How to Create Content That People Want to Read… (and Link to)

It’s possibly one of the most used and least understood terms in online marketing: ‘great content’. It wouldn’t be so bad except that it sounds so deceptively simple. So many people go out and start creating content, in some cases, thousands and thousands of pages of it, with the net result of significant cost and hard work amounting to little or no return.

It’s often made to sound so simple; as an affiliate you want to achieve search engine rankings which means that you need links. And how do you get links? With great content, of course.

So how do you get yourself out of the cycle? How can you define what great content is and start producing it? And, most importantly, how can you get people to read and share it?

There are a variety of factors that many believe to be fundamental in devising good content that are, in fact, quite unnecessary. Good content does not need to be new; yes it has to be unique and written solely for your site, but it doesn’t have to be a new idea, something no one else has written about or a new way of presenting the information.

This brings us to why people want to read or share content. Generally, articles that attract a lot of attention do so for one of only a few reasons:

• Controversy: does the piece go against commonly held wisdom or take a stand against something?
• Ground breaking: is it the first piece to report on something?
• Humor: this one is pretty much self explanatory…
• Helpful: if you help people with commonly held problems they will reward you for it.
• Financial: is there a financial benefit from the piece, whether it’s in the form of a prize, discount or tip?

That’s not to say that other content types won’t do well, but these main categories are often very successful. Once you understand what great content is to your audience, you can start figuring out how to create it.

Analyse what you already have

The best place to start looking for ideas is within your existing content. It’s important to understand what your existing visitors like to read and share before you start creating new content, as these will be the people who will share what you are going to create in the future.

First, take a look at your top content; which pages on your site were most visited within any given timeframe. Remember to assess each piece over a long period, as while some posts may get a lot of initial traffic and interest, making them appear more popular, others will continue to drive traffic and links for months, even years to come, ultimately making them more valuable. Re·read the most visited pages and make notes on each one, answering the following questions:

• What is the topic of the article?
• What type of article is it (funny, news, controversial, etc)?
• What format is it in (is it a video or an infographic)?
• Does it contain text and media items?
• How long is it?
• Who wrote it?
• What day, date and time was it published?
• How many comments does it have?
• Are the comments positive or negative?
• How is the post formatted?
• What is compelling about the post title?

Look for patterns in the answers; do news items with videos do better than long articles? Is one particular blogger more popular than others? What is it about those pieces of content that makes them popular, and can you re-create that?

Next, you need to understand where the traffic for those popular articles is corning from. Look at the referrers for popular articles; were they featured on someone else’s blog driving lots of traffic? Did someone with a high profile tweet about them? Answer these questions and you can start to build a plan to get similarly high volumes of traffic to similar articles.

Once you understand what is popular and where the traffic for those items comes from, you can start to put that into a strategy, if a blogger always shares news items, make sure to make a note of it so that you can start building a relationship with them and notify them of future news pieces, or if a particular topic always gets a lot of attention, make sure you’re aware of it.

You can then repeat this whole exercise looking at the pieces of content that got the most links rather than visitors. This should leave you with a good idea of which of your existing content is strongest, and a blueprint for repeating that success in the future. Additionally, you should now have a blueprint for the types of site that are likely to refer traffic and link to you. This provides a great basis for identifying additional sites that you may wish to contact to notify of future articles.

Expanding your remit

Once you have a thorough understanding of your existing readership, you need to turn your attention to what a broader audience is looking for. While maximizing your existing audience is the quickest way to increase readership and links, ultimately, your aim is to grow. You will, therefore, want to perform a similar analysis on your competitors.

While you may not be able to get traffic information, you can certainly see which articles received the most links, giving you a good understanding of your competitors’ popular content. For this it’s recommended searching for your generic terms in Google, and restricting the search to blogs and news items, including a custom date range to exclude items posted within the last month. This is to avoid the newer items placed at the top, maximizing your chances of being able to see link data. Google will do half the work for you here, because it will list these items in the order that it thinks is most relevant, in most cases, placing those items with the most links at the top.

Once you have a list of posts, you can then analyze them as above, adding yet more information to your blueprint.

