Matt Diggity Talks To Us About Affiliate SEO

We’re joined by none other than Matt Diggity this week to talk all things affiliate SEO.

Affiliate marketing is a topic we haven’t really gone in to on the show until now, but it’s an exciting part of the SEO world and something you can realistically use to generate 6 figures in revenue a month, as Matt covers.

Matt is a well known name in the SEO world, whether it’s running his blog Diggity Marketing, his YouTube channel, or over at his training group The Affiliate Lab. He’s also the man behind the Chiang Mai SEO Conference.

Our chat touched on the key things you need to know about using SEO and affiliate marketing together. Enjoy.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Michael 0:00
Hi guys, Michael here before we get into the show, if you’re a Twitter user head to at service scaling, I’m tweeting a bunch of stuff. I’ve learned scaling our digital marketing agency, and I think you’ll find it pretty interesting. All right, let’s get into the show.

Unknown Speaker 0:15
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 0:37
Hello, and welcome to the SEO show. I am Michael Causton. But I am not joined by Arthur fabric this week. He wasn’t able to make it but I’ve got someone you know, much better. I’m just gonna say much better. 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 commerce Store or lead generation, but affiliate marketing is another big part of the SEO world that we haven’t touched on before. And affiliate marketing, something I’ve used a lot in my own life. You know, when when I started my agency, we didn’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 you know, I had a, I had a new baby at home, I had obviously bills. And it was because I ran affiliate websites, it’s because I use my knowledge and SEO to generate income online that I was able to not take an income from the business, my affiliate site. So 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 you know, the top line overview of who you are and what you do. And we’ll get going.

Unknown Speaker 3:06
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, mostly producing a lot of content around SEO, and then lead spraying 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. Then I have an agency the search initiative, link building company authority builders in 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, and not sure.

Michael 3:51
Awesome. Well, I’m very glad to hear that you bring 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 um, yeah, look, you’ve obviously got a lot of different things you do there. And, you know, I’ve been aware of you for many years now sort of following the posts you do on your blog, and, you know, your sort of newsletter roundups going on in the SEO world, that sort of thing. But um, 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 know, 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 gonna be awesome to pick your brain on that. But I really want to start with the basics and ask you what is affiliate SEO? You know, when we say that?

Unknown Speaker 4:42
Sure. So affiliate SEO would be affiliate marketing through the vehicle of SEO. So 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 tick Talk in saying, hey, buy this certain thing that I’m using. And when you refer someone, and they 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 round up post with a bunch of wireless routers, your number one recommendation is gonna get clicked on a lot, you know, make some sales.

Michael 5:43
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, when you can sort of explain, you know, 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?

Unknown Speaker 6:07
Sure. So this puts me in a little bit of a bind. So 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 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’s, 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 7:26
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, 100 grand is six figures a month in income from an affiliate? So

Unknown Speaker 7:37
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 200k per month, yeah, can happen in the right niches and the right amount of focus, and investment.

Michael 7:52
Awesome. So even 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?

Unknown Speaker 8:17
Sure. So this is a good question asked me because I do all 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 it’s 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 have to keep some of it back. So you can make some profit yourself. So you don’t really get to attack a website or in a niche is hard as you would as if you have your own website and your budgets, basically, however much you want to spend, you can go in the red if you want to. So I just find client SEO hard to scale. I mean, like my agency does pretty good. But it’s been alive since 2017. And he’s not making as much as some of my better affiliate sites just by itself. And so a lot, a lot more work, right. Then we have lead generation, which I do indeed, like so, lead spring has a model where we partner with businesses on the ground, and when we partner do so we’re actually taking a stake in their business and we’re taking some equity. So we partner with law firms, we partnered with real estate agencies and say like, Okay, we’re gonna three extra business. We’re just asking for 25% of it. And so I really liked this model a lot because you don’t have to worry about stuff like EA t like these are real professional What’s real licenced real estate agents real lawyers don’t have to worry about VAT. And like, yeah, it’s just real businesses that aren’t scrutinised by Google’s affiliate algorithms. And in the right niche, you can make a shit tonne of money. Now, why do I like affiliate? So in the grand scheme of things, you know, like I have my agency does its own thing. But lead spring is doing the affiliate answering 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 the flip. So these are businesses that you can fit 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 affiliates these days?

