Matt Diggity Talks To Us About Affiliate SEO

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for The SEO Show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show. I am Michael Costin, but I am not joined by Arthur Fabik this week. He wasn't able to make it, but I've got someone, you know, much better. I'm just going to say it, much better. I've got a special guest this week. His name is Matt Diggity. He probably needs no introduction in the SEO world. Whether it's his blogs, his YouTube channels, his newsletter, the different businesses he runs, the Chiang Mai SEO conference he hosts over in Thailand. He is a man of many hats and quite well known in the SEO space. So it was great to have him on the show and I was able to pick his brain about affiliate marketing. Now affiliate marketing is not really a topic we've spoken about much on this show, but it is a massive part of the SEO world. You know, you can run SEO on your own website as a business owner, you can run it, you know, as I guess an e-com store or a lead generation, but affiliate marketing is another big part of the SEO world that we haven't touched on before. Affiliate marketing is something I've used a lot in my own life. You know, when I started my agency, we don't really talk about it much on this show, but I run an agency and when I started it, you know, I quit my full-time job at another agency to go start it. We had no income. So for the first six months that I was running my business, I didn't take a salary from the business, but I had a new baby at home, I had obviously bills, and it was because I ran affiliate websites, it's because I used my knowledge in SEO to generate income online that I was able to not take an income from the business. My affiliate sites are what kept me going basically. And, you know, affiliate marketing is something that I've continued to do to this day and had lots of success over the years with and it's something that I really enjoy doing and I think you're going to really enjoy listening about. It's a really great way to, you know, you can make $1,000 a month on the side, you can make $10,000 a month on the side, you can even make $100,000 a month as Matt spoke about in our chat. It really is up to you and your efforts. We, with this episode, just wanted to make it a really top line introduction to what affiliate marketing is and how SEO ties into it. And then at the end of the chat, Matt gives a bunch of different places you can go to find out more about him and affiliate marketing. But that's enough rambling for me. Let's jump over to our chat today with Matt Diggity. Hi Matt, welcome to the show. For our listeners who may not have heard of you, if you could please give us the top line overview of who you are and what you do, we'll get going.

MATT: Yeah, okay. So yeah, my name is Matt Diggity. I am fully immersed in this world of SEO with multiple businesses. Diggity Marketing would be my personal brand. It's also what holds my website, my YouTube channel, stuff like that. It's mostly producing a lot of content around SEO. And then Leadspring would be my primary moneymaker. This is my agency that's fully set up for building affiliate websites and flipping them eventually. And we also do JV partnerships as well. And I have an agency, the Search Initiative, a link building company, Authority Builders, and a conference, Chiang Mai SEO Conference, that's been in sleep mode since 2019. Thanks to you-know-who. But we're looking to bring that back maybe next year, maybe the following year, I'm not sure.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Well, I'm very glad to hear that you're bringing that back. I was going to ask you about that because we were planning on coming over with our team to the next one and then of course COVID happened. So it's been a couple of years in the works. But yeah, look, you've obviously got a lot of different things you do there. I've been aware of you for many years now, following the posts you do on your blog and your newsletter, roundups going on in the SEO world, that sort of thing. But you touched on a topic there that we really want to make the show about today, which is affiliate, affiliate SEO, affiliate marketing. It is a huge part in the SEO world. You can do client SEO, you can do affiliate SEO, and we haven't really spoken about affiliate SEO on the show. So it's going to be awesome to pick your brain on that. I really want to start with the basics and ask you, what is affiliate SEO? You know, when we say that.

MATT: Sure. So affiliate SEO would be affiliate marketing through the vehicle of SEO. Affiliate marketing is the make money online strategy, where you're essentially recommending products to people, whether that be through reviews or like going on TikTok and saying, hey, buy this certain thing that I'm using. And when you refer someone and they purchase and they go through what's called a special affiliate link, that link is tracked and you get credit for making that referral. And then you're typically making like some kind of commission. 5% on Amazon, 20% on other networks and stuff like that. And then SEO in the affiliate SEO moniker would be the methodology used to get traffic to these affiliate offers. So most of the time you're going to be ranking for keywords like best wireless router and then you have a roundup post with a bunch of wireless routers. Your number one recommendation is going to get clicked on a lot and you'll make some sales.

MICHAEL: Yeah, awesome. Okay. Well, just to give our listeners a feel for what's possible with that, because I know you've run a lot of affiliate sites over the years. Do you have any examples of affiliate in the wild or sites you've run in the past, maybe a dead one where you can sort of explain what it was, how long it took to get going, traffic, revenue, that sort of thing, so people get a feel for what's possible with affiliate marketing?

