How to Create Affiliate Marketing Content- A beginners guide

This article highlights the best practices in affiliate marketing content used by the most successful affiliate marketers in today’s world.

A little about me… I am the senior writer at content clerks, a company that focuses on writing content for businesses on the internet, affiliate marketers included. 
The strategies I have laid out here are the same for all our clients who order affiliate marketing-related content.
Read and follow this guide, particularly for your content strategy if you are serious about making money online selling affiliate products.

Keyword Research and Topic Ideation for Affiliate Marketing Content

Before you start writing any articles, you need to do keyword research. This will make it possible for you to know what keywords will be easier to rank for. Keyword research will also give you an idea of what topics to write about.

Previously, many people advocated for buyer intent keywords, but these have become really competitive, and this strategy doesn’t work that well anymore. It would be best to use both buyer intent keywords and informative keywords to do this successfully.
Here are a few examples of keywords

Buyer Intent
Dog Vitamins
Nutra thrive for dogs
Anti-itch for dogs
Informative
Homemade dog food
Dog chewing paws

When performing keyword research, you need to check for less competitive keywords with a good number of monthly searches.
For you to do this successfully, you can use both free and paid methods or tools.

Paid tools that you can use for keyword research include Ahrefs, MOZ, Semrush, and Ubersuggest. At Content Clerks, we have the agency package for both Ahrefs & Ubersuggest. We use them to perform keyword analysis and extensive topic ideation for all our bulk order customers.
I will show you exactly how we do it.

Keyword research using Ahrefs – Paid Tool

Ahrefs pricing starts at $99 a month. It might not be the best option if you have a tight budget.
Since we started with the examples in the dog niche, we will focus on that throughout this guide.

First, we start with an idea in mind. Say “dog supplements.”

Lucky for us, our first keyword fits our criteria perfectly! We usually consider a keyword with Keyword Difficulty that is less than 40. These are less competitive and much easier to rank for. The keyword “dog supplements” also has an approximate search volume of 1.8K in the US and 2.8K globally.

These numbers might look small, but with 50-100 articles written and optimized around such keywords, you will start gaining some real traction on your website. That’s the beauty of doing proper keyword research before writing any affiliate marketing content.

What if you are not lucky enough to come up with such an idea? Well, with Ahrefs, you have several other options to find keywords related to what you initially searched for.

Here’s how…

On the left-hand side, there is a menu that gives you such options.

As you can see, we already have 7 dog-related keywords that meet our criteria for a good keyword. The “Questions” section is also quite resourceful.

Keyword research using Ubersuggest – Paid Tool

Ubersuggest starts at $12 a month, a reasonable price for those on a tight budget.
If we search the term “dog supplements,” here’s what we come up with…

The results are somewhat the same as what we got from Ahrefs. In Ubersuggest, however, they use SEO Difficulty instead of Keyword Difficulty. There is no standard way of naming, but they mean the same thing.

Again, if you are not so lucky to find a great keyword on your first search, all you have to do is scroll down and find other related keywords.

Here is what it looks like…

There you have it. We now have four potential keywords that we can create content around.

An alternative way of doing keyword research for affiliate marketing content is to check on what your competitors are already ranking for. Again, you can use both tools to achieve this.

Competitor Affiliate Marketing Content Analysis using Ubersuggest- Paid tool

A simple google search can give you the top blogs in the dog niche. We found iHeartDogs.
After putting their domain into the traffic analyzer section and selecting “Top pages,” we found this…

We see that the page with the most visitors and most shares on this website is a blog post talking about dog breeds with the cutest puppies.

You have to write content around the same topic but make it more detailed, informative, and fun! Don’t just be in the copy-pasting business nor produce mediocre content. Nobody is going to read or share that! Your affiliate marketing content has to be top-notch.
You can do this with as many articles as you like.

Competitor Affiliate Marketing Content Analysis using Ahrefs- Paid tool

We will use a different dog website called Puppy leaks.

Ahrefs has a “Top content” section on the left-hand menu. 

Several articles are driving traffic to this website and getting lots of social shares. Like the previous example, choose the articles you want to write and give them your best shot!

Using Blog Post Topic Generators for Affiliate Marketing Content

There are occasions where you do not really know where to start. Remember when we started with “dog supplements”? What if you do not have any idea of what to write?
There are websites like Answer The Public that can help you get ideas on what to write about.

Here is what we get when we put the word “dog” into Answer The Public.

The results are almost endless. You can filter in terms of questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical and related results.

I like to spice things up a little by using a chrome extension called Keywords Everywhere and Answer The Public to get even more data.

The tool adds more data to the results. The data is organized as follows…
[Average monthly searches – CPC- Competition]

This data will give you an idea of what keywords to focus on.

Using Google Search Suggestions

Many affiliate marketers often overlook this method, yet it works rather well. We all want to rank on Google. Therefore, who else can give us the best search terms other than Google themselves?

Here is how it works…
You go on Google and start typing something related to your niche. In this case, we used “My dog…”
Automatically, Google starts giving you suggestions.

You can already start to see what kind of topics you can focus on. These suggestions are definitely from what people search. There is no way Google is just guessing.