Michael 10:56
And is that generally your play? Like because even still making 40 grand a month is pretty decent cash flow? They’re like, do you sort of ever just want to keep these assets? Or you touched on Google’s algorithm sort of having a vendetta against that affiliate folks? In many ways? Well, that’s not your word. That’s mine. But um, is that why you like to flip slides to sort of walk in that, that revenue gain? Or do you sort of keep some as a cash flow game as well?

Unknown Speaker 11:21
Well, so most of the money is made on the flip, if you look at the economics of it, right? So this 40 came from on site, like it’s not, it’s like you’re putting some of that towards growing, right. But when you realise that profit, and you sell it, like, that’s 40k times 55. So you get all that that in there. And what’s 55 months, it’s like, like four and a half years. So you 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 the niche that like Google seems to be cracking down on like, 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 on your business of 100k per month to like down to 30, or something like that, that is a psychological hit. So it’s good to keep some cash cows.

Michael 12:29
Yeah. Andy is a market for buying sites pretty strong at the moment, like you mentioned, sort of a $2 million deal, then, if there are 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 at that level?

Unknown Speaker 12:49
Yeah, so there’s a Yeah, it’s, there’s a weird zone, right around that, that 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 like 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, they were really hot buyers, I would say, like, last year when the market is 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, like you create a good business, any, you know, all purchases.

Michael 13:43
So maybe, for people listening, if they’ve got a bit of money there and their business or profits that they want to put into something potentially buying an affiliate site is the way to go rather than starting one, you sort of fast forward all that hard grunt work at the start. Yeah, cuz I wanted to ask you that as the 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, and 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?

Unknown Speaker 14:18
Like, why SEO instead of paid traffic, for example, or social traffic? Correct? Yeah. Yeah. So let’s see, oh, 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 gonna purchase. So conversion is great. Of course, you can get to the top of Google with an ad for best wireless router, but it’s to some degree people can recognise what’s an ad and what’s organic, and they trust the organic stuff better. And then you can promote anything you want with with organic SEO, right? Like with paid ads, you have a lot of restrictions on what you can run ads to like, even in the health space like you can’t You can’t make an ad with someone with too good of body in an ad for for health products. So there’s one limitations there and you don’t don’t even think about touching like stuff like crypto or, or like casino and stuff like that. But with SEO, you can promote anything you want. The cons are, like you said, like, it takes time to get a result with SEO, as you and your audience now. And the Google algorithm man like, yeah, it’s it’s a real beast. And 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 figuring out what Google really wants, like, 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 really understand things, it gets easier over time.

Michael 15:54
In the, I guess, in white of Google’s constant tinkering, you know, broad core updates were seemingly 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 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

Unknown Speaker 16:24
100% yet to diversify, like, it’s just gonna keep you saying, 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 in affiliate is having multiple websites. So diversity, diversity is key.

Michael 16:50
Okay. And we always talk on this show about SEO being you know, 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 right, 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 you know, 12 months down the track and find out that you’ve been going down the wrong path, you know, the offers no good doesn’t convert the payouts aren’t high enough to 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?

Unknown Speaker 17:26
Yeah, that’s a big one. So like, you’ll read a lot of, I don’t know, beginner affiliate marketing guys, 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 make to do yoga, like a yoga mats like dollars, right? So that I think that’s 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 Flippa and people are selling websites on Flippa. In order to sell a website, you have to disclose your financials, and you have to disclose what the website is. So you’re gonna see, okay, in the air conditioning niche, with the site with that has 500 pieces of content and 300 backlinks, it’s making $15,000 a month that 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 the other option is to just choose a domain name and a total like category that’s big enough to where you can just make mistakes and pivot if you want. Like, instead of going after like the the bicep niche like, Oh, I’m gonna sell dumbbells and stuff like that. You want to go for fitness, somewhere, you can get into supplements, you can get into weightlifting equipment, you can get into all this different stuff. So, but the the ultimately, like, the best way to do it is to reverse engineer what’s already working in marketplaces.

