Asking if backlinks are still relevant for SEO is like asking if marketing is still necessary for a business to generate leads and sales. While a good product speaks for itself, one of the primary functions of your marketing efforts is to drive sales and scale your business.
The same goes for your content and backlinks. If you have unique, high-quality content that is also actionable and offers value to your audience, you are bound to get backlinks organically.
But having a solid backlink strategy in place can give your affiliate marketing site a much-needed boost in terms of traffic and authority. A website’s backlink profile remains a key ranking factor for Google. This makes backlinks an integral part of SEO.
In this article, I’ll introduce and test link building strategies for affiliate websites. The goal of improving your backlink profile is to rank higher for your targeted keywords, which will then drive more traffic and affiliate sales.
Backlink quality vs. quantity
Having a good backlink profile is crucial for content-focused affiliate marketers to drive sales. But not all backlinks are the same. Everyone wants contextually relevant links from websites with a high domain rating (DR) that publish high-quality content. Your ability to attract such links organically or through collaborations depends on your own DR, the quality of your content, and the reputation you have built in that niche.
That’s why I recommend paying attention to your ability to rank for relevant keywords in your niche already at the stage when you choose your affiliate products. Sure, you can improve your ranking ability gradually, but you have to start from somewhere.
Choosing your link building approach between link quality and link quantity is not something worth contemplating. You need traffic to build an audience, but you need conversions to earn affiliate commissions. So going for the middle ground is your best bet. Prioritize high-quality links, but don’t rule out any opportunity to get links from websites with a slightly lower DR. Content relevance and quality also matter. Don’t get so hung up on ratings.
From time to time, you may come across websites with a seemingly good DR, but whose traffic is almost non-existent. These websites are mainly used for link building purposes and resemble the link farms that were popular in the past. It is best to avoid cooperating with such websites as you have nothing to gain from their links.
Affiliate Link Building Strategies
Your ranking for organic results mainly depends on the number and the quality of the backlinks and the relevance and quality of your content. If you’ve chosen a saturated niche where all keywords have a high difficulty score, you’ll need a ton of backlinks and referring domains pointing to your articles. That is, if you want to rank on the first page.
Below is the SERP overview for “best SEO tools” using Ahrefs, a popular keyword among affiliate marketers. It has a difficulty score of 78, which makes it difficult to rank, especially if your DR is not in the same rank as the websites on the first page.
So what is the best strategy for building backlinks to your affiliate marketing site? Creating detailed and useful content that is unique and relevant to your target keyword is a good starting point.
But as an affiliate blogger, you can’t just rely on organic links. To successfully and effectively build relevant links, I would boil it down to the following three strategies:
- Guest Postings
- Content Collaborations
- Summarized Insights
Let’s take a closer look at each strategy.
Guest Posts
It’s still worth sending out guest posts. It has two main functions: building your personal brand and authority is one, and improving your domain rating through quality backlinks is another.
And the more respected and better DR website gets your publication from guest, the more authority you get from it. Another benefit is that submitting your upcoming guest posts becomes easier when you already have some past work you can refer to.
If you’re just starting out, you should start small and approach websites that are less selective. . After posting some content, you can also apply to become a contributor to content posting communities like Business2Community, where it is possible to create high-quality dofollow links to your affiliate website. But only place relevant links that add value to your guest post.
Like every article on your website, every guest post is a huge investment of time.So choose your topics carefully and take advantage of your own expertise and experience. Run your own experiments and try to avoid recycled ideas. High DR websites can afford to be picky because you need them more than they need your content. They have no shortage of guest post releases. The only way to get more bargaining power is to make sure your content is amazing.
Guest Posting
The process of guest posting your post often follows the same pattern:
- Find websites that accept guest posts and read their guidelines
- Create a topic or topics relevant to your chosen websites
- Write a speech guest post and submit it to those websites
- Start writing your guest post while you wait for approval
- Remember to link to a relevant article on your website
- Add images and other visual elements to your article
- Submit your draft if accepted or submit your submission to other websites
- Make edits if requested and submit the final version to the editor
This is just to give you an idea of the steps involved in guest posting. Your job is to match the correct article to the correct website. In some cases, you may have written the guest post before submitting it. Some websites even ask you to submit a draft right away.
