You always hear and read from influencers that content is king, it’s no secret. Making useful and viral content is the most cost effective way to prove yourself as an authoratitive voice and dramatically improve SEO in a saturated market.
Many affiliates have trouble grasping this idea because writing content that addresses visitors’ pain points can be a difficult long term game.
But if you want to drive organic traffic without spending an arm and a leg it’s a must. This is a especially true since 57% of marketers said that custom content was their top marketing priority in 2014.
While there are many ways to create content that is shareable on social media, to really get on top in affiliate marketing you’ve really got to go above and beyond.
While we can’t all get $67,496 while sleeping without some sort of strategy, here are some tips you can use to up your content game to drive traffic and convert.
Create comprehensive FAQ section
All products have areas where visitors have pains about, so why not be the first to address their frequently asked questions? This will help visitors trust your voice, improve your SEO, time on page, and traffic.
How do you find out what are the frequently asked questions before others address them?
Researching product comments on sites which it’s already sold on can give a perspective of what common questions to address. For example, if you’re selling a GoPro 4 you can easily check out Amazon’s comment section seeign where users have doubts and concerns.
You can also do a search on Google and put in one of the following:
- Go Pro 4+”comment section”
- Go Pro 4+”faqs”
- Go Pro 4+”troubleshooting”
The list of possibilities can go on and on, but you’ll get results that are relevant so you can make a comprehensive FAQ section.
Many affiliates don’t go the extra mile to provide value to visitors only trying to create content that influences offer link clicks.
Create video content that addresses visitors’ pain points
Writing a blog post reviewing the product with an affiliate link is nothing new and provides little value since others in your niche are probably doing the same.
While it gives the visitor the security that the product is worth buying and confidence to click through an offer link; a blog post can only make you stand out from others in your niche so much.
But what if you could make your content about the same product different from your competitors?
What if you could further address your visitors’ needs than just promoting an offer?
There are 2 very simple steps to make your content unique, shareable, and that will ultimately lead to more conversions and traffic:
1. Find out where your visitors are hurting.
In order to know what your visitors want, you have to know what their pain points are. Let’s say you have another competitor trying to promote a trekking backpack through the Amazon affiliate program. While taking a look at their blog posts you can check out the comments from their visitors.
You might notice some people might be pros and others first-timers that need a little guidance. But you happen to find a comment that asks how to attach a tent to the back of it and then another asking the same thing.
Bingo. Now you know where you can capitalize and create something that addresses their needs while creating unique content.
Finding out where visitors need more guidance can help you clear their doubts and become an authority in the niche that you’re in. By leaving them with little or no questions of how a product works, it gives you a higher chance of conversion and drives more traffic to your site.
2. Don’t just use a blog post to address their problem.
Explaining things in words is undoubtedly one of the most powerful ways to get a point across, but not always the most effective. If you’re trying to explain all the features of using a trekking backpack, it’d probably be best to do a video explainer or a step by step.
In fact, 90% of users say that product videos are helpful in decision process to buy or pass on a product. There are many ways to produce content but many affiliates forget that many visual pieces of content like slideshows, livestreaming video, podcasts, and a lot more.
Moreover, content with visuals has been proven to be more sharable and can help convert better. Buffer found that Tweets with images receive 150% more tweets than ones without.
In addition, the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text and 90% of information is transmitted to the brain visually.
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Make copy that sounds human and rotate landing pages
Copy that’s robotic, impersonal, and stale makes it harder for your visitors to trust an offer that you’re promoting. We have to remember who we’re writing for, humans not machines. Humans are driven by emotions and impacted by how and what you write.
This means you should write as you speak, break up paragraphs, use personal words like “you” and “we” and know your audience.
Even the font choice, size, and style affect the way the visitor feels. Using bold and italics create a sense of emphasis that makes them feel you’re actually speaking to them. You should use these elements for some points, but not all.
Having great copy can come in many forms and there’s never one right way to create magnetic headlines. It would be wise to rotate landing pages to see which pages perform best so you can maximize your traffic and conversions.
Rotating landing pages lets you see what voice your audience identifies with the most. You can write copy that could be human but with a tone of comedy, arrogance, or maybe quirkiness.
By doing split testing, you will find out which landing page works best so you can make content that visitors enjoy to read.
Skyscraper Technique
Brian Dean from Backlinko increased his organic traffic by 110% in 14 days with the skyscraper technique. To give you the basics of the skyscraper technique, you pretty much have to:
- Find content that has authority in your niche and is “link worthy”.
- Make it better.
- Reach out to the people in your niche that would be interested in your content.
- Create content that others have ignored.
Most of the time affiliates that are in the same niche tend to repeat the same content without giving visitors a reason to go to their page rather than an authority. But if you can find a way to make it 2x better, it gives you an edge to drive more traffic to your site.
You can make your content better in many ways, but these are the most common:
1. Make longer content
Time and time again it’s been proven that longer content converts better than shorter. Finding points where your competitors can expand on and researching where their users have questions can make a great base to create longer content.
Neil Patel of Quicksprout tested how his longer content would perform better than shorter with 327 posts. He found that posts that had more than 1,500 words received 22% more Facebook likes and 68% more tweets than shorter content.
2. Repurpose visual content
As mentioned before, visual content natural is more attractive to humans. But let’s say your competitor makes a great linkable blog post, it might be a good opportunity to make an infographic that expands on their ideas.
In addition, you can include a little bit of both by writing about the infographic as an introduction so you can cover both bases.
Create free content that visitors would otherwise have to pay for
When just starting out in affiliate marketing, it can be hard to drive traffic to your landing page when you have to compete with well established names. But everybody loves free things, especially if it’s exactly what they need to address their pain points.
Finding out what valuable content or product your competitor offers for a price is a golden opportunity to gain leverage on them.
Creating similar content but offering it for free is a sure way to take traffic from them to you. Better yet, finding out what their visitors need and incorporating it in your content is a way to create a unique selling point for your content.
While it’s not a traditional method, it gives you an advantage to gain authority, trust, and more conversions from competitors in your niche.
Wrap Up
Times have changed, ad farms aren’t converting and visitors are looking for something that actually adds value to make them a smarter consumer.
That’s why affiliates continually write posts that they believe that have click-worthy offers. The problem is that there are so many doing the same thing and it leaves you in the crowd-so you’ve got to be creative in your strategies.
Do you have any content strategies that have worked for you? Have you used any of the ones mentioned above? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.