Generating content Ideas and an editorial calendar

Once you have a thorough understanding of what ‘great content’ means within your niche, you need to continue to create it in order to attract the ‘eyeballs’ and links you need. Look through the list of articles that you have from your site and those of your competitors; this should start to provide you with a good number of new content opportunities:

• Could you provide updated information?
• Are there follow up post opportunities?
• Can you provide a better explanation or different perspective?
• Is there a counter argument?
• Top ten lists (and the like) can be done as a regular feature.

Once you have exhausted these possibilities, it’s time to brainstorm new titles. I find it best to plan these for up to three months at a time. Bear in mind that not every piece of content you write needs to be (or should be) an awesome piece attracting lots of links. What you’re aiming for is to include enough great content within your regular offering to allow the readership and link volumes to snowball. Just how often this is depends on how much content you are able to publish, but I recommend ensuring that around a fifth fall into the ‘great’ category.

In order to find the great titles that you’re going to publish over the next three months, you will need to brainstorm around three times more than you need (this isn’t wasted effort – the two-thirds you don’t use as ‘great’ will still be good content ideas that you can use). Once you have this list, start cherry picking the titles that best align with your blueprint, and Schedule them into your editorial calendar, clearly marking them as items that you are going to market more aggressively than your other content. If you don’t have an editorial calendar this is a great time to start one and it can be as simple as starting a Google calendar. Having at least the majority of your upcoming content planned out in advance lets you improve both the quality of your content and the effectiveness of it.

Marketing your great content

You can’t aggressively push every piece of content you create; your contacts will get very bored of you and you will do yourself more long-term harm than good. Instead, create a brief strategy around pushing your great content, refer back to the people that you identified as being interested in sharing and linking to particular topics or types of content, and make sure you promote each piece of great content to the right people at the right time, without inundating anyone. Build relationships with the people who are pushing similar types of content for your competitors, and see if they will promote similar content from you.

The overall effect of pushing this great content to the right people is that people will also become more aware of your other content, not only on your blog or news section, but also throughout your site, resulting in a bigger readership, and more links. And that’s what you as an affiliate promoting brand or particular service wants to achieve.

Starting Tips for Affiliates

“If your time is one of your greatest resources and your website one of your strongest assets, then it makes good sense to endeavor after activities and programs that provide you with the greatest return on your investment of time and money.”

When you’re just starting out as an affiliate, you often have a limited budget and limitless ambition. As you build your affiliate business, investing in the right programs and striving for success will ideally remain at the forefront of your business, so making smart affiliate choices is as important early on in your affiliate career as it is when you move forward.

As an affiliate, your time is one of your greatest resources and as with any monetary investment you’re looking for the greatest return. So where is your time and money most wisely spent? Here are some areas that successful affiliates often pinpoint as priorities.

Organic search

If you are an affiliate rookie, setting up your website and achieving high ranking sits high up on the priority list. Once you know what verticals you want to promote, you’ll get the most value out of getting your website up and running long before you actually get started with your business. From a cost perspective, this can be done relatively cheaply as a successful website will rely more heavily on the time you are willing to invest and how familiar you are with the ins and outs of SEO.

For the SEO novice, WordPress sites can be a great option in combination with SEO plugins. These often include free upgrades and strong customer support, which can not only help you get set up quickly, but can also help you reach the rankings you’re after faster.

If you’ve been an active affiliate for some time and have experience in optimization, you can still benefit from going back to SEO basics. Key areas that affiliates may overlook or undervalue are description metatags, alt tags, title tags and image optimization.

For both the novice and the expert affiliate, the goal is often the same: to get your website strong visibility on major search engines. And while there’s no magic formula to achieving a high ranking website, it’s not especially a matter of being overly difficult, but being diligent. Three areas that are worth being diligent about are your keywords, content and link building strategies.

Google recommends that you research keywords based on what you think your target audience will actually type into the search engine, and also offers the Google Keyword Tool, which can be helpful with your research. We know ‘Content is King’, and we also know that if your content isn’t relevant and isn’t incorporating your keywords, you might as well not be writing. When it is relevant and targeted, however, this will also help you with your inbound links, as other sites will be keener to link to you when you offer something that is unique. Internal links are equally important. Matt Cutts from Google once quipped: “The easiest links that you can get to your own site are your own links” – so a strategy that includes both inbound and internal links is ideal.