MATT: Sure. So this puts me in a little bit of a bind. So like, I can't really say any of the sites that I'm working on right now, because my primary moneymaker is not teaching SEO, it's doing SEO. And then sites that I've any site that I'm not working on means I've sold it. So there's a buyer operating it, and they're not too happy about me broadcasting like what their business is literally their business. So I don't want to give a concrete example, or I'm not, I don't have the ability to give a concrete example from mine. But everyone's seen like the wire cutter, there's a popular one called gear hungry, etc. But to answer your question, I recently made a post on my YouTube channel about a website that's doing 280,000 visitors per month, and it's making 40k per month profit. And that took, I would say about a year and a half to maybe two years to get to that point. We started at the beginning of 2020. So that said, it wasn't a site we started from scratch. It was a site that we purchased that had a little bit of traction, which is, yeah, the normal way I like to go about doing things these days. But yeah, 280,000 visits per month and about 40k in earnings. But that's, that's the tip of the iceberg. We're trying to get this one to 100k.

MICHAEL: And is that a common thing in your in your world? Do you think like, People listening, is that a realistic goal for people, you know, a hundred grand, six figures a month in income from an affiliate site?

MATT: I would say this is like in the top 2%. A lot of websites will hover around the five figure level, but yeah, to get to a hundred K per month, yeah, it could happen in the right niches and the right amount of focus and investment.

MICHAEL: Awesome. So even five figures, you know, even four figures, it could be life-changing for people to have that on the side. So, you know, affiliate marketing SEO is one thing. Why would you spend time on that as opposed to maybe doing, let's say, lead gen SEO or, you know, if you want to create a site and generate leads for people and sell them or even client SEO where you bring on clients. Now, what makes affiliate the place that people should be spending their time, do you think?

MATT: Sure. So this is a good question to ask me because I do all of those things, affiliate, client, and lead generation. So client is great, but it's really hard to scale. So there's a few reasons for that, in my opinion. Number one is there's a churn, right? So clients, by nature, if you do a good job for them, they don't need you anymore, right? So There's a built in churn aspect to it. And because you're doing SEO for someone else, you're spending a lot of time just talking to that person explaining what you're doing. So you're not like 100% efficient with your time. Also, like you're on a limited budget. So like, you're only getting a finite amount of money to run the SEO for these people. So you You have to keep some of it back so you can make some profit yourself. So you don't really get to attack a website and a niche as hard as you would as if your own website and your budget's basically however much you want to spend. You can go in the red if you want to. So I define client SEO hard to scale. I mean, Like my agency does pretty good, but it's been alive since 2017. And it's not making as much as some of my better affiliate sites just by itself. And it's a lot more work, right? Then we have lead generation, which I do indeed like. So LeadSpring has a model where we partner with businesses on the ground. And when we partner to do so, we're actually taking a stake in their business. So we're taking some equity. So we partnered with law firms, we partnered with real estate agencies and say like, okay, we're gonna 3x your business, we're just asking for 25% of it. And so I really like this model a lot, because you don't have to worry about stuff like EAT, like these are real professionals, real licensed real estate agents, real lawyers. So you don't have to worry about EAT. And like, yeah, it's just real businesses that aren't scrutinized by Google's affiliate algorithms. And in the right niche, you can make shit ton of money. Now, why do I like affiliate? So in the grand scheme of things, you know, like I have my agency, it does its own thing. But Leadspring is doing affiliate and it's doing client, I would say at a ratio of about 70 or 70 to 30 affiliate and then lead generation. Why do I still like affiliate? Because of the flip. So these are businesses that you can flip for 55x monthly profit. So while you're making 40k per month, that site is worth, I don't know, 2 million, like almost two and a half million, right? If we eventually sell it. So this is the big paydays are super exciting. And that's where you make most of your money with the affiliate these days.

MICHAEL: And is that generally your play? Because even still making 40 grand a month is pretty decent cash flow there. Do you sort of ever just want to keep these assets or you touched on Google's algorithm sort of having a vendetta against affiliate sites in many ways? Well, that's not your words, that's mine. But is that why you like to flip sites to sort of lock in that revenue gain or do you sort of keep some as a cash flow game as well?

