Typically, there are two main approaches that we SEOs can utilize to monetize our skillset.
Client SEO involves ranking which ultimately generates leads for clients, whether applied directly to their websites or to your own lead-generation site.
With affiliate SEO, you’re typically ranking your own websites with the goal of selling a 3rd party product, in which you would take a commission from the sale.
For those that don’t know me, I’m 100% affiliate. Like most, I started out in my early years taking in clients. But I soon found that I ran into a wall. I couldn’t scale my income to the levels I wanted because a huge chunk of my time was spent babysitting customers.
In 2010 I fired all of my clients; five-figures per month worth. The result: I was able to scale my business to levels I never thought imaginable. In addition to that, I’ve created more freedom in my life, I have time to travel 365 days of the year, and I can choose what I want to do, and when I want to do it.
If you are involved client SEO and you’ve often postulated what it would be like to ‘truly’ be your own boss, you’re in the right place. You’re about to take a look how to make the transition from client to affiliate SEO.
Client SEO vs. Affiliate SEO: Pros and Cons
Both approaches have their merits. Let’s see how each of them measures against the other.
Client SEO
Pros
- Instant Revenue – The great thing about client SEO is that as soon as you shake hands with your client you get paid.
- Clients fund your growth and education – A monthly recurring income of $500-$2000/month is more than enough to allow you to experiment with various ranking techniques or to build your own PBN.
- Low competition – Most of the time, your clients want to rank locally: a limo company in Miami for example. Local playing fields are typically easier to rank in and require fewer resources.
Cons
- Time scalability issues – There’s no way to avoid it, clients need to be talked to. They send emails with questions and often require phone check-ins. This is a serious drag on your time and can be quite annoying when you inevitably take that needy customer on board.
- Income scalability issues – Clients will typically have a ceiling on how much they want to pay you. Even if you’ve doubled their business and have increased their monthly revenue by $10k, you’re going to have a hard time getting them to pay you more than $2k of that. Why? Because there’s always another SEO knocking on their door, offering to do it for cheaper.
- Cold Calling – I won’t even get into this. You already know it sucks.
- Customer Turnover and Lead Generation – Regardless of how good a job you do, there’s going to be turnover. Shit happens. Economies shift. People change priorities. To keep up with the inevitable turn over, you need a constant influx of leads.
- Location dependence – I know plenty of people who are able to effectively manage clients remotely. Daryl Rosser for example. But getting to that point requires either some very slick email skills or late nights calling clients in opposite time zones.
Affiliate SEO
Pros
- Income: The sky is the limit – The great part about affiliate SEO is that there is no ceiling on how much money you can make. If you’ve doubled your traffic from one month to the next, you don’t need to negotiate with your provider for more money. Affiliate commissions are paid out per-sale.
- Finding “clients” is easy – Instead of having to reach out to individual product owners, most affiliate partnerships are setup by an intermediary company such as Click Bank, Market Health, etc. Getting on board just involves a simple application process
- Your time is your own – With the affiliate model; you’re truly your own boss. You can decide to work when you want, and from where you want. If you decide you don’t want to work for a month, that’s completely available to you. You’re accountable to no one but yourself (which ironically can be a bad thing for some personality types).
- Niche domination – Once you find a profitable niche and you start to make you money, deploy more sites and dominate the entire niche. Occupy the entire first page and monopolize all of the traffic.
- Product creation – Let’s say you rank for “how to get a six pack” and you’ve been promoting a diet program. There’s nothing stopping you from having your own product created instead, keeping all the profit for yourself, and sky-rocketing your income. There’s even the possibility of taking it a step further and listing that product via Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).
Cons
- Takes a while to rank and make money – If you’re used to ranking locally, prepare yourself for more competition than what you’re used to. In affiliate, typically it takes longer to rank and you don’t get paid in the meantime. Plan to budget for the resources required to get you to page 1.
- Negative SEO – It’s not as common as it used to be, but negative SEO tends to pop up more often in affiliate, especially in the lucrative niches.