Michael 18:56
Okay, so you’ve touched on sites like flipper 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 gonna put some nice makeup or lipstick on what they’re selling. How do you sort of look through that and pick the winners? Right? So

Unknown Speaker 19:17
I mean, there’s there’s two, 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 is like 100%, Black Hat, because you wouldn’t you probably want to implement the strategies. But when you’re looking at a site to purchase like, of course, this is something to spend your money on. You want to make sure like, this is a good deal. What I would definitely look at is like if clean SEO has been done, like it’s pretty, pretty white hat there’s no like crazy 301 redirects. It’s not on an expired domain in a different niche. If it was built on an expired domain like you want it to be, have made that that transition like Five years ago or more, look for links that are hard to get right. So those are links you want to build later and see what else, obviously a niche you want to be in. Like, 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, like, you’ll look at some more stuff, but those are the main things.

Michael 20:30
Yeah. And then I guess, once you’ve got that, it’s, there’s a big time investment to write like, particularly if you decide you pick a 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, you know, optimising 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?

Unknown Speaker 21:12
Sir? Yeah, you keyword research is the first step and 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 Nilly, willy nilly, you gotta have a map to the plan. So before like, mostly for keyword research, I was just reverse engineering other websites in the niche, like toss them in a truss and just see what are the really these other sites ranking for. And especially if you if you’re like, an authority, 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 to doing it. But there’s been a movement in the last couple of years for topical authority, where if you want to rank for something like best protein powder, it’s not just you’re not even if you bought right, the best piece of content on the planet on the best protein powder, and you got it. Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote it and Mr. Olympia, like they felt like the whole like judge team is editorial did 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, this protein making fat? What is protein? Does soy 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 asked the answer the public related searches, Google Autocomplete, hrs, just tonnes of different stuff, and making a big master list, sorting it out and clustering it, and then then we get started.

Michael 22:53
Okay. So it sounds like a lot of work there on the then we get started part, right? Because I know personally, scaling content, writing content is just a pain. 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 topics into actual articles on a site?

Unknown Speaker 23:17
Yeah, yeah, we, we structure our team in pods. So like, at the top, there’ll be the editor, which assigns is what different content is going to be worked on and create 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 surfer is going to handle like, pretty much all the enthalpy optimization at the same time, why you write it. And then when that’s when that’s done, it 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 H ones and description, all that kind of stuff. So there’s this process, and we find like specialisation is pretty important, right? You don’t want, like the writer have to edit his own stuff, you even the designers, we have a couple of designers, one that handles the upload and one handles like images. So just specialisation and then these people can turn it out, like most of our websites, especially the ones that we really care about our publishing 90 per month. And so this kind of specialisation and I don’t know conveyor belt type technique is what enables us to turn that out.

Michael 24:30
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 what’s your take on that?

Unknown Speaker 24:55
Yeah, as a noob start writing yourself just get a feel for like what goes into it. Even though you might find a terrible or it’s hard to turn out 1000 word article, just do it yourself. So you feel 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 optimise 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 two 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, and you need to have experiences wine me via an expert. Email me some samples, I’m looking to pay five cents per word. And with with a pool that big, you’re gonna find expert writers, and you’re gonna find the price that you’re looking for.

Michael 25:56
Yeah. So on the topic of price that 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 writer? Or is it something that can be? I guess, I’m 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?

Unknown Speaker 26:24
Sure. So see, so I wouldn’t pay less than four cents for word, I just want to Agen the person to make money and do a good job. Right. So I would put a floor for cent per word. And you can go up to 10 cents for word, but really diminishing returns, like if you’re paying 10 cents for a word like that that person should be like, an expert in something that you legit can’t find another writer. So I think that that range is pretty good. But normally, most the time paying five to six, and good call good quality content. Yeah. But the content Yeah, so we have an experiment going on right now. And we’ve used this topco map process to to build out a topical map for 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 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 just arrived, the latest update, doesn’t, Google doesn’t see none to 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 gonna go in and look at any any keyword or any page that’s ranked on page one or two, and then re optimise 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 28:03
Okay. And that’s, that’s pretty interesting. So those informational posts right there 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?

Unknown Speaker 28:22
Yeah, yeah, totally. Any site that has enough traffic? I guess, media vine specials, 30 or 50k? I don’t remember. But yeah, well, we’ll toss ads on there. And we find it doesn’t interfere with the earnings that the affiliate earnings doesn’t distract people from clicking on those links. That said, for our affiliate posts, we manually place them like, if you let if you let media vine just like go in and like place its ads, wherever it wants, like, you could have a big ad like right next to the call to action button. That’s, that’s glaring, it’s animating all that stuff. And people notice that call to action buttons, you really have to manually place them.