MATT: Well, so most of the money is made on the flip if you look at the economics of it, right? So, this 40k per month site, you're putting some of that towards growing, right? But when you realize that profit and you sell it, that's 40k times 55. So, you get all of that then and there. And what's 55 months? It's like four and a half years. So, that doesn't become a bad decision. until four and a half years, but you just got $2 million in order to make another one or two or three or four. So that's where the scaling comes into play. And I guess like there's definitely some sites that you want to hold on to like when they become a cash cow, where it just takes like zero effort to operate at that point. And it's not in a niche that like Google seems to be cracking down on like sure, just keep it as a cash cow and fund the other ones because That's another psychological issue when you flip a site is you just went from a total monthly revenue on your business of 100k per month to like down to 30 or something like that. That's a psychological hit. So it's good to keep some cash cows around.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And is the market for buying sites pretty strong at the moment? Like you mentioned sort of a $2 million deal there. Is there a lot of that sort of money floating around out there? Like let's say someone here listening wants to start a site or even buy a site and maybe build it up and flip it. Is it quite easy to sell these sites at that level?

MATT: Yeah, so there's a weird zone right around that period of like a million. to 10 million. So anything less than that, you might find like private buyers, like some doctor who retired or an SEO agency or something that can afford like a million dollar site. But once you get above that, you're in this weird zone where you're looking at private equity. And They were really hot buyers, I would say, like last year when the market was flooded with a bunch of easy money. But now it seems a little bit different. But if you position your website as something better than just an affiliate site, like a real brand, and you diversify some traffic channels and you diversify monetization, you create a good business and anyone will purchase it.

MICHAEL: So maybe for people listening, if they've got a bit of money there in their business or profits that they want to put into something, potentially buying an affiliate site is a way to go rather than starting one. You sort of fast forward all that hard grunt work at the start. Yeah, because I wanted to ask you as a next question, you know, it all sounds awesome in theory, you know, you get this free traffic from Google, you have an affiliate site, you can make 40, 100 grand a month, and then you can flip it for millions. You know, it's a dream there. But, you know, what are the major pros of using SEO for that? Maybe some of the major cons, you know, in terms of time investment, that sort of thing that people would need to be aware of.

MATT: Like why SEO instead of paid traffic, for example, or social traffic?

MICHAEL: Correct. Yeah.

MATT: Yeah. So SEO just converts the best. When people are searching for something on Google, Best Wireless Router, they're actively looking for a wireless router that they're going to purchase. So the conversion is great. Of course, you can get to the top of Google with an ad for Best Wireless Router, but to some degree, people can recognize what's an ad and what's organic, and they trust the organic stuff better. And then you can promote anything you want with organic SEO. With paid ads, you have a lot of restrictions on what you can run ads to. Even in the health space, you can't You can't make an ad with someone with too good of a body in an ad for a health product. So there's a lot of limitations there. And you don't even think about touching stuff like crypto or casino and stuff like that. But with SEO, you can promote anything you want. The cons are, like you said, it takes time to get a result with SEO, as you and your audience know. And the Google algorithm, man. Yeah, it's a real beast. It is more challenging for affiliates, but I don't think it's impossible. If you read between the lines, you do a little bit of your own testing and figure out what Google really wants, it becomes easier. One thing with affiliate SEO is because the algorithm is so intense, it kind of weeds out your competition at the same time. So if you can stay ahead of the algorithm and really understand things, it gets easier over time.

MICHAEL: In the, I guess, in light of Google's constant tinkering, you know, broad core updates where seemingly you can't quite put your finger on what's being changed and what they're going after in a lot of cases, do you sort of go with a play of diversification maybe where you have multiple sites in a niche or do you try and put all your efforts into one site and then, you know, you got to do link building on multiple sites or do it on one site? What's your general approach there to try and, I guess, keep this safe and, I guess, like a real business, you know, protecting your industry?

MATT: 100% yet to diversify, like, it's just gonna keep you sane. You know, like, we're how we're wired as human beings. Like, if you see even if your website's gaining 10% traffic, like every month, like you think that's pretty cool. But if it drops 10% traffic, one month, you freak out and the world's over, right? The only way to cope with that, especially an affiliate is having multiple websites. So yeah, diversity, diversity is key.

MICHAEL: Okay. Um, We always talk on this show about SEO being a long-term play and the work you do now, you're sort of planting the seeds and watering them for the future. With affiliate, let's say you're starting from scratch. You've got this great idea for a site and then you don't want to get down 12 months down the track and find out that you've been Going down the wrong path, you know, the offer is no good, doesn't convert, the payouts aren't high enough, too competitive, whatever the case may be. Do you have any tips or pointers for, let's say, someone totally getting into this from scratch to avoid wasting time or, you know, helping with niche selection, that sort of thing?