- Niche selection – Hands down, the most important skill involved in affiliate SEO is niche selection. This is what it all boils down to: being able to find the niches with the highest profitability and the least barrier to entry.
At this point, you’ll have to ask yourself… am I the kind of person that prefers working with clients? Or am I willing to take on more challenge in order to be my own boss and remove my time, location, and income limits?
If you answered yes to the second question, I’d like to share with you how I recommend making the transition in the smoothest way possible.
Moving from Client SEO to Affiliate SEO
1. Selecting the right niche
I mentioned before that affiliate SEO is all about niche selection. It doesn’t matter how well you can rank if the niches you’re ranking aren’t profitable.
That said, finding the right niche is a lot like playing roulette, but with much better odds. If you keep playing enough, eventually you’re going to win. And you only need to hit it big with one niche in order to fund your entire business.
In order to find your first niche, many people suggest tapping into your interests to find a niche that you’d like to write about and get involved in. This is a great approach if you’re looking to build a huge authority site that you’re committed to developing on a daily basis.
However, there are pitfalls with this approach. Just because you’re a huge fan of yoga, doesn’t mean that that it’s a money-generating niche. I know this from personal experience.
Instead, I offer a different approach for niche selection: shortcut the guessing process by reverse-engineering what’s already working.
Method 1 – The Flippa Method
Go to flippa.com and see what’s already selling. Sales prices are typically determined by a 20x monthly profit metric. If a site is selling for $20k, then it’s making $1k per month.
Sift through the market place until you find a niche that you’re interested in, makes a good amount of money, and has an acceptable amount of competition
Method 2 – The Wikipedia Method
Alternately, you can use what I call the “Wikipedia method”. Sloppy SEO’s commonly use Wikipedia for their outbound authority links on their PBNs. Take any Wikipedia page in a niche you might be interested in and chuck it into Majestic. Manually go through the backlinks and hunt down the unblocked PBNs that are linking to this Wikipedia page. Then simply look at the PBNs themselves to see what money sites they’re linking out to.
These methods offer two ways to discover niches that are already making money for someone else, so they can definitely make money for you.
2. Start Planting Seeds Now
As mentioned earlier, it takes a while for sandboxed sites to rank and start to enter profitability. Start creating sites now, as many as your budget will allow for.
Take a look at your financials from client SEO. How much profit are you making? How much of that profit are you comfortable investing in your new business model? Once you’ve figured out that number, it’s time to start budgeting.
Bear in mind, you’re going to need to consider all of the following expenses:
- Backlinks: Are you going to be content marketing and building your own links? Are you going to be building your own PBN?
- Content: How much content is needed for each of the sites you’ll be starting?
- Assistants: Do you need VA’s to help with PBN setups, social profile creation, and other tasks?
- Etc, etc, etc
Once you’ve figured out how much you’re able to allocate and how many projects that allocation will cover, it’s time to start deploying sites.
Remember, affiliate is like roulette. As with any games of chance, you need to play to win. The more you play, the higher your chances are of winning. Make as many money sites as you can today, and start the process of growing these assets as soon as possible.
3. Once you’re making money, start to fire your clients
The 80-20 principle (Paretto’s Law) looks like this: roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
Take a look at your clients. 20% of your clients cause 80% of the problems, don’t they?
Once you start making money from affiliate you’re going to start firing your bottom 20% of clients in order of how much stress they add to your life and how much time they hoard.
Firing your clients is going to give you more time to…
4. Dominate your niche
Once you’ve found a profitable niche and you’re making money, it’s time to deploy more sites. On average, the #1 ranked website only collects 33% of the Page 1 traffic. Occupying slots #2-4 will essentially double your traffic, and thus double your income.
You’ve already ranked one site. You’ve hopefully taken good notes on what backlinks are required to get there, what anchors to choose, how often to link, what kind of content ranks, etc.