Finding the right programs

Promoting the wrong programs is much like writing with the wrong keywords – it just isn’t worth it. Too many affiliates are swayed by a high commission structure which though important, is not the only aspect to consider.

If content is king of SEO, then conversions is queen of affiliate programs. Teaming up with programs that can convert your traffic will have a lot to do with their software provider, acquisition and retention strategies, consistency, stability and ensuring that they have a reputable and secure site. The benefits of a strong software provider are a smooth player journey, sharp graphics, interactive games and customer support that provide players with attractive features such as live chat that can immediately address and resolve concerns.

The obstacle with this approach is that because so many operators run their programs with leading software providers, platforms become saturated with the same games and features – so how is an affiliate to choose? Some affiliates opt for programs that have proprietary software that offer variety and unique products. Thus, a combination of the two may prove advantageous to affiliates.

An operator’s tracking and reporting software is also key to an affiliate’s success and gaining a complete picture of their online business. This should provide affiliates with marketing tools that save time and help to optimize campaigns. Transparency is so important when it comes to tracking players, deposits, revenues, and the ability to manage campaigns across multiple sites with one account will help simplify an affiliate’s business. Look for reports that will give you the statistics you need to constantly make improvements, and avoid repeating costly mistakes. Reports that give you a site-by-site breakdown, campaign-by-campaign analysis plus an in-depth view of impressions, clicks, registrations and commissions will help you to consistently evaluate your progress, and make informed decisions that will help increase your bottom line.

A third consideration when choosing a program is its payment processing. This should run like clockwork and provide players with a variety of payment options that facilitate getting paid on time, and with fair withdrawal terms – conditions which are critical to player retention.

If you’re still not sure about a program, forums are the perfect place to gauge how a specific platform builds and maintains relationships with its affiliates and players. And while it’s true that forums are an excellent source of information, they can also be a source of misinformation. For affiliates, this means taking comments with a pinch of salt and verifying their accuracy. What may be good or bad for one affiliate and cause a positive or negative comment, may not necessarily apply to your business and model, so get all the facts and base your decision on the full picture – following other opinions alone may sway you from an otherwise good opportunity.

Promotions and support

You’ve set up your website and got it ranking, you’re evaluating various programs that will suit your affiliate business and you’re still not sure. If you’re an affiliate that has opted to promote a few good brands, as opposed to many brands of all sizes, then finding the right fit is essential to maximizing the return on your investment of time and money.

Regular promotions provide value in and of themselves, in terms of acquiring and retaining players and providing incentives for affiliates to promote. Promotions are also the bread and butter of fresh content for your website, and what will help you gain the visibility you need in the search engines. It’s important to partner with programs that see value in this, and it’s also critical to find out how timely promotions are communicated to affiliates. That is to say, it’s great to have a promotion to tell your players about, but if you don’t find out about it until the day before it starts (or worse, the day before it ends!) then you won’t be able to leverage this opportunity. Strong, frequent communication is so important in an affiliate program, and chances are that if promotions are not being communicated in a timely manner, then other areas may also be falling by the wayside. How quickly will your emails be answered? How promptly will your concerns be addressed? How can you build a relationship with a program that doesn’t have communication high up on its priority list?

Promotions also provide affiliates with an opportunity for additional branding. When you announce promotions, you also provide players with valuable information, thereby, giving them a great reason to come back to your site, time and time again.

If, as an affiliate, your time is one of your greatest resources and your website one of your strongest assets, then it makes good sense to endeavor after activities that help with your ranking, and programs that provide you with the greatest return on your investment of time and money. This focus is extremely important in online marketing where there are many distractions, and making poor decisions can cost you time, money, website ranking and perhaps most importantly, opportunity and growth.

If you are interested in Foreign Exchange and would like to become an affiliate and earn money as a Forex Affiliate, here you can find the list of the Best Converting Forex Affiliate Programs.