MATT: Yeah, that's a big one. So like, you'll read a lot of, I don't know, beginner affiliate marketing guides, like choose what you're passionate about, right? So I like yoga. And so I built a website on yoga. And guess what? It doesn't cost shit to do yoga. Like a yoga mat's like $5, right? So I think that's BS. The surefire way to find a niche is just to find one that's already working. So go to a marketplace like Flippa, right? And Flipa, people are selling websites on Flipa. In order to sell a website, you have to disclose their financials and you have to disclose what the website is. So you're going to see, okay, in the air conditioning niche, with the site where that has 500 pieces of content, and 300 backlinks, it's making $15,000 a month, that math works out to me, that's something I can replicate. So then there's no guessing, you could just go straight in. The other option is to just choose a domain name and a total category that's big enough to where you can just make mistakes and pivot if you want. Instead of going after the bicep niche, like, I'm going to sell dumbbells and stuff like that, you want to go for fitness. So where you can get into supplements, you can get into weightlifting equipment, you can get into all this different stuff. But ultimately, best way to do it is to reverse engineer what's already working in the marketplaces.

MICHAEL: Okay. So you've touched on sites like Flippr and buying sites, reverse engineering. What are you generally looking for on there? Like how do you tell a winner from a dub? Because people might, you know, people selling stuff are probably going to put some nice makeup or lipstick on what they're selling. How do you sort of look through that and pick the winners?

MATT: Right. So I mean, there's there's two reasons to look at marketplaces. One is for ideas and others to actually purchase websites. Right. So you don't really care too much. I mean, if you're just looking for ideas, like you don't want to emulate a site that it's like 100% blackout because you wouldn't you probably wouldn't implement those strategies. But when you're looking at a site to purchase, like, of course, this is something you're gonna spend your money on. You want to make sure like, this is a good deal. What I would definitely look at is if clean SEO has been done, it's pretty white hat. There's no crazy 301 redirects. It's not on an expired domain in a different niche. If it was built on an expired domain, you want it to have made that transition five years ago or more. Look for links that are hard to get. Those are links you won't have to build later. See what else? Obviously a niche you want to be in, that's super important. And that's about it. I mean, there's really not that much to it. Of course, when you actually dig in and your money is on the line, you'll look at some more stuff. But those are the main things.

MICHAEL: Yeah, and then I guess once you've got that, there's a big time investment too, right? Like particularly if you decide you pick your niche and you're starting from scratch, there's going to be a lot of upfront work without much result with only a little bit of traction to sort of keep you motivated. Generally, you know, I found from the early days of launching sites. But let's say our listeners did go out and want to start a site from scratch and they've done their research, they've picked a niche. Obviously, once the site's created, it becomes a matter of optimizing the site, creating content for the site, that sort of thing. What's the general process for that in your world when it comes to creating content and researching topics and the like?

MATT: Sure. Yeah. Keyword research is the first step in the content plan. As you know, SEO is content and links. And so the content part, you don't just start writing anything you want willy-nilly. You got to have a map to the plan. So before, mostly for keyword research, I was just reverse engineering other websites in the niche, like toss them into Ahrefs and just see what are these other sites rank you for. And especially if you have an authority of 40, and you look at another site that has an authority of 20, if they can rank for the stuff, then you can too. That's a decent way of doing it. But there's been a movement last couple of years for topical authority, where If you want to rank for something like best protein powder, even if you write the best piece of content on the planet on the best protein powder and you got Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote it and Mr. Olympia, the whole judge team has editorialed it and it's still not going to do very good. So you have to become an authority on a topic. So right now, we're just like, if we want to get into protein, we're just going to research every single possible article related to protein. Does protein make you fat? What is protein? Does soy have protein? Every single possible question. And to do that, we're looking at pretty much everywhere. Google NLP API, we're looking at people also ask, the answer to the public, related searches, Google autocomplete, Ahrefs, just tons of different stuff, and making a big master list, sorting it out and clustering it, and then we get started.

MICHAEL: So it sounds like a lot of work there on the, then we get started part, right? Cause I know personally scaling content, writing content is just a pain. Um, what's the general process with that? I imagine you would have a team of writers that you're using or maybe third party platforms, or do you have different approaches for different types of sites to actually turn these clusters of, of topics into actual articles on a site?