All you need to do next time is to repeat the same process. Once you have a recipe for ranking one site in a niche, you’re cracked the code. I’ve never run into a case where my recipe didn’t work the second time.
5. Lean-in
At this point, it’s all about leverage.
- As you start to make more money from affiliate, continue to fire more clients.
- Deploy more sites in your money-making niches until you’ve maxed out the niche’s revenue.
- Start to deploy new sites in untested niches so you can ‘play more roulette’ and hopefully scrounge up some gems.
- Start hiring a team to help with the busy work. Consider hiring an apprentice to take over the ranking aspects of sites so you can focus on niche selection.
- Consider applying the 80-20 principle to some of your earlier niches and selling them off, freeing up more time for niche testing and scaling into larger niches.
Conclusion
Once you’re making money in affiliate, to scale up, you simply need to reinvest into new niches, refine your processes, and build your team.
Or if you’re looking to go the complete opposite route, take a few months off and enjoy your freedom. Give yourself a well-deserved vacation.
By this point, you’ve created a passive income stream that gives you amazing ROI on your time, while truly being scalable. It’s up to you what you’d like to do with that time and money, but remember, at this stage, you are truly your own boss and you’re virtually limitless in where you want to go with it.
Hi there, Great article Ive never really considered affiliate SEO.
Once I feel confident im local seo I might well give it a try.
Can these unlocked PBNs from wiki outbound links be used to our advange in local seo too?
Cheers:)
Nyk24 – Seriously don’t wait… Get into Affiliate sites now… better yet LOCALIZE your affiliate site – try things with your affiliate site before you try it on your customers sites. An example niche that would be good to do this with would be generators.
Yeah, I wish I got into it around 2010 when I first thought about it lol.
Thanks Paul that’s a good idea.
PBNs could be used for any purpose, with local SEO it’s pretty easy, as you can either target an entire niche or just local specific stuff. In most cases, it’s not even needed though, but for stiffer competition it would make things easier.
I wish I started with affiliate sites years ago… I can’t knock client SEO though, I’ve made a ton of money with it. One thing Matt didn’t point out, is that when algorithm changes happen, big boost in new client income (Then again, could have the reverse effect)! And, for local SEO, once you’re ranking, you’re usually pretty safe and don’t need to do much ongoing work. You’ll always have customer service calls though, that never stops. Never..ever stops. lol.
The cat is a bit out of the bag LOL forget the idea of finding niches with the Wiki method… I do pretty much the same thing to post comments were possible ( on someone elses PBN ) no juice, but great point of relevance in many cases – want to stay away from the PBN sites that are scattered in their content topics.
Thanks Nathan……will definitely use the pbn trick for a client in a competitive local imdustry
Awesome post, Nathan– Matt Diggity always delivers and constantly hits the ball out of the park.
Thanks for the kind words, Nicholas.
Would basing your future on Google be that wise?
I feel that this isn’t really an either or kind of thing, just a matter of diversifying.
I’d be scared to death relying on affiliate income.
Those were kind of my thoughts a few years ago, but if you’re selling SEO services, you’re in that same boat. At the very least, you’re right, it could be just a matter of diversifying your revenue if that’s all you want it to be. I think what Matt was showing is that it can be much more than that.
Excellent post – Easily and straightforwardly explained.
I agree… Thanks for the comment John!
Good points and reality on client TLC– it’s never enough & “what have you done for me in last 24 hrs” after we teach them how to start using sales reports, analytics & stats. Thx Matt & Nathan.
I think that problem goes away once you tweak your sales process and set certain expectations.
SEO Dude makes a good point about expectations. With SEO in particular, I always tell people they don’t need a report… if you’re trying to rank a client in a local area, the results show whether you’ve been doing work or not and whether it’s worth paying for. There’s only been a few cases where I would provide reports. Reports, just give them the ability to treat you like an employee, ask a bunch of questions that prevent you from working on their stuff, and spending too much time on non revenue generating tasks.