Branding Tips for Affiliates

In any business, iGaming or currency trading industry, being recognized and remembered is the key to trader and player acquisition, retention and an increase in your bottom line. That can be a tall order in such a competitive industry. With so many affiliates vying to promote similar gaming products, the question remains: how does an affiliate stand out?
Your brand identity is what distinguishes you from your fellow affiliate marketers. It’s your unique selling point, what makes you stand out and, if done correctly, prompts players to keep corning back to your site time and time again. The more competitive your industry, the more important good branding becomes, and this is certainly true for affiliates in the Forex Trading and iGaming sector. Don’t wait until your brand is tired, forgotten and boring to make good branding a priority-get started with these six tips.

1. Distinguish yourself
As an affiliate, you are an entrepreneur, and so in many ways you are your own brand. As your own brand, it’s so important to distinguish yourself from the other masses of affiliates, especially those who are promoting within the same vertical. What value do you provide to your audience and potential users of your site? How are you different or special? How can you ensure that your site is worth coming back to again and again? This is called point of difference and states, “By creating a point of difference, you’re creating a brand, and branding is often what separates the men from the boys (so to speak).” If you’re just getting started, this is one of the most important aspects of branding to nail. If you’re a veteran affiliate, make sure your point of difference comes shining through in your website and promotions.

2. Design
The look, feel and navigability of your website are critical to your success, and if you’re a thriving affiliate this is no doubt something you have spent a considerable amount of time developing. In terms of branding and design, one of the most important elements to keep in mind is consistency. That means when you look at your website, business cards, email marketing campaigns and banner ads, for example, they should use the same colors, font and logo. A good test is to look at your various promotional items individually, and see if you can identify your branding across the board. It’s also worthwhile hiring a professional to help you with this, especially if graphics and design are not your strong suit.

3. Language and tone
The language you use says a lot about your branding. Are you very technical or do you promote more of a fun, playful tone? Not only does this say mountains about who you are, but it also attracts a specific kind of visitor to your site. Your language will have a lot to do with your target audience, in terms of attracting newbie players, expert players, casual players and so on. Like your design, your language needs to be consistent. You don’t want a very technical website combined with a light-hearted email campaign; this creates confusion. Similarly, if you send out newsletters, your subject line should remain identifiably yours, so your players recognize your communications, thereby increasing your open rate.

4. Co-branding
If you are able to negotiate a branding strategy with your iGaming or Forex affiliate programs, this can definitely work to your advantage. Affiliates who have achieved a solid track record with their player database may be able to reach out to their affiliate manager to negotiate an exclusive deal. If you’re partnered with leading Forex Brokers or iGarning operators, having their presence on your marketing creative can increase trust, player confidence and help drive traffic to your website. This strategy will help you build awareness of your own brand, and can be especially effective if you are just starting out or your online branding remains relatively unknown.

5. Targeted promotion
It’s hard to build your reputation and branding when you aren’t letting people know who you are and what you do. There are so many ways of doing this today that vary in price and scope, and will help
ensure you are maximizing your reach, and ultimately, your bottom line. One of the most important things to keep in mind is your target audience. You may be able to find an incredible price on an online ad, but if the website is targeting an irrelevant market, you might as well not invest. This is often the case when you are getting traffic to your website, but aren’t able to covert. This rings true no matter where you are promoting, whether it be social media sites like Facebook and Twitter or a sponsorship opportunity. So position yourself and your brand in strategic places, where your target audience can identify with you.

6. Conferences, mascots and merchandise
In line with the above point, participating at affiliate conferences and events can be an effective way of promoting your brand because you really are at the right place, with the right people. Conference swag is also ideal for branding, especially if you can find something cost effective and attractive.
Mascots can be especially effective in creating further interaction with your customers, can help you distinguish yourself in a saturated market and can add personality to your brand. Mascots give your business a face, a personality and can be especially effective in the Forex and iGaming industry. Some operators and affiliate providers have used mascots across their marketing campaigns to build their brand presence successfully.

“No branding strategy can stand alone, no matter how clever, without a strong business backing it.”