MATT: Yeah, yeah, we we structure our team in pods. So like, at the top, there'll be the editor, which assigns what different content is going to be worked on, and creates the outlines, right. So determines like the outline of what the content is going to be written looks like. So they send that off to the writers, writers, right and surfer. So surfer is going to handle like, pretty much all the NLP optimization at the same time while you write it. And then what that's when that's done, he goes back to the editor for approval. And then it goes to the designer to upload. And then it goes to SEO manager just to tweak the final changes, like create the title, the H1s, and description, and all that kind of stuff. So this is just process. And we find specialization is pretty important, right? You don't want the writer to have to edit his own stuff. Even the designers, we have a couple of designers. One handles the upload, and one handles images. So just specialization. And then these people can turn it out. Most of our websites, especially the ones that we really care about, are publishing 90 per month. And so this kind of specialization and conveyor belt type technique is what enables us to churn that out.

MICHAEL: Okay. And where do you generally source those types of people? I guess for yourself running big sites, you can invest in teams because the sort of income stream is there to support it. What about someone that just starts? Is it generally something that they're just going to have to sort of put their head down and write it themselves initially? Or do you recommend they go use third party platforms that do that? Or what's your take on that as a noob?

MATT: Yeah, as a noob. start writing yourself, just get a feel for like what goes into it. Even though it's, you know, you might find it terrible or it's hard to churn out a thousand word article, just do it yourself. So you feel like you understand what it's like. And it's obviously the cheapest way to do it. And then you can see that it actually works, right? You can see that if I do things my way and I write the content, I optimize it the way I've been told to, I actually get results. So at that point, once you understand this and you're ready to scale, You can start looking for external writers. I recommend going to the Cult of Copy Facebook group. And it's a big Facebook group, like 20,000 plus people, I'm not sure. And just put up a post and say, hey, I'm looking for a writer in the wine niche. You need to have experience with wine. You need to be an expert. Email me some samples. I'm looking to pay $0.05 per word. And with a pool that big, you're going to find expert writers, and you're going to find the price that you're looking for.

MICHAEL: So on the topic of price, you mentioned five cents a word. Is that about what people are paying? Do you think? And is it something that you should be investing in, you know, in terms of paying enough to get a decent rider or is it something that can be, I guess, um, done on the cheap? Like I see tools, even AI tools where they claim to be able to write content. Like are you using that in your process at all to try and either reduce costs or increase volume, that sort of thing?

MATT: Sure. So, Let's see. So I wouldn't pay less than four cents per word. I just wouldn't. How can the person make money, um, and do a good job? Right. So I would, I'd put a floor, a four cents per word, and you can go up to 10 cents per word, but it's really diminishing returns. Like if you're paying 10 cents per word, like that, that person should be like a, an expert in something that you legit can't find another writer on. Um, so I think that that range is pretty good, but normally most of the time paying five to six and good quality content. Yeah. About AI content. Yeah. So we have an experiment going right now. And we've used this topical map process to build out a topical map for a particular niche and figure out every single piece of content that we should write on. And then we use Jarvis to crank out this content. Bear in mind, we're only focusing on informational type content for now. We'll handwrite the commercial content later, like the roundup posts and the review posts. But so because we can just churn out content as fast as hell with Jarvis, yeah, we just launched the site with 200 articles and we're publishing three per day. And yeah, it's just, we just survived the latest update. Google doesn't see none the wiser. So it's working pretty good. Our plan right now is, so we launched and we pretty much have topical authority already. And now we're going to go in and look at any keyword or any page that's ranked on page one or two. And then re-optimize them with Surfer just to kind of toss some edits in there and just give them that final push to lock them into the top three of Google.

MICHAEL: Okay. And that's pretty interesting. So those informational posts, right, they're just sort of designed to get traffic to the site and then you want to funnel them through to your product reviews or, you know, the moneymaker pages, I would imagine with internal links or call outs, that sort of thing. Do you run any ads ever, like to supplement your affiliate income?

MATT: Yeah, yeah, totally. Any site that has enough traffic. I guess Mediavine special is $30k or $50k. I don't remember. But yeah, we'll toss ads on there. And we find it doesn't interfere with the affiliate earnings. It doesn't distract people from clicking on those links. That said, for our affiliate posts, we manually place them. If you let Mediavine just go in and place its ads wherever it wants, you could have a big ad right next to the call to action button that's It's layering, it's animating all that stuff, and people won't notice that call to action button. So you really have to manually place them.