Very true point and you end up spending more time on client SEO creating glossy reports and explaining to the client what you are doing than actually doing it and for that reason affiliate in my opinion is so much better. I recently wrote this which explains just that http://www.fatrank.com/seo-clients-unrealistic-goals/
As for Matt Diggity then i could not agree more and he always hits the ball out of the park. He is an absolute legend and what i love about him is he tests and does not just presume things. But physically tests and tests until he has real data and stats to back up his opinions and for that reason is why several of us UK SEO affiliates are flying over to chang mai to catch up with him. Top article again and will subscribe to this blog as never come across it 🙂
Great post! Actually, I did affiliate SEO full time from 2007-2010 but, like many others, I got slapped by Google updates and lost most of my rankings and income. I relied too much on article directories for traffic, as well.
To add insult to injury, a couple months later I lost my Adwords account, too! Sucked with a capital SUCK!
Live and learn. Lol
At least I was fortunate enough to be able to sell nearly all of my sites and pull a nice chunk of cash from them. That sustained us until early summer of 2012.
I’m just starting to work client SEO now, as well as in my supply business, but have begun building affiliate sites again recently. I like the freedom of working when I want to.
A couple great resources for those that need help are Erica Stone’s “Extreme Reviewer” which teaches how to build killer sites around mostly Amazon products, but her methods will work with anything.
Another is Dr. Andy Williams Udemy course on building affiliate sites. I’ve been on his list for years. He’s very detailed and intelligent. Actually, I think he’s still running a sale on his Udemy course where you can get 50% off. I just bought it for $15.00 the other day using code MAY-2016.
Another thing I’d recommend is to build a list in every niche you enter. I didn’t do that years ago and it came back to bite me. If you have a good list of buyers and prospects then you’ll always have people you can market to and Google won’t have 100% control over your business.
Also, a mixture of SEO and paid advertising works well with some niches, too, depending on the cost per click.
Personally, I don’t think I’d ever “fire” all of my clients. To be completely honest, I missed some of the people I’d done business with for years when I shut my supply business down during the recession. I was making money, but I was bored and missed some of the customer interaction. My thought now is that if someone is easy to work with and doesn’t take up a lot of time, why shut down that income stream? Just my thoughts.
Once again, great article! Thanks for sharing.
Joe
It seems like the grass is always greener on the other side, doesn’t it? lol. Affiliates getting into client work, and vise versa. Good point on customer interaction, that is something you definitely learn to enjoy over time, as long as they’re good customers. 🙂
When I first started it was doing affiliate stuff. I got tired of the swings in income.
Client SEO to me is more dependable and much easier to boost income. Good post though.
That’s another great point, SEO Dude.
That’s a good point… I have considerable swings in income just from this blog. If a client leaves, you can make up for it with new signings and prepare for it by knowing your retention rate and average lifespan of a client.
Affiliate can be very steady income though also. I have 4 decent affiliate sites which make me five figures a month religiously within pennies every month and this has been steady for well over a year. My frustration with client seo is they do not concentrate enough on the most important element which is rankings > traffic > leads. Instead they seem to prefer glossy reports and meetings.
I say this and still have a few close mates killing it in the UK with client SEO so it is certainly a great niche also but i prefer being sat on the beach somewhere with making money on autopilot through affiliate purchases. But suppose it is each to their own and what works for one might not work for someone else. Great comments though lads and nice to bounce ideas off each other
I hear ya… That’s why I’ve always told people I won’t be providing reports, and also why I always loathed working with local clients. I dealt with people across the country, very few locals so I never had the problem of people stopping in my office wanting a quick meeting. I did have a few on occasion that would do that, but a quick mention of a meeting fee eliminated the problem.
I think there’s a client expectation problem, but it also stems from the seller not positioning themselves properly and setting proper expectations and boundaries. Its common for the sellers to just want to get the sale, and afraid to set boundaries thinking they might lose the sale. When you have enough leads in the pipeline, you’re not afraid of someone not buying anymore. lol.
