High-quality content is a king in the world of the affiliate marketing. If you want to launch a profitable business in this field, you should learn the basic rules of effective writing. It’s not that as hard as it seems.
With access to the worldwide web, you can get any necessary instruments for content creation and design a brilliant affiliate marketing content strategy. Check the following tips, which will help you to succeed.
Be Honest
Affiliate marketing website works effectively when you are honest with your readers. If you didn’t like a concrete product offered by a client, you should share your real opinion. You should do your best to provide the target audience with objective judgments, which are useful for the decision-making process.
“If you post a few articles, which contain fake data, visitors will lose trust in your web resource. In fact, people are fed up with tones of the fabricated positive reviews and they struggle to find content, which they can believe in.”
– explains James Daily, digital marketer at Brainished.
Moreover, you shouldn’t hide a fact that content on your website contains affiliate links. You should insert disclosure and blog policy at the beginning of every post. Don’t ignore this rule because your primary mission is to build trust in a relationship.
Write About Personal Experience
If you want to build an effective affiliate content marketing strategy, you should write only about those goods and services, which you used in real life. You should test a product in numerous ways and define its major advantages and disadvantages. If you naively believe that you can use other customers’ reviews to create great content, then you are totally wrong.
You have a goal to build credibility and establish authority on the web. For this reason, you should think, act and write like an expert in the field. Otherwise, if you become a fake expert, your opinion will be worth nothing.
Add Negative Reviews
At least 10% of all content, which you produce, should consist of the neutral or negative reviews. If you want to become an influencer in your niche, you should be able to give constructive criticism.
Take a look at Broke My Nail website, which encourages readers to buy nail polishes and other manicure essentials on Amazon. It’s notable that content creators write not only about the best but also about the worst products.
At the screenshot, you can see that the author was deeply disappointed with the “crash test” results of the popular lacquer. She expressed her honest opinion and shared a real photo with the audience without being afraid that this article will not bring direct profit.
Do you still wonder how bad reviews like this one can help you to improve your affiliate marketing content strategy? Let’s think like a buyer!
Let’s imagine that you are a 20-year-old girl, who looks through online reviews to choose a perfect nail polish. You have just read this article and understood that tested lacquer is not worth your money. But you feel that you can trust this website, so you decide to check other reviews published by the author.
As soon as you will find a positive review, you will click a link to buy a product. Bingo! This is how the affiliate marketing website works!
Research Keywords
Before writing your first blog post, you should build your SEO strategy. If you believe that Google will rank your content high just because it’s interesting for readers, you are wrong. You, like any other blog writer, must optimize content in accordance with Google’s requirements.
The first step to optimize your post is to find out which keywords you should use. If you want to create highly effective content for affiliate marketing, you should focus on high-traffic keywords with minimal competition. You can define them with the help of the analytical SEO tools, such as SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest and LSI Graph.
There are two types of keywords you should focus your attention on: informational and buyer-centric. You can use informational keywords for content, which teaches and educates your readers. And you can utilize buyer-centric (transactional) keywords in the articles, which encourage readers to make a purchase.
For example, if you run a food blog, you can use such informational keywords as “What is a sponge cake” or “How to make sponge cake fluffy”. If you want to target transactional search queries, use keywords such as “Buy sponge cake mix” and “Vanilla sponge cake mix price”.
Improve Text Readability
Top affiliate marketers strongly recommend bloggers to improve readability of their posts. Even the most fascinating post has no chances to be displayed in the top on the search engine results page (SERP) if it’s hard to read.
If you want to create content for affiliate marketing, which will be ranked high, take into account the following rules:
- Keep sentences short. The ideal length is 15-20 words.
- Use headings and subheadings. Make text scannable.
- Split a long text into short paragraphs. Too long paragraphs scare visitors away.
- Use bulleted lists. Highlight only the most important facts.
- Don’t use too many adverbs. They make text look more sophisticated.
- Avoid passive voice. The active voice always works better.
- Choose simpler alternatives of the words and phrases. Write many instead of numerous, and yet instead of however, etc.
You can check readability with the help of Hemingway App or any other similar online services. It analyzes text immediately and highlights sentences, which you should rewrite. The app helps to understand what kind of mistakes you made and how to fix them.
If you believe that rules and restrictions like these kill creativity, you can find a better solution. If you don’t want to lose your inspiration, you can continue writing the articles in the way you like. When you will finish your work, send it editors from GetGoodGrade or Canada-Writers and they will improve text readability instead of you.