MICHAEL: Right, okay, okay. Well, you touched on a couple of post types there, while we're on the topic of on-site. They're sort of informational, you know, bringing people in for all sorts of general queries. There might not be commercial intent there. But from an affiliate point of view, what are the moneymaker pages on a site that people sort of need to be aware of or the type of content that they would be wanting to spend their time on? Because it's the one that's going to lead to pushing people to these affiliate sites and getting the payouts.

MATT: Sure. The ones that make the most money, but they're also the most competitive is like the best of, so best wireless router, best protein powder. It was like the buyer intent on those is huge, right? And there's a lot of search volume for these types of keywords. The second, I guess, would be single product reviews. So like Belkin 5678 router review, something like that. Those are pretty good. And the buyer intent is pretty damn good too. But they just have less volume. And then last would be like versus posts. So this versus that, those just don't have much search volume, but they're typically like a lot easier. And they have a little bit of buyer intent. So those are the three you want to focus on. And you know, like People ask, like, which one should I start with first? I mean, ideally, your ideal situation is you want to publish as fast as possible. So you'll get to all these eventually. But I mean, I said, if you want to, like, make money the quickest, get those versus ones out first. And a lot of supporting informational content, not necessarily because people that read the informational content, click over to the review post, they typically don't. If someone's trying to learn like how to install a router, and you have a link to Belkin router review, like If they want to know how to install it, that means they already have it, right? They don't need to read another one. So the connection there is not that much, but you really just need the informational content just to make Google's algorithms happy.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Okay. On the topic of, I guess, topic of relevance, you know, you've got all the content on the site is one thing. What are you seeing with exact match domains and that playing into things?

MATT: EMTs. I just don't touch them too much recently because any business I'm working on, any website I'm working on, I want a brand. If you have an EMT, you're stuck at that level. Bestwirelessrouters.com can only talk about routers, right? And I just find that any websites really starts to get some traction when you start to build up that authority. And I don't want to be hit by a ceiling eventually.

MICHAEL: But they still work good. Yeah, I've sort of seen them working quite well. So sort of that, I guess, catch 22. If you're trying to build a real business, a real brand there, then what you said makes total sense. On that topic of building a real business and brand, do you do much in the way of list building with your affiliate sites and trying to then monetize the list? Or are you sort of largely just going on the front end? If they come to the site and convert into a customer and the affiliate link, great. But the rest of that traffic that does nothing is just sort of, see you later.

MATT: No, no, we definitely build lists. Typically, the kind of funnel we create is like lead magnets, PDF ebooks, and stuff like that. And then, yeah, trade your email address, get locked in, get these free PDFs, and then automated follow-up series, which normally is like, it makes a little bit of money itself. So like your follow-up series would just introduce them to content, get them back to the site with your best Roundup pros, and then eventually at the end, like a special coupon to your best converting product. So that works pretty good itself. In general, once you get a website to make a decent chunk of money, you're really just optimizing the monetization. At a 55x multiple, if you can increase the earnings $1,000 per month, then you just made $55,000. So any little incremental tweak you can make It's pretty huge. That's what, that's like, if, if you can really start to get creative and stuff, that's why I looked at things like renting out my Facebook pixel. Like, so you can, you can share your audience with someone and let's say my fitness website, I can share my audience with someone that sells protein powder. Like that's a huge win win. And I wasn't doing anything with that data.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yep. Okay. That's very clever. Have you, have you done that or you've just sort of looked at that?

MATT: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I do all the time, typically getting pixel rentals from $1,000 to $2,000 a month.

MICHAEL: Yeah, great. Okay, cool. Well, that's a great idea I hadn't come across. So definitely something I'm going to look into a bit more. Let's move on a little in this chat about affiliate because we've looked at what it is, we've looked at onsite, but a massive part of it is the link building side of things. I have a feeling, I already know what answer you're going to give here, but when it comes to link building for affiliate sites and the white hats, the gray hats, paying for links, not paying for links, where do you sit on that? What do you think is necessary for people to be successful with any sort of affiliate site in a niche where they're going to make decent money when it comes to link building?