To me, I like the idea of both methods. I like the flexibility of affiliate stuff, but I also like the rush you get from closing a big sale and smashing objections.
^^ True story, James.
There’s various ways to make affiliate SEO stable and diverse, just like client SEO.
Client SEOs, you wouldn’t just get one $10k/month client and then stop, right? Same with affiliates. You build 10, 20, 50 sites and diversify your income stream.
Exactly Matt. Build out dozens of niches and like you hit in the post here then any niche which makes you good money then dominate the niche. I have 4 decent niches (which I will show you in chang mai when i come Matt) where i own the complete first 3 pages on google with various money sites and parasites and they make me a decent amount each month. Its long term residual income without needing the hassle of clients phoning or emailing regularly!!
So Matt and James, are you only using PBNs to rank? If not, what other methods are you using, if you don’t mind? Are you using PPC at all?
I’m just trying to get a better grasp on what’s working well right now.
I know you didn’t ask me… I hardly use PBN’s anymore, and haven’t for a few years now. I have found that internal On Page with a huge focus on internal juice flow will get you a long way ( developing site rank vs page rank ). In local organic, it can get you at the top pretty quick. Start with the LEAST competitive term you can find and rank that term, then start climbing the ladder. As you develop top page rank for these lessor terms you will find it easier to rank for the more competitive terms ( site rank starts to take over ) Basically bridging content marketing with SEO and understanding how to control it vs just writing a bunch of stuff and hoping it works ( and it never does LOL )
Thanks, Paul. That’s essentially what I’ve started doing. On-page, silo structure and logical internal linking, as well as guest posting, video distribution, social, web 2.0, etc.
So I guess I’m on the right track. 🙂
Hi Joe. Absolutely using PBNs to rank in some hard niches and without them there is not a chance you will rank because you need big quality authority links for the larger niches for sure – if you are not in the mould of building out PBNs then i would strongly suggest hitting Matt up (author of this blog) and get on his waiting list because he hires super powerful links and i know dozens of big SEO agencies who use these hired links from him to rank huge keywords (and im talking here the 20,000 monthly searches that are over £10 per click on PPC)
However this is certainly only one part of approx 50 other things i do mate. Its easy to rank parasites still like youtube with spam (GSA, mass embeds etc). Then you can create the branded social fortress around your sites and get all those web 2.0s ranking with various techniques like rankwyz, fcs networker and if really dirty then injected contextual links from places like sape.
Long tail or easier keyphrases though can simply be ranked with good quality content (making sure you use the skyscraper approach by Brian Dean) where you create content bigger and better than your competition have and then silo structuring your sites to pass juice throughout the whole websites. This is perfect for local easy keywords. Yes lastly (and sorry for the essay lol) then PPC can still be very profitable if you are advanced in adwords optimisation. Infact one of my mates who earns the most out of us all at over 5 million clear profit a year solely does pay per click. He spends an absolute fortune with google and have a dozen designated account managers employed by google but makes a killing. The funny thing is all his PPC payments go on his virgin air miles so literally with the amount he spends then he can do a first class around the world trip free of charge every single week and thats why if you ever looked at my facebook i am in cancun, las vegas, dubai and travelling because get first class flights free off him all the time :))
Best advice I can give is keep hustling and do not throw your eggs into one basket. If you are starting out then maybe start in client seo to practice, develop your skills and earn money to be able to reinvest into affiliate. As a sideline start building websites in niches you know and understand (if your mate is a plumber or electrician then build him a site and tell him any orders he gets give you a kickback on because you know he wont rogue you and then repeat for all your friends because you will earn extra money and all your friends will love you for it also). I still do that also tbh if you check here i recently posted it which is generally only for my friends and this fatrank blog is not for building a fan base but more for training my apprentices in areas and explaining some stuff to friends or people i help out – http://www.fatrank.com/no-risk-supply-of-enquiries/ Do not subscribe to this as it will be boring and not worth your time and if you want golden nuggets keep reading these articles on this site and diggitymarketing and blogs like charlesfloate as they are all sharing great tips and techniques. Wish all of you the best anyway chaps and it is awesome as an industry everyone shares and helps each other out because it is that big there is never really any competition for us all. 🙂 x x
I also use primarily PBN combined with perfect onsite SEO in order to rank in affiliate. Not using PBNs would be like bringing a knife to a gun fight.