Choose Appropriate Post Length
Depending on your niche, you should choose a post length which will work the best. Some affiliate marketing websites publish short 500-700 words long articles every day. Others prefer to publish 1500-2500 words long articles a few times per month.
It all depends on topics, which you want to discuss and preferences of your target audience. For example, if your readers are tech savvy specialist, and you want to discuss new software in details, your article should be pretty long.
However, if you want to publish some regular updates about sporting goods, you should create short posts. For example, Wirecutter publishes buying guides, which includes reviews of 3 products. Every review consists of 3 sentences: it presents only the most valuable information and nothing more.
Discuss Things, Which Really Matters
If you want to create great content for affiliate marketing, you should know your customers well. What have they already heard about your product and brand? What additional information do they expect to find online?
If you write about something brand new, for instance, tech gadgets for pets, you should describe everything in details. People want to know how these devices look like, how they work, whether they are safe and so on.
When you review a product, which has dozens of features, don’t try to cover them all in one post. First of all, you should focus on the features, which can influence the buying decision.
If you write about the high heels shoes, it’s not really necessary to discuss the leather quality in details. You should better share your personal experience with your readers. You should answer the major questions, which buyers have.
Did you feel comfortable wearing your new shoes? Did you get the blisters? No one really cares about the genuine materials if shoes don’t fit properly and hurt the back of the ankle, isn’t it?
Focus On Trending Products
If you want your blog to be popular, you should write about the trending products. There are plenty of goods and services, which appear and flood the market every day. Your task is to identify the emerging bestsellers and create killing content about them.
“There is no sense to write about the products, which are getting out of fashion. It’s better to find the items, which are totally worth the current hype. The target audience is looking for the objective opinions and honest reviews about these products, so your content will attract a lot of new real clients,”
– explains Amanda Sparks, a blogger for TopDownWriter.
Nowadays, it’s very easy to find out what products are trending in your niche. Everything you should do is to check social media. For example, if you will analyze Explore Tab on Instagram today, you will see that pearl skull is getting very popular in category Beauty. If you are a beauty blogger, you should discuss this new trending product in your next post.
If your affiliate marketing website is related to very specific not widely used goods or services, it’s unlikely that you will find answers on YouTube or Instagram. You should better check popular professional groups and discussions on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Use Appropriate Tone Of Voice
You should use a tone of voice, which appeal to your target audience the most. It can be a friendly and conversational tone if you target Millennials and Generation Z. Or it can be formal if you create content for Baby Boomers.
Moreover, you should pay your attention to the appropriate wording. You shouldn’t use slang, terminology or jargon if you are not sure that your readers are familiar with these words. As a writer, you should ensure that you speak the same language as your target audience.
And you should never ever use abstruse words, especially if you don’t clearly understand their meanings. These words will just worsen text readability and scare your visitors away. If you want to create great content for affiliate marketing, make sure that the target audience feels comfortable reading your articles.
Strive For Excellence
The quality of your content shouldn’t cause any doubts, so you must proofread every text thoughtfully. Modern users don’t trust the illiterate blog writers, which don’t know where to use a comma in a complex sentence.
Moreover, Google checks whether affiliate marketing websites have correct grammar and spelling. In other words, if you will publish poor-quality content, search engines will never rank your blog posts high. Probably, your readers could forgive you a mistake, but machines couldn’t.
Even if you are really good at writing, you still should be very careful with the proper usage of the words and punctuation marks. You should be attentive to the typos and mistakes, which you make unintentionally. If proofreading is not your cup of tea, you can get assistance from services like BestWritersCanada or TopAustraliaWriters.
Create Visual Content
When you develop an affiliate marketing content strategy, you should understand that it’s not enough to fill your blog with textual content only. When ordinary articles don’t work effectively, visual content becomes very helpful.
You can always go the extra mile and improve your affiliate marketing website with some video content. Analysts predict that online video consumption will grow by 9 minutes per day each year until 2020. If you want to stay on trend and deliver useful content to your audience, one of the options is to use animated explainer video. This is a short animated video that explains your business idea or a product in a simple way.
A visual content not only does make your message clear to the viewers but also increases the average time on page for your website. This parameter is still among the important SEO metrics.
In Conclusion
If you are passionate about writing and about the products in your niche, you can create great content for an affiliate marketing website. Your task is to watch the industry trends and understand the preferences of your target audience. Strive for excellence – and you will be rewarded with rapid business development.
In the information age, you can achieve success even without the huge investments or outstanding talents. Everything you need is to speak up your mind and create online buzz.
