David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

Creating new affiliate content can be a bit tedious and sometimes restrictive, especially if you’ve chosen a niche that isn’t that wide. How much content can you really write about fence posts for example?

One source I find very helpful is the list of search terms used to find my websites. They show what keywords and phrases people are using to find your website and this information can be gathered from local stats scripts from your webhost or third party plugins such as Google Analytics.
 
What I do is search through the logs looking for trends. There’s probably a faster and more accurate way of doing this but I prefer skimming through the full results set to find gems contained within.

For a niche website, your keywords and keyphrases should be fairly tight to the content you’ve written. Using the fence post example above I would expect the vast majority of queries to be things like:

• Buy a fence post in Birmingham
• How to protect a fence post from rot
• Repair a broken fence post
• Fence post cement

And so on and so forth.

Each of these could be a fresh article in its own right. The flip side of looking for keyphrases is that you can also identify what people are looking for on your website and assess whether you are actually helping them or hindering them.

The type of affiliate site you have will dictate the type of search phrases you attract. A price comparison site will be bound to get keywords like "cheap", "cheapest", "best price", etc. so that may or may not be helpful, depending upon your logic. Similarly, if you’ve got a forum with a general chat section you might get weird and wonderful results that may need to be interpreted as such.

It's not the be-all-and-end-all but it’s a method I use when I need a bit of inspiration. It also highlights the importance of understanding how your visitors find your website.