Michael 28:57
Right, I can. Okay. Well, you touched on a couple of post type said, while we’re on the topic of unsightly sort of informational, you know, bringing people in for all sorts of general queries, there might not be current commercial intent, man. But from an affiliate point of view, what are the moneymaker pages on a site that people sort of need to be aware of 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 payout?

Unknown Speaker 29:24
Sure, they’re 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. There’s 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. The buyer intends pretty damn good too. But they just have less volume. And then last would be like versus pose. So this versus that those Just don’t have much search volume, but the typically like a lot easier. And they have a little bit of buyer intent. So those are the three want to focus on. And like, people asked like, which one should I start with first? I mean, ideally, your ideal such 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 gets us 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 posts, they typically don’t if someone’s trying to learn like how to instal a router, and you have a link to Belkin router review. Like, they want to know how to instal it, that means they already have it, right. They don’t they don’t need to read another one. So the connection, there’s not that much, but you really just need the informational content, just to make Google’s algorithms happy.

Michael 30:51
Yeah. Okay. On the topic of, I guess, topical relevance, you know, you’ve got all the content on the site is one thing. What’s, what are you seeing with that exact match domains? And that playing into things?

Unknown Speaker 31:05
EMTs. I just don’t touch them too much recently, because any, like business I’m working on the website are working on I want, I want a brand. If you have an EMD are stuck at that level, best wireless routers.com can only talk about routers, right? And I just find that any websites like 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. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But they still work good.

Michael 31:33
Yeah. Yeah, I’ve 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 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? Are you sort of largely just going on on the front end, if they come to the site and convert into a customer on the affiliate link? Great, but the rest of that traffic that does nothing is just sort of see you later?

Unknown Speaker 32:04
No, no, we definitely build build lists. Typically, like the kind of funnel we created, like lead magnets, PDF, ebooks, and stuff like that. And then yeah, trend, your email address, get 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 posts, and then eventually, at the end, like a special coupon to your best converting product. So that works pretty good itself. In general, like once, once you get a website to make like a decent chunk of money, like you’re really just optimising the monetization, right? If you can add a 55x Multiple, if you can increase, like the earnings $1,000 per month, then you just made $55,000, right? So any little incremental tweak you can make is 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 33:16
Yeah, yep. Okay, that’s very clever. Have you have you done that? Or are you just sort of looked at that?

Unknown Speaker 33:23
Yeah, I do all the time. Getting pixel rentals from one to $2,000 per month.

Michael 33:30
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 but um, let’s move on a little in this chat about affiliate because we’ve we’ve looked at you know what it is we’ve looked at on site but a massive part of it is the link building side of things. I have a feeling you know, I already know what answer you’re going to give here but when it comes to Link Building for affiliate sites and you know the white hats and grey hats paying for length not paying for length where do you sit on that? What do you think 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?

Unknown Speaker 34:07
So I look at it like this like sure there’s there’s niches you can rank in without doing any proactive link building and three, 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 just severely hamstring yourself like why why would you want to rank slower and why why would you want to limit the the niches you can go after with this old 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 and the link building or you can get there in six months with link building. Well, what’s the opportunity cost you just, it’s 12 months times times 20k per month, right? So that’s how much it cost you. So is it better to just buy those links upfront, 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, like, building links for free is pretty damn challenging these days, like view do outreach, most of the websites even want links on or asking for money. Now, of course, there’s there’s different different ways to build things for free that are truly free like Carl, but you’re trading time for that grind. So I think it’s just like an ROI question. I don’t think there’s much of a risk question. Like Google just ignores a lot of links that it thinks are too spammy. I think it’s more of like an ROI. And if you find any kind of calculation or any experience in this game, the ROI is there. Yeah, so that’s my stance. Yep. Yeah.

Michael 35:53
I 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?

Unknown Speaker 36:04
No, no, I think they cool down on them. So authority builders has a manual penalty recovery service, and this question quiet as hell. Yeah. Yeah,

Michael 36:15
I can’t remember the last time I saw one either. Personally.

Unknown Speaker 36:17
I mean, let’s not go word. But yeah, bigger

Michael 36:21
PR spree from Google coming soon.

Unknown Speaker 36:23
We’ll see about that. I think it’s just like, they’re they’re getting confident in their algorithms, ability to just ignore links that are too spammy.