Affiliates may not always be in the position to have a mascot, and may want to opt for merchandise instead. Let your creativity be your inspiration when it comes to merchandise, with items like branded playing cards to give at poker associations, branded bingo cards and pens and dabbers to distribute at bingo halls. There are many ways for affiliates to build their brand presence, with the aim of increasing their recognition and trust in the industry. One of the main things to keep in mind, however, is that no branding strategy can stand alone, no matter how clever, without a strong business backing it. If your brand is a promise of value, then delivery on that promise is an absolute must. Relying solely on brand name for loyalty is wrought with risk unless you are backing this with the full marketing mix: product, price, place, promotion and excellent customer service.

The 7 Golden Rules of White Hat Link Building

1. Relevant Pages and in-content Links

Link building today is all about relevant pages and in-content links. You need to have the links inside the content of a relevant page; a page talking about your business, products or topics relevant to you. You want links neatly embedded inside a page, not navigational text links. The practice of using presell pages, a term introduced by Aaron Wall, enables you to get such high-relevance, incontent links easily. You write up a page that talks about your industry, company or products and have links to your site in there. The content on the page looks just like a normal article written by a newspaper or a fan of yours. This method used in link building replaced irrelevant footer links that were crippled in 2005.

 2. Domain Trust

Domain trust concerns the trust of your domain and the trust of the domain linking to you. What this means is that you need links from trusted sites in order to become trusted. Both the trust of linking from and to a domain is important as well as the domain age, the brand and co-citations. All of these factors make up the trust rank of your website. What trust rank means is that link quality is relative: if your domain is trusted it will respond differently and more  quickly to links and there will be more LSI in effect. What this signifies is that you should not build trust only on links. It is not just about link building – it is more than that!

 3. Natural Anchor Text

You might ask yourself what really is natural when it comes to Anchor Texts? A natural link looks like it was built by a user, not an SEO. Normal users don’t care about anchor texts, and so, if all your links look like they were built by an SEO, you are in trouble. What this means is that you don’t only have high value keywords in your links, but also some links saying “cool site”, “brand name x”, “click here” or even a longer phrase. Don’t over-optimize. A natural distribution is your goal – not the maximization of equal anchor texts which happen to be your “money keyword”.

 4. NoFollow

If you build links, do you build NoFollow links on relevant pages as well? Of course you do, because you don’t look at PageRank. If you apply the NoFollow tag Page Rank is not passed on – but it does not avoid passing relevancy and trust. This is why NoFollow tags from very highly trusted sites still have an effect on your rankings. In addition, normal users don’t care about NoFollow – if you ask the everyday guy what a NoFollow is he will have no clue and won’t care, because he doesn’t have to. All your links should look like they were created by normal users, which means you should also include NoFollow links in your backlink profile.

 5. Juicy Pages

When a page is juicy this means that the page ranks and that it passes value to you if you place a link on it. Therefore, a webpage that does rank for a phrase or keyword important to you is a page that you want to have a link on regardless of PageRank, cache date and other ‘SEO type’ metrics. Why? Well, if Google thinks the page is important (for the particular search query) so should you.

6. No-Spam!

You don’t want to have links on duplicate content pages like article directories and article sites – at least for Google (Yahoo!/Bing are a different story). You don’t want to add links into pages that are years old without changing their content. Don’t try to get a link on a site if the neighborhood consists of 48 very obvious link buyers that have placed their links for different topics even if it is a PR4, PR6 or even PRIO! Don’t even think about it! It is not a content  age talking about your product, business or industry. The page is only plastered with links because of a little green bar – you are smarter than that, you don’t want a link there!

7. Don’t buy links for Page Rank

I guess you got the message already, but let me repeat it again: you don’t care about PR, your users don’t care about PR and Google merely uses it to signal that a site has been banned. PR is not important. We’re referring to the visible Toolbar PageRank of course, not some hidden parameters inside the Google algorithm. The webmaster guidelines of Google explicitly state that you shouldn’t buy links for Page Rank and in this matter, you should really trust them.

TOP 5 Content Tips for Affiliates

When we talk about content, we mean the stuff the humans can see. If we would like to be pedantic: titles, words, graphs, images, links; both on your own site and on third·party profiles such as social media.
Your content serves three broad functions, and should be well·balanced towards all three, which are; readers, relevancy and ranking (yes, the ‘new three Rs’).

