SEO Affiliate Journey

I'm starting a new SEO affiliate journey.

I've had a few documented journeys here in the past, one for Quora which only lasted for a week or two, but I'd call it somewhat of a success. I saw it had potential but ultimately didn't wish to continue with it.

I've had another journey with CPA, which was not a success at all. I've concluded that while I have nothing against those who do it, it's not something that I'm comfortable with. Plus, I don't want to play a cat and mouse game with social media sites.

I have a lot of experience with running huge websites and creating some sizable ones, but my SEO knowledge is 10 years out of date. We'll see where this goes.

I've not got any experience with affiliate programs.

I'm starting two new sites, both affiliate - but only one is going to rely on SEO.

Obviously I don't want to give a whole bunch of details because I don't seem to have any competitors, but my SEO site will be a web directory where most or all items will be affiliate links.The average commission will be around $20.

I'm developing a custom lightweight web application which definitely isn't necessary but for me, it's probably quicker than setting up a Wordpress site how I like it. My concern is the SEO on a custom application may be lacking... but we'll see.

I hope to get the site online by tomorrow. The web application is running and the site design is done other than making a few changes to make it responsive, and beyond that I need to make a little bit of starter content.

After the site is up, I'll focus on SEO... my intention is to rank for lots of tiny, very low traffic, no competition hyperspecific keywords. I hope that will lead to a high conversion rate due to how targeted the traffic will be.

My expenses will be zero for the software, zero for hosting, and about $6.00 for the domain.

What I'd love is to at least start generating a commission every few days as encouragement to dive into affiliate + SEO. I want to see it working. I know SEO is a long play, so it may take a couple weeks or months.

Amazon, right? Are you planning on using their API for products? Or is that too far advanced? How scaled are you going?

jbraxton382 said:

Amazon, right? Are you planning on using their API for products? Or is that too far advanced? How scaled are you going?

Click to expand...

It's not Amazon. I have another project that I'm starting with Amazon, which will rely on social traffic, and I'm pretty lost over whether to use their API or to do as most other sites do, and not use the API.

For the SEO site, I'm going to start by attempting to rank for 50-100 super specific keywords. I've not done detailed keyword research before though. I'm hoping I can rank within a few days given there's no competition.

Domain ended up being $5.90, so that's my total expenses so far.

Worked a lot on the site yesterday, I've got it all set up and going. The only thing that it is missing is content.

So today I've got three main focuses:

• figure out how to find the best keywords, start adding ~10 highly specific, low competition categories of content
  
• set up social media accounts for the site, not necessary but want to get that done
• work on the SEO, haven't even got the meta data set up yet.

I'll also have to submit the content to Google... I think, been a while.

I'd like to exclude bot traffic from Google Analytics, I'm not sure if it does that automatically. That's another thing I'll have to get to.

After today, I may let it sit for a while and see how the first keywords go. I'm hoping I can easily rank #1 for everything I go for, since they're so specific and low competition... and then expand with the same logic from there, but we'll see.

I haven't been able to work on this too much until now, although I did make a number of changes and improvements. Meta tags is one. A few other small SEO bits.

I did a small bit of keyword research a few days ago, I found a few potential starting points, but I have a concern. Many pages will be very similar except for the title. I'm not sure Google will like that.

Anyway, going to get to adding content. I'll try to add 10 categories full of content in the next few hours here.

Seems marginally tougher than I first thought. My competitors do seem to be targeting more specifically than I had expected. Not too concerned, there is still plenty to go around. I just need to be more specific.

I've added quite a large number of categories though none are excellent, I need to streamline my keyword research and find the right tools. I've added content to 5 or 6 of the categories and the rest are empty placeholders for now - but they'll still get indexed.

I've also made some SEO improvements based on what my competitors are doing.

Some of my original template categories are now indexed in Google. I'm going to delete them, but it's a positive. I'll check again tomorrow to see if my new categories are indexed and where they sit.

Still waiting for my new pages to fully index, Google Search Console says 15 are indexed, 2 not so bad errors.

In the meantime, I'm starting on my second site. This one will be an authority site, kind of a big category but still a clear niche. I've found some nice keywords with no competition and alright (100-1000 search) traffic, I'll be monetizing this one with Amazon. My only concern is how Keyword Planner says these are high competition keywords - I'm going to ignore this, because I see zero competition except for subpar amazon.com product links.

The products are cheap (best no competition keyword I've seen so far correlates with a $7.50 product) but I'm actually fine with that. I don't mind making peanuts as long as I get the ball rolling, plus I'm sure I'm leaving myself enough room to grow into more expensive, likely higher competition, products.

First site is getting impressions according to Google Search Console. No clicks yet, but impressions on some keywords that I wouldn't have thought I'd get impressions on.

Just letting this site age for a while, but good signs.

Second site isn't live yet, but written an article or two.

Oh wow, it's climbing up the rankings for a term I wasn't aiming for at all. Figured it would be far too difficult. Got its first click, too.

This definitely has potential. Been working on launching other sites, but might have to start focusing on this more now that it's settling in nicely.

For now I'll just keep talking to myself in this thread. lol

Good luck about your journey.

I've added a small two line description for each of the categories for my directory site. I'm hoping it will help with the SEO. The directory site is extremely low on content, it's just links - but that's all users are looking for. Figured it doesn't harm to at least add two sentences to describe each category.

Working on creating new, more specific categories to target very specific keywords based upon what's doing pretty good already. Adding 13 more categories today at least.

I think I'm taking a bit of a risk by adding lots of categories that are the same content-wise but just targeting very slightly different keywords. Will just try to not overdo it. And will shuffle the order of links in each variant, as well as a completely unique description.

Google Search Console seems very slow at reporting data.

I'm not sure where to even start with backlinks, but I'm not sure I'll need them.