MATT: So I look at it like this, like, sure, there's niches you can rank in without doing any proactive link building. And they're very easy. And there's ways to do it with like massive websites, topical authority and just generating gigantic websites. where you can get some traction without link building. But you're just severely hamstringing yourself. Like, why? Why would you want to rank slower? And why? Why would you want to limit the niches you can go after? With a solid link building plan, you can, you can compete in the best niches. And you can, even you can, you can compete in the easier niches, but you can get there faster, right? So like a website that makes 20k per month, right? Or a niche that can make 20k per month, you can get there and a year and a half in the link building, or you can get there in six months with link building. Well, what's the opportunity cost? It's 12 months times 20k per month, right? So that's how much it costs you. So is it better to just buy those links up front and enjoy the profit faster? That's the way I look at it. Now, you can build links for free, and you can pay for links. Building links for free is pretty damn challenging these days. If you do outreach, most of the websites you even want links on are asking for money. Of course, there's different ways to build links for free that are truly free, like HARO, but you're trading time for that. It's a grind. So I think it's just like an ROI question. I don't think there's much of a risk question. Google just ignores a lot of links that it thinks are too spammy. I think it's more like an ROI. And if you've done any kind of calculation or have any experience in this game, the ROI is there. Yeah, so that's my stance.

MICHAEL: Yep. Yep. Totally agree. Totally agree with that. Out of interest on the topic of, you know, risk and Google, have you seen many manual penalties lately across sites, your sites, other people's sites?

MATT: Nah, nah. I think they cooled down on them. So Authority Builders has a manual penalty recovery service and it's been quiet as hell.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. I can't remember the last time I saw one either personally. I mean, let's knock on wood. Yeah, big PR spree from Google coming soon.

MATT: We'll see about that. But I think it's just like they're getting confident in their algorithms' ability to just ignore links that are too spammy.

MICHAEL: Well, on the topic of links that are too spammy. What should people be looking at when buying links or where should they turn to? You know, it's pretty bloody hard to build links. You know, that's why people go to agencies and use them to do it all on their behalf. And agencies have big teams of people, you know, prospecting and dealing with website owners and following up to get posts live and all that sort of stuff. So let's say you're a fledgling affiliate website owner. You've got your side hustle going, you sort of work full time, but then on the side, you're trying to grow this site. you can't really be building links 24 seven. So what's your, what's a good approach for people to do that?

MATT: Sure. Well, I mean, if you've got a new website, you have to think of like, what, what, what is the deal with a new website? Why doesn't it live in the sandbox is because Google doesn't trust it. Right? So how can I build links that have the maximum amount of trust? Now I, my theory is that there's a lot of metrics that you can look at. You can look at DR, you can look like TF, trust flow, citation flow, all these kind of things. But if you really want to build a link that Google doesn't ignore, look at the traffic of the website. Only 9% of the internet has traffic, right? It's Google's stingiest algorithm. Like if, if Google ranks a website and gives it traffic, that's become the liability to them. They've just, they just put their users, they sent their users to that as incorrect information. they're going to get in trouble, right? So it's the stingiest thing they have. If they like a website enough to give it traffic, of course, they're okay with outbound links, it's not going to hit that ignore bucket, right? So I would stick to websites that do that, that have a little bit of traffic, at least 1000 visitors per month. And in addition to that, like build links that are like the most common types of links that happen on the internet. So The most common type of link that's actually created is in a new piece of content. New piece of content is written, and then that piece of content links out to multiple sources. So an example of that would be a guest post. Like guest posting is a new content. This is opposed to like going and outreaching and saying like, hey, can I get a link in this old piece of content that you have? I have this resource that your readers might find better. I mean, this happens in the real world, but not nearly as much as the new content approach. In these beginning stages, you want to just do the most trustworthy, common things that you can to get out of the sandbox as fast as possible. And then, I always recommend for new people, do HARO. Help report it out. It's a grind, but it's 100% free. It's going to get you a bunch of links that you can't pay for. So HARO is a good alternative too.

MICHAEL: Yeah, awesome. Okay. So on the topic of Haro, for our Australian listeners, there's a site called Sourcebottle, which is the same sort of thing. It's where PR, you know, or journalists put a release out asking for an expert to write about something. And then you sort of write about it, send it to them and hope that you can get a link in it. A lot of time, but not much cost in terms of dollars. But let's say someone did want to pay for links. Do you recommend they go with third-party services or should they just go pound the pavement and find sites that are taking guest posts and approach them and deal with it all themselves? And when it comes to paying, sometimes links might be $1,000, sometimes they might be $80. How do you tell the difference between what a good one is and a bad one? I know like you mentioned, like traffic, there's a great one. You know, if it has a lot of traffic, you probably focus on that metric. Is there any others that you recommend?