As much as I understand where you are coming from… I just dont agree. Most ( not saying you ) rely on the PBN to do the work and slack on the onsite. But it is the onsite, that is more like a scalpel than just a knife. Proper keyword specific targeting in my experience simply does not require the use of direct PBN juice. Granted I am not going to get a top 100 listing for a term like “soccer” ( and honestly wouldn’t want the term anyways.. it would be high traffic and low conversions – which would translate to a poor site back to search bounce rate – and that’s not good ) but a term such as “cristiano ronaldo workout” and it wouldn’t be to hard to squeeze into the top 20 at the very least.
Maybe I wasn’t clear. If you’re trying to rank for anything competitive, BOTH aspects are required to rank: proper onsite AND link juice. I never would recommend someone to do subpar onsite and then slam it with PBNs. That’s just a waste of money. Read more: http://diggitymarketing.com/the-real-reason-why-your-backlinks-dont-work/
Ive ranked 1 for te only 3 affiliate sites ive ever made with only on page, zero backlinks. The key is keeping the reader engaged. Being human in your post and getting to the point. Exact match domain helps too. My chronic weed addiction has cut into my affiliate website production.
Thanks for this info! The 2nd quarter of the year is almost over. I’m now currently refocusing 50% of my time to building my consulting business, affiliate, and lead gen sites instead of doing client SEO work.
Don’t get me wrong, I love working with my clients but I just woke up today and realized that I need to build another stream of income while slowly getting out of my Digital Marketing agency business. I feel that this business is eating a lot of my time and I just can’t scale fast enough to build the lifestyle that I want and it seems that I am not a business owner and I’m just working for someone else (but in this case, I’m working under a lot of companies and I could lose my income anytime even if I always over deliver)
John, I understand how you feel. I wasn’t really worried about losing income, I think the agency business is the easiest and fastest way to get large sums of money. The problem is, it’s not a style of business that you can have someone else manage for you. The more often you replace yourself, the more often you find that time still being consumed by other activities. Even when you have in house employees, an office, etc. your problems don’t go away, they just change lol.
Probably smart to diversify a bit. Multiple streams of income is never a bad thing.
Off topic a bit, but can someone please recommend an “easy to use, easy to learn” WordPress theme that would work well for both client and affiliate sites?
I’ve been using generic “done for you” PLR sites for clients so far, but I’m tired of paying a monthly fee. Also, I used the Socrates WordPress theme for years but the version I have has become outdated and I don’t want to pay what they want to upgrade to a developer’s license.
I’d really appreciate any ideas.
Joe
Just a friendly word of advice with regards to affiliate conversion rate optimization (CRO). There’s never a one-size-fits-all theme that’s going to work for multiple niches. In beauty niches, for example, you might need a really girly theme in order to convey the trust required to make a sale.
Then on the other hand, you have some niches where absolutely ugly works. Ironically, ugly works most of the time.
Thanks Matt. That makes a lot of sense, and you’re absolutely right, ugly does work most of the time. I remember several sites that I setup years ago from scratch using XsitePro and they were awful looking, but still converted well.
Kinda the 4 I use Virtue, StoreFront, Mystile, and Responsive / Responsive Pro. The responsive themes lends themselves to Silo structure with a bit of coding. Mystile is by far the most flexible theme I have ever put my hands on ( but lots of coding needed ) Storefront with some add ons ends up looking pretty sweet.. and Virtue, probably the hardest to learn, but for a more visual layout, this would be the one. But aside from what I use – Im a programmer, so understand what I may use may not be your cup of tea, I might suggest Divi – maybe a bit of a learning curve, but the ability to develop pages as you go within the editor I think might be appealing for you.