Don’t be so quick to settle for these suggestions just yet, as some of them might be very competitive, and you might never rank high enough. It would be best to find a search query that you can answer in an article with little to no competition. To do this, pick one of the suggested topics.

We picked “My dog is shaking.”

There are several articles written around that search term. What you want are questions that people are asking related to the same phrase. 

Scroll down to the “Related searches” section.

We find an interesting question- “What should I do if my dog is shaking?”
Click on the query and see the results.
To find a good search query worth writing affiliate marketing content on, certain conditions must be met.

The conditions are

1. There are very few, if any, articles answering the questions directly.
2. Some of the results that are ranking on page one are from forums such as Quora.
3. Ranking pages have a Domain Authority of less than 20. You can use a free tool like Ubersuggest to check for domain authority.
4. Social media posts are ranking for that query.

The results do not have to meet all these conditions. If one condition is met, you’re good to go!

The first result somehow answers the question. The next four don’t

Condition 1 is met, indicating that this is a great article to write and rank for easily.

There you have it. We have gone through several comprehensive ways of doing keyword research and getting topic ideas. If you follow these steps, you will have some of your affiliate marketing blog’s best keywords and topics.

Hiring Content Writers for your Affiliate Marketing Content

Let’s face it. Writing articles for affiliate marketing is not an easy task. Some people do not have the time to sit down and come up with 1500 words of unique and compelling content, while others just cannot do it.
Remember, when you are just starting, you need about 30-50 articles so your website can start gaining some traction.

While this is entirely optional, you can hire content writers to do this for you. There are two ways to go about this. 

You can choose to work with a content writing agency like Content Clerks. There are several other content writing websites out there. Still, I recommend Content Clerks because not only do you get in-depth keyword research done for you but also well-researched, SEO-friendly articles.

The other option is to hire a freelance content writer. You can do this on websites like Freelancer, Fiverr, Upwork, and People Per Hour.

However, if you want to hire a freelance writer, there are few things to keep in mind.

• First, the potential candidate should provide you with samples of their work or should be willing to write a test article in your niche.
• Should they agree to do a test article, make sure the article is free of grammar errors and original. Therefore, you can use tools like Grammarly and Copyscape to check grammar and originality, respectively.
• The potential candidate should be able to write both general articles and product reviews.

Working with a content writing website like Content Clerks makes things easier because all writers have gone through rigorous testing and proper training to provide nothing but the best quality.

The most competent writer in that niche is assigned to handle your work when you place an order. All content is checked for grammar and originality before submission.

Affiliate Marketing Content Strategy

We’ve talked about how to find the kind of content to write. Now let’s talk about how to write it. As a rule of thumb, if you want to start well in affiliate marketing, you need 30-50 articles on your website.
Consequently, after publishing these, you can now start publishing content every week.

Here are a few things to keep in mind…

Publish both informative and affiliate articles

Internet users are becoming more aware and can tell what pure affiliate marketing content websites looks like. The best practice is to have a combination of both affiliate articles like reviews and informational articles. Informational articles are those that answer people’s questions.

Link your affiliate blog posts to the informative ones

Well-researched and properly written informative blog posts will drive a lot of traffic. Instead of just letting this traffic leave your website after knowing what they came to find out, you can try and direct them to related affiliate blog posts that will drive conversions and make you money. For example, if you wrote an article on “how to make homemade dog food”, you can link to an affiliate article you wrote about dog vitamins.

Article length and frequency of publishing

Your articles should be at least 1000 words. You can post these 3-4 times a month. Once a month, publish a detailed 3000-word article. Your articles can be product reviews, short ebooks, buyer guides, informational posts, and even tutorials. Just make sure you are giving people answers to what they need to know.

Include the current year in the article title (When possible)

Doing this improves your click-through rate. The title “Best Dog Vitamins in 2021” will get more clicks than one that doesn’t have 2021.

On-page SEO for your Affiliate Marketing Content

Now that we have the articles written, we need to do on-page SEO while publishing the articles. 

Here are some tips to keep in mind when performing on-page SEO.

• Let the main keyword phrase appear in the H1 title, the meta description and at least one H2 subtitle.
• Include the main keyword in the first paragraph of the article.
• Have both internal and outbound links on your article. This is a good way for interlinking blog posts.
• Optimize images for web publishing so they can load faster. You can also add “alternative text attributes” to your images based on your keywords.
• Make sure your article is optimized for featured snippets. A featured snippet is a box of information Google places on top of the organic search results to answer the search query quickly.
• Moreover, if you are using WordPress, several plugins can help you achieve this.
• Make use of FAQ Schema in your article. According to Neil Patel, the method works great when it comes to SEO.

There are many other on-page SEO tips to consider. If you are using WordPress, you can leverage plugins like Yoast and Rank Math. Hence, these are great tools that will help with on-page SEO.

Conclusion

There you have it. We have covered almost all aspects of content strategy when doing affiliate marketing. As I mentioned in the introduction, these are strategies that we use and are working for all our clients and us as well. If you’d like to try our content writing service, you can place your order using the link below.