Writing Good Content
posted in Getting Started |You’ve decided what your first site will be about, registered a domain name, and signed up for a Web hosting package. You’re either using WordPress to manage and upload your content or know enough HTML to do it manually. You’re ready to rock and roll and start adding good content to your site.
Which brings us to our first fork in the road. When I say “good”, I don’t necessarily mean that your prose is eloquent, witty, and/or illuminating, perfect and sparkling. None of those adjectives have anything to do with whether your content ranks well in search engines and attracts pre-motivated surfers that will make you money.
You have to always keep in mind that the point of an affiliate site is to provide answers to questions. I cannot stress that enough. Either it’s a surfer typing in a phrase in a search engine, simply looking for more information, or it’s a surfer that already knows what they want to buy, but just aren’t sure whether the product is good or where the best place to buy it is at. Those two situations occur millions of time each day and will provide 99.9% of the money you will ever make as an affiliate.
With that in mind, “good” content for an affiliate site can be defined a bit further:
- Each page of content should address a narrowly-defined topic.
- Each page should have a clear title that includes the keyword(s) that surfers are most likely to search on.
- The targeted keyword is not only in the title, but also sprinkled throughout the text. Don’t overdo it, though. A good rule of thumb is to include the targeted keyword once in every paragraph of text, but I’ll cover this topic in more detail later.
- Shorter pages are best. Four pages of 250 words each are almost always better than one page of 1000 words.
- Avoid long paragraphs whenever possible. Try to stick to paragraphs of 2-3 lines whenever possible as it’s hard to read large blocks of text online.
- Include links to other content on your site whenever possible.
If you stick to those very basic principles, pick a good niche and write a page of content a day, you’ll make money as an affiliate. I guaran-damn-tee it.
Let’s look at an example of both good and bad content, with the above in mind.
Let’s pretend you’ve decided to create a site about some of the Cisco certification classes offered, as it’s something you’ve done yourself and research using the Google Adwords Estimator tool and the Overture Keyword Selector tool has convinced you that there’s lots of searches done in that area and that they pay well for clicks on Adsense ads.
You decide to create a page for “CCNP boot camp”. In this example, you following all of the above suggestions and create a good page of content:
In this example, you ignore all of the above, and end up with a page of content that’s not so good:
See the difference? They both contain roughly the same information and are about the same length, but they couldn’t be more different. The first has a clear title, judiciously repeats the targeted keyword throughout, is short and concise, and has short paragraphs. The second has a generic title, barely mentions “CCNP boot camp” specifically, is one block of text, and is in general a train wreck.
If you look at the Google Adsense ads on each page that are automatically served up, Google has a hard time even serving up the appropriate Adsense ads in the bad example, as it defaults to generic ones. It can’t tell that the page is supposed to be about the potentially lucrative “CCNP boot camp” keywords, so it can’t even serve up those potentially profitable ads to be clicked on by surfers.
You’ll notice, too, that I actually worked a bit backwards here, as far as creating the page. I did research to find a juicy keyword phrase (one that pays well for Adsense click and one that is searched on a good bit) and then I created the content. I didn’t start by saying “Gee, I should write some good content today.” I didn’t even start with the slightly more focused approach of saying “Gee, I should write some good content for my CCNA/CCNP site today.” I started by using the tools mentioned above, found a term that should be profitable, and wrote a concise, focused page for that term.
By now you’re probably thinking: “Well, that makes sense, but man, this is sounding like actual work. You told us to write about what we enjoy, and I’m cool with that, but I work enough as it is. Can’t I just write about something I enjoy and not do all that work?”
And the answer, of course, is sure. On all fronts. Yes, it is work, especially if you want to do it well. And yes, you can simply write about what you enjoy, with no other consideration, and slap up some Adsense ads and make a bit of money here and there.
Making money with affiliate sites is very easy to do, if you’re willing to learn how to do it and (more importantly) willing to invest the time to do it well. But it’s always going to be work, no matter how you slice it. The more you work at it, the more you can make. It really is that simple, in the end.