Thanks, Paul. Unfortunately, any kind of coding won’t work for me unless it’s basic html.
Joe, I’ve never used wordpress much, but like all the mythemeshop themes. I always hear a lot of good things about Divi, never used it myself but seems pretty popular even among those that don’t do coding. Maybe worth checking out!
Thanks guys. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to just buy a theme for each, though I’m waiting on the affiliate theme for now.
So the on topic discussion is about transitioning from client based SEO to affiliate based SEO… You need to start thinking in the same manor with your site development. From out of the box done for you, to learning how to do the customizing yourself. To be honest it really is not that hard. as an example go into Google and type “Mystile theme custom css” listings 1, 2, and 3 happen to be mine ( LOL and no PBN was used to get there thank you very much ) There are kick tons of this type of content for many themes. Use the out of box solutions for now, but start the process of learning how to mod themes to your needs. I would suggest Divi to start. It really requires little coding knowledge – but there is a learning curve to the back end. The time spent is returned multi fold later. faster better sites will be the result.
Paul,
I respectfully disagree. I’m not a coder. I can do some basic html and am okay with using WordPress, but anything too technical is not a good use of my time. I’m a marketer – period. Anything else isn’t a good use of my time and should be outsourced, if possible.
Would it then not make sense to push the change on your outsourced hired help? decreasing your overall theme expense and centerlizing the work knowledge down to 1 or 2 themes which will increase production?
I refrained earlier… and it ate at me. you can be what you want, but first and for most you need to be a financial steward to your business. At my peak I had over 1000 clients and saw over 3000+ websites. Guess what my theme financial outlay was in a years time… correct ZERO. Scale your current model to 300 sites, look at the financial outlay – ouch kinda hurts don’t it? You are not there yet… but there is a few huge growth potential walls in front of you. Financial and productivity, would be the largest. YOU can kill probably both of those with one stone by getting your hands a bit dirty… learning some basics, and acquiring the ability to better direct and lead your team. I see success and failure on the internet all day every day. You have to remember that focusing on SEO and article marketing and PPC and all of these those things revolve around a base… a foundation. That foundation is the website in the middle of it all. People pay big bucks to get that foundation right, and it is this crucial element that you think is not worth your time. Im not saying become a master programmer.. I am saying get a working knowledge to assist in moving your business forward
Such a very detailed post.
I really loved the Wikipedia niche discovery approach.
Lot’s of people say ‘ go for low competition keywords’
but if someone follows that advice in niche selection,
it eventually becomes obvious that not all low competition
niches are that lucrative.
This ultimately determines the bottom line ROI.
Regarding this topic, i just finished a PDF list
of 30 Amazon Affiliate Site Examples with bestselling
products and first page keywords analysis.
True story. And just to add… the low competition keyword strategy is a conundrum in itself. Just think about how many people get into Amazon Affiliate simply because they think they won’t have to compete with experienced Click Bank SEOs. But since everyone has that same idea, Amazon ends up being one of the most competitive platforms you can be in.
Hey Matt, so you recommend clickbank affiliate SEO instead of Amazon?
I’ll jump into any affiliate platform that makes decent money. It’s more about the offer/product than the platform. Amazon can beat Clickbank if the volume is there.
Local Client SEO is so easy but it sure comes with the headaches sometimes
This is coming from the heart. After a long time . . .
Bro I started Client SEO (Just over a year ago) and my income this year would be close to 6 figures and yes the freedom is worth MILLIONS! However, I know scaling is not an option. I have to start an affiliate site (Experimenting with some Amazon sites) and once I become a success in that – THAT’s REAL FREEDOM!!! So happy you made it! I’ll be following this blog for inspiration on where I want to be. If you can do it, so can I 🙂 Cheers!