Michael 36:33
Well, on the topic of links that are too spammy, what, what should people be looking at when buying links? Or where should they turn to, you know, it’s pretty bloody hard to build things. 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 yet 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. 24/7. So what’s your what’s a good approach for people to do that?

Unknown Speaker 37:11
Sure. Well, I mean, if you got a new website, you have to think about like, what, what is the deal with a new website? What isn’t 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 and go look at Dr. You can look like TF trust, flow, citation flow, all these kinds 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 gets the traffic, that’s it becomes a liability to them, they just, they just put their users they set their users to that if it has incorrect information, they’re gonna get in trouble. Right. So it’s the strangest thing they have is they like a website enough to give a traffic there, of course, okay, but it’s apparently it’s not going to hit that ignore bucket, right. So I would stick to websites that, that do that, that have a little bit of traffic, at least 1000 per 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, a new piece of content is written. And then that piece of content links out to multiple sources. So for example, 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. So 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, like, I always recommend for new people, like do HARO, like help report it out. It’s a grind, but it’s 100%. Free, and it’s getting a bunch of links that you can’t pay for. So, alternative to

Michael 39:14
Yeah, awesome. Okay. So on the topic of harrow for our Australian listeners, there’s a site called sauce bottle, 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 didn’t want to pay for links. Do you use like, do you recommend they go with third party services? Or should they just go pound the pavement and find sites that are taking guests person approach them and deal with it all themselves? And when it comes to paying, you know, sometimes links might be $1,000? Sometimes they might be $80. How do you sort of tell the difference between what a good one isn’t a bad one? I know like you mentioned my traffic may have 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?

Unknown Speaker 40:08
Yeah, so okay, you have two routes, like you can build your own team and do their outreach yourself. So you’ll typically need like a few different people, the 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 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 outreach, or that’s going to actually email all these people using a software typically paid software like, I don’t know Hunter IO, they 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 emails. So then you send out 1000 emails, you’re gonna get 50 replies, so how do you negotiate like how much you’re gonna 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 gonna be a markup of course, because all this all this mark on 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 41:54
Yeah. So it’s much it’s much the same, like trying to build links, like being a outbound sales person, you know, like a sales development person where you’re just constantly pounding the pavement, approaching a lot of people getting a lot of nose and having to follow up. So it really is a time think 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. Yeah. 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 and much greater depth. So I’ll get you to sort of let people know where they can go to find that out in effect. 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 and want to run the 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?

Unknown Speaker 43:05
That probably say, I mean, underrated, it’s 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 can go right on it before moving on to the next one, or scattering around, like just talking about general stuff. Just focusing on this. Like, I’ll put it like this. So diggity marketing, like, just finished the topical map on the affiliate. Right. And we’re now we’re working on hosting, right? So, so affiliates 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 style silo just showed up a little bit, right. It’s just like this is playing. And this is what Google wants to see. When you fully rent sussing out.

Michael 44:01
Yeah. Awesome. On the topic of that, do you have any resources blog posts that people can check out on topical authority?

Unknown Speaker 44:09
Yeah, check out this interview I did with Corey Talbert on my YouTube channel. Awesome.

Michael 44:14
Okay. Now moving on. That was the most underrated what would you say is the biggest myth interfere?

Unknown Speaker 44:21
Oh, God. Oh, man, we’re a star. EA T. It is pretty stupid. Like the fact that people think that like Google’s gonna look at your author and then go to the Berklee archives and see if they really went to school there and check their credentials and all that stuff like now they don’t have the capacity or the need to do that at what all the only thing they can do with EA T is figure out if there’s literally no signals at anyone else’s 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 the stuff you’re doing. It is mostly digital Run by links. Yeah.

Michael 45:01
Okay, cool. And the last one, the SEO world, there’s a tonne of tools software, we’re all geeks, we tend to like that stuff, finding up for new tools, testing new tools. But if you had to pick three, what would you pick to get the job done?

Unknown Speaker 45:16
Atrus surfer and probably Screaming Frog.

Michael 45:23
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? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 45:40
for the free route, check on my YouTube channel. I’m posting every single week and trying to do a good job there. So there’s a lot of 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, I’ll see you on the other side.

Michael 46:00
Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us.

Unknown Speaker 46:02
It’s been a pleasure.

Unknown Speaker 46:04
Thanks for listening to the SEO show. If you like what you heard, don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We’ll see you in the next episode.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai