David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

If ever there was a link bait style title, that was it!

Here are my 5 top tips for blogging as an affiliate. They apply to affiliates that focus on SEO rather than PPC.
 
1) Choose Your Subject Carefully

You need to find a subject you can write a lot about without getting bored. You need something that is fairly niche but something that isn't too restrictive.

Take confectionery for example. My blog could be about chocolate buttons but that's too restrictive. What would I write about? There's a couple of things ranging from who sells them to who's got special offers on them but nothing link worthy and nothing that will generate you stacks of cash. A blog about chocolate allows a wider scope. It allows you to link to merchants who sell gift boxes, hampers, speciality chocolates, etc. You can talk about chocolate buttons within that but it allows the flexibility to digress into other aspects such as chocolate covered toffee, chocolate truffles and classic chocolate bars (Wispa bars have been re-released in a small batch by the way!)

2) Stay Focussed

It's easy to digress and change your blog from one thing to another. Using the above example, it's easy to stray into the confectionery market on your chocolate blog. This dilutes your efforts, can put some readers off and ultimately leave you with a lower quality site than what you would have had.

It's also worth mentioning that if you regularly link to retailers that sell chocolate (as per this example), if they come out with a new jelly sweet product, don't rush to blog about it just because it is new. Does it pass your criteria for your blog? Is it related in a very close way? If it were a chocolate covered jelly sweet, that would be blog-worthy but a plain jelly sweet would not as it has nothing to do with chocolate.

3) A Post a Day...

A post a day would equate to 365 in a year. This is a linear sum which means that the outcome would increase at the same rate as the input. The true sum would be:

total number of pages = 365.25 x blog posts per day

So if you can muster up the energy, intuition and spirit to blog 5 times a day on one site, that would equate to 1826 pages of fresh new content in a year. If each page is carefully written to maximise affiliate clickthroughs, to be keyword rich and to encourage RSS and mailing list signups, you are sure to be onto a winner.

Also bear in mind that most blogging software tools are built to handle multiple editors. If you can group with some friends to post content, your page count would increase by that amount:

total number of pages = 365.25 x blog posts per day x number of bloggers

So say I group together with 4 other people, we could create 9131 pages if we each post 5 a day. Naturally there would be issues of ownership, revenue sharing and quality control but it's feasible.

4) What's It All About?

Stick to the basic rules of blogging. One topic, one post.Within that one post, make sure you carefully target keywords. Don't create a spam blog post packed full of keywords but remember that with SEO, every keyword counts.

When you name your post, give it a meaningful name. We are all guilty of poor naming of posts but when it's done properly, you are not only helping yourself but you are helping to maximise the potential reach of the article.

5) Be Creative

Don't be boring. If you are blogging 5 posts a day and each of those is extremely boring, you will put people off. It might sound bizarre but your blog is your corporate image. Think of all the companies in the world. Would you like to be known as a Ben & Jerry's type person or an Innocent person? Or would you prefer to be a HSBC or Royal Mail type of person. Each of these have their own corporate image to maintain. HSBC maintains a professional business image. Innocent concentrate on being fun and quirky. Take a look at some of their job descriptions and it really shines through with phrases like "If you’re able to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time as well then you might just be the perfect candidate" and "Can you say "Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry" 10 times without hesitation or error? If so you may want to read on".

Always keep in mind who you are writing for and what your aims of writing are. You may prefer writing in a serious tone. In which case, if your market is teenage girls, it may not work as well as if your market is the over 50's. Similarly, "youth speak" will be lost on the older generations.