MATT: Yeah. So, okay. You have two routes, like you can build your own team and do the outreach yourself. So you'll typically need like a few different people, a link prospector. These are the people that are scouring the internet and trying to figure out what are the different websites that you want to link on that are relevant to you that have your DR ratio, like DR greater than 20 or whatever, whatever you decide is good for you. Decent amount of traffic and like a lack of spammy stuff. Like you, you would want to see that like this website isn't linking out to a bunch of casinos for example, or yeah, stuff like that. So the link prospector is going to figure out all the different opportunities for you. Then you have your outreacher that's going to actually email all these people using a software, typically paid software like, I don't know, Hunter.io. You also have a cost that's like figuring out what these email addresses are. So Hunter.io will figure out the email addresses and then send out the emails. So then you send out a thousand emails, you're going to get 50 replies. So how do you negotiate like how much you're going to pay? And when you're doing all this yourself, you can end up paying for a backlink like probably average like $70 to up to $150 when you're doing it yourself. The alternative is just go to like, like Authority Builders, for example, a backlink provider service. And sure, you just go log in and then just buy it straight away. And you can look at all these metrics. And there's there's going to be a markup, of course, because all this, all this mark, marketing and this headhunting was done beforehand for you. And so you're looking at a link from like 150 to 180. So there's two different approaches for you there.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So it's much, it's much the same, like trying to build links, like being a outbound salesperson, you know, like a sales development person where you're just constantly pounding the pavement, approaching a lot of people, getting a lot of no's and having to follow up. So it really is a time sink. The easiest way is just to go pay someone else to do that for you and pay the markup for it and take it off your plate so that you can focus on other things like the content research or working on your site, improving the speed of it, improving the conversion rate, all that sort of stuff that's going to move the needle a lot more.

MATT: Yeah, 100%.

MICHAEL: Okay, well, look, I think that's been a really good introduction to affiliate SEO for our listeners. Obviously, it's a massive topic, you can go into it in much greater depth. So I'll get you to sort of let people know where they can go to find that out in a sec. But before we wrap things up, I always like to ask our guests three questions about SEO, just the same ones every time just to get their take on it. want to run them past you and see what you had to say on it. The first one is, what would you say is the most underrated tactic or thing in SEO that, you know, people aren't doing enough of?

MATT: I'd probably say, I mean, underrated is tough, but I would probably say topical authority. Like we're just crushing it right now. And I'm not saying that to brag or anything, but like, just simply focusing in on one topic and figuring out everything that you can write on it before moving on to the next one, or scattering around, just talking about general stuff. Just focusing on this. I'll put it like this. Dignity Marketing just finished a topical map on affiliate, right? And now we're working on hosting, right? Affiliate's done 100%, and hosting is done 15%, right? After this last core algorithm update, boom, this affiliate silo just went shot through the moon and this hosting silo just shot up a little bit, right? It's just like, this is plain, this is what Google wants to see is when you fully rinse this thing out.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Awesome. On the topic of that, do you have any resources, blog posts that people can check out on Topical Authority?

MATT: Yeah. Check out this interview I did with Koray Tugberk on my YouTube channel.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Okay. Now moving on, that was the most underrated. What would you say is the biggest myth in SEO?

MATT: Oh God. Oh man, where do I start? Uh, EAT. EAT is pretty stupid. Um, like the fact that people think that like Google is going to look at your author and then go to the Berkeley archives and see if they really went to school there and check their credentials and all that stuff. Like no, they don't have the capacity or the need to do that. EAT, what, The only thing they can do with the AT is figure out if there's literally no signals that anyone owns this website If you don't have a contact page, no one's on the about page Like if you if you make zero effort they can check for that But they can't check on the quality of this stuff you're doing easy is mostly determined by links.

MICHAEL: Yeah Okay, cool. And the last one the SEO world. There's a ton of tools software. We're all geeks We tend to like that stuff signing up for new tools testing new tools but if you had to pick three What would you pick to get the job done?

MATT: HRS, Surfer and probably Screaming Frog.

MICHAEL: Cool. Okay. Well, it's been great chatting with you. I'm sure our audience will want to go find out a bit more about affiliate marketing. There's probably been some ideas planted with people. So for those that do, where can they go to follow you or find out a bit more about you?

MATT: Yeah, for the free route, check out my YouTube channel. I'm posting every single week and trying to do a good job there. So there's a lot on affiliate marketing and SEO and a whole bunch of good stuff. And if you want to really dive in, check out the Affiliate Lab. That's my course. So yeah, hope to see you on the other side.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us.

MATT: It's been a pleasure.

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