Case Study:Ranking Affiliate Site with relatively Clean Links

Niche: Finance CPA offers and products

Competition: Not payday loan type. Not even close but not low competition either. Thanks to recent G updates,I think competition has come down drastically. We will see. I will try to rank product name+review kw type. Also,try to rank main general kw with Facebook page or YT channel.

Website: 10 months old website with 6 review pages and 10 tutorial type articles. It has got a youtube channel with 4 videos but focus of this case study will be website not YT channel.

Link history:Very little link building has been done in first 2-3 months(G+,Fb,Pinterest profiles, Press release,4-5 blogposts from same niche websites and 6-7 parasite links,fake social signals,1 high quality guest post.) No link has been developed in last 6 months as I was not sure whether my funnel/angle was decent enough(since,I wanted to make it a long term site.I did not follow any short term SEO strategy).
So,I tested the same website in Spanish language version,where competition is low. It got me few conversions. Also,I realized videos do convert well in this niche. With these learning, I am now confident to take on the competition in English language.

Background: I am relatively new to affiliate marketing(I do not have any sort of big list or JV connections etc) but I have decent domain knowledge of the niche. I have been doing SEO for more than 5 years now and my prime bread and butter is local SEO. Typical IM journey( Got into IM while trying to rank my own business etc)

Strategy: I do have access to a decent size own PBN and connections with other local SEO guys to swap for links. But,I would not use any direct PBN links(may be handful of very high quality links) for this site though I am confident it will help my ranking in short run. Rather,I will point these PBN links to my existing links or newly developed high DA links.


Now let us jump to the case study.

Day 1-3: I am going to put main keywords in SERPbook and see where all the keywords are ranking now.

1.I will list all the existing links done 8-9 months back and put it in a spreadsheet. I will list 30-35 authority links in same niche (but not competition) which I will use for co-citations links. I will pass these to my VA asking him to post 1 link per day from my relatively lower quality PBN(pointing to my tier 1).Also, I ll the second list to my writer to create around 50, 200-600 words articles. I will use these for niche posts and parasites.I should not need more than 50 direct links.

2. I will dig out G+, facebook,twitter,pinterest etc main pages and make it active(Make posts,tweets,retweets,pins). They have hardly any followers or likes. Later,I may get some cheap likes(100-200) from developing countries. (Fake likes do not stick much.Hence,going for real likes).

3.I will take the existing youtube video(which is a product review video) and do some onpage optimization adding "2015 etc". Buy 500ish retainer views from Fiverr and few G+ shares and random social signals.

Now,I have to get back to work to finish Day 1's agenda.

Here is a screenshot of current rankings of 2 generic kws and rest of the 6 product review keywords.

CPC for keywords is in the range of $15-25.

Day 2 and Day 3 part done apart from cheap Facebook likes. Now,I am waiting for my content to be done for new mini sites/web2.0 posts. Meanwhile,I am building 2 posts/day from my PBN to the fb/twitter/pinterest/5 guest posts/YT channel.

Here is public key for Rankgraphs.

http://serpbook.com/serp/?viewkey=0c8nyo2

Go ahead buddy. Keep it up.

Sounds like a plan.
Will follow.

Since,it will take at least 4-5 days for the content to be delivered,I have created 5 mini web2.0(wordpress,blog.com etc) sites with just a single post with video/image myself. This way,I can start linking to these mini sites from my PBN from today. Later,when content gets delivered,I can publish those articles again.

I was grabbing affiliate links for English site and noticed the Spanish site has got 2 conversions(Around $300) for relatively less popular products.(Also,it ranks in top 5 in Spanish language but I was not even planning to put in English version due to low volume). So,now I am thinking of adding more less popular product review pages.I will update when I add.For this week,focus is on backlinks.

This really looks interesting.

I'll be following this thread!

Update. Things are going fine. Just that,my VA was on leave for 5 days last week. Now,everything is going as per plan.
There has been no direct link building(only tier 2) .Also,most tiers point to homepage only.

So,the product review pages are 2 seed away. Most product review pages have jump to page 2-4.

Next week,I will post new posts on my mini sites/web2.0s pointing to some product pages.

Good! Plz update the Thread regularly. Hope to see $$ coming in soon.

It is 8th week now. Almost,all product review pages are in page 2-3. Only one product is at page 1 bottom and big primary kws ( 2-3 words) are in top 30 now though serpbook does not show those yet.
http://serpbook.com/serp/?viewkey=0c8nyo2
160+ tier 2 PBN posts are done now. Around 50 direct links(tier1 editorial/web2.0) point to homepage. Very few backlinks to product pages. So,I think if I put any new product review page,I can expect page 2-3 without any link building.

Next,I plan to put product review pages naked urls in 40-50% of tier 1 properties with new posts. Push 1-3 product review page to top 3.

Traffic- Most of the traffic now comes from product review+2015 etc keywords. It is around 15-25+/day now from 5-10+/day,a month back.

Earnings- Last month grossed around $400 from 3 different products. Site is still under optimized as I am waiting for traffic to reach at least 50+/day.