Be prepared that it can easily take a couple of months from start to finish, especially when it comes to authoritative websites. Not all websites will respond to your proposal and many of them will reject it. That’s why you need to be flexible and launch multiple websites from the start.
Content Collaborations
Link building partnerships with other bloggers are an effective way to complement your profile. of backlinks. These backlinks are incremental to the links you get organically or through guest posting. Or, in some cases, content collaborations may consist of guest posting partnerships with other bloggers. But what really sets them apart is the relationship based on reciprocity.
Content and link collaborations are based on the primordial concept of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. They are based on mutual trust. If you endorse someone’s content by linking to their article, you expect the same in return.
To get started with content contributors, gather a list of potential partners in your niche and reach out to them. You can also join blogging communities on social networks or create a new one.
The advantage of joining a community is that you don’t need to contact the same partners one by one when you want to collaborate with them. again. Simply post your partnership offer in the community and choose the partners whose content seems to add the most value. Relevance is key in all content partnerships. It’s okay to be picky. There is no shortage of potential contributors.
How to Choose Contributors
When choosing which bloggers to partner with, pay attention to at least:
- Relevance: To ensure joint promotion brings value to both parties, the blogger should create content in the same niche as you and share a similar target audience.
- <li Domain Rating – For equal sharing, consider the domain rating. The DR score is a measure of a website’s authority based on its backlink profile. The higher the DR, the more authoritative the site. Therefore, a backlink from a high DR website is more valuable to you as a sign of trust. Enter your potential partner’s domain into a website authority checker before proceeding with the collaboration.
- Traffic Size: For an exchange Fairly, it also makes sense to collaborate with bloggers who are more or less at the same stage of traffic growth. Use a web analytics service like SimilarWeb or any SEO tool to check your website traffic statistics.
Abstract Insights
In addition to guest posting and content collaborations, commenting on abstracts continues to be another useful strategy for getting backlinks. This strategy involves sharing your knowledge on a specific topic and publishing it in a roundup post that also links to your website.
Compared to the previous strategy of collaborating with other bloggers, the advantage of summarizing information is that you can get valuable links without having to link to someone else’s website.
The disadvantage is that you can never be sure if your comments and links will be published or not. It helps if your website has decent DR and traffic because people prefer to link to authoritative websites. Also, having some credibility as a blogger and experience on the topics you’re discussing makes it easier to get your ideas out there.
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) remains the leading platform for summarizing information, at least based on the number and range of inquiries. But with such platforms, those releases that are not accepted by the author will usually end up being wasted as each comment is tailored to a specific query and has no other use.
I would recommend giving it a try to see if it’s worth it. Answer at least 10 relevant queries and calculate your success rate. Pick topics you have experience with, follow the guidelines, and write down your ideas, but don’t spend too much time on it. If none of them post, the answer is clear and you can go back to other link building strategies. Also keep in mind that sometimes you can get a positive response weeks or even months later.
Bottom Line
As a content-focused affiliate marketer, you need backlinks to build your audience. rating and rank of your domain. higher for relevant keywords in your niche. Earning affiliate commissions largely depends on your ranking ability. You want your product reviews to appear on the first page of search results.
It’s important not to focus on just one link building strategy, but to combine them all so they complement each other. Guest posts require much more time and effort than a simple content collaboration or roundup information, but they are usually found on more authoritative websites.
Not all backlinks are the same. Never overuse reciprocal links and make sure that what you are linking to actually adds value to your article and is contextually relevant.
If you’re interested in reading more about affiliate marketing, you can check out our ultimate guide or tips to make money with affiliate marketing. sale.
About Johannes Rastas
As a partner marketing manager at Supermetrics, Johannes focuses on expanding Supermetrics’ partner program and collaborating with its existing partners. He also works with SEO and content on a daily basis. Feel free to contact him on LinkedIn.
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