• Readers: should find your content useful, possibly interesting and hopefully memorable (enough to make them want to find you again by name).

• Relevancy: your content is the major relevancy signal, and your chance to show search engine crawlers exactly and explicitly what your site is about.

• Ranking: elements of your content and they way in which it is marked up will be evaluated by components of the search engine’s ranking algorithms.

Some of you will have spotted that a fourth critical point to good content has been omitted, which is that it attracts links. That’s a topic for another article.
More does not mean better. I can ensure that my content is written and marked up so that non-human visitors understand it is about ‘bingo’ (for example). Now in make ‘forex’ every second, fifth or tenth word, that does not make my content more relevant. It makes it drivel. Quite simply,
if you keep the new three Rs in mind and follow some of these five tips below, you will have a solid content strategy – which is one of the foundations of good search engine optimisation.

• Write for humans first

You want humans to (ultimately) click you affiliate link, therefore, your content needs to be written with humans as the priority.

• Don’t keyword-stuff your headings … this is not 2005!

Headings should be marked up with <h> (heading) tags, with primary heading being the <h1>, secondary heading <h2.> and so on.
<h1> Forex Broker Review </h1> It shouldn’t be too much of an effort to ensure your keyword occurs in your <h1> as one would naturally tend to headline a piece of content along the crux of the subject matter. Don’t, however, ‘stuff your keyword into your header by front-loading it unnaturally, or repetitively. In my experience, the use of keywords in your heading tags is most useful as a relevancy signal, and is, at best, a very weak ranking signal. You will not stand to gain anything by having more <h2.>, <hp tags than the content naturally requires, or by unnatural repetition of the keyword in every single header. In short:

• You should find your keyword will fit naturally in your <h1>. If not, hire a good writer.

• If your keyword is at the start of the heading (i.e. front-loaded), then great; though don’t contrive this as there is little to gain.

• If your content requires additional <h> tags and your keyword naturally fits here, then great.

• Mark up images correctly

If you are using images or tables, you need to ensure that content is also explained to search engines. Images should have both an alt attribute and an image title. Both elements are intended for humans first, however, Google has confirmed that it primarily uses the alt attribute to  ascertain what the image is about. This makes good common sense, if we understand the intended difference between the alt attribute and image title.

• Image title: the label, the overall caption that summarises the image.

• Alt attribute: the alternative information, which will be displayed should the image fail to load, and will be ‘read’ by assistive technologies.

As an example, if wanted to optimise a page about eToro broker review ‘eToro reviews’ or similar, and we have a picture or logo on our page, the image title could be ‘eToro, Forex Broker, logo’ and the alt attribute could expand ‘Logo of Leading Forex Broker, eToro’.

• USP: what is your Unique Selling Point?

Google has made no secret of the fact that it wishes to de-prioritise sites that offer little or no original content, or little content of additional value to the web. In recent years, changes and tunings to the algorithm have sought to identify other signals such as ‘brand strength’ and authority (the update commonly known as Vince), or to deprioritise repetitive or wholesale duplicated content (the update commonly known as MayDay). Whilst many may feel this is a targeted dislike and mission to weed out affiliate sites from the SERPS, to focus on motive is counter-productive. Instead, we need to evolve to our sites’ offering so that there is something of original value. Identify what it is about your site that makes it better and different from your competitors. Do you have the list of best forex bonuses? The the biggest community? The most comprehensive comparison features table?
Know what your content USP is, and leverage this on-site and off-site in your promotional campaigns and social media messaging.

• Differentiate from the others

All too often we can see cookie cutter affiliate site content that goes like this ‘[brand name] Forex is a leading Forex site that offers an [conprehensive/unbiased/detailed] Forex reviews with an [attractive/pleasing/bold] UI’. Every page, about every product on your site becomes substantially similar; which, due to the very nature of competition in this space, means that every affiliate site becomes a clone of the other. Start again with your site’s USP and filter this message down into your content. Think about how different data points can be presented or what types of multi-media or user-generated content you can add into the mix.