Revenue Oriented Keyword Research (The Blueprint!)

Revenue Oriented Keyword Research

Hey everyone,

We have a special treat for you today.

Alejandro, a member of our community, is going to share with you his technique for organizing keywords that have garnered him a consistent $1,000+ a month in an 8-month-old site.

Many of us are attacking every keyword we can, but Alejandro has chosen to reserve his resources for the ones that will lead him to the highest commissions first.

There's a bunch to learn here in terms of site and article structure, so I'll let him take it away.

PS. Alejandro has agreed to do an “Ask Me Anything” about this technique and much more within the HPD membership. Log in if you're a member already.

However, if you're interested in joining – click here for more info.

Hey Humans!

My name is Alejandro and I’m an ex-miserable waiter turned Amazon Affiliate and Internet Marketer (with some decent success!) Today I want to talk about the way I conduct niches/keyword research, from a revenue oriented standpoint.

My main goal today is to help you put keyword research into a straight business perspective.

This is business, and every action that we take should be geared towards growing our business. Niche and Keyword research are the foundational actions we take when we’re building a brand new affiliate site, hence we NEED to get this right from a revenue perspective.

So after reading this article, you should be armed and ready to talk business when you talk keyword research. You don’t want to be the guy who wings it, do you?

What kind of results could we expect?

This keyword research approach combined with my approach to content creation/content structure has allowed me to build an amazon affiliate site from scratch and bring it to over $1,500/month in just 8 months.

Enough memes, back to business.

I did that when I was still on the “beginner” phase, as I just had a two (2) page blog previous to that and it was doing… $0 a month.

So there aren’t a lot of past experiences helping me push the needle faster. Hence, this is something ANY beginner can apply to build a profitable amazon affiliate site.

Search volume, keyword competition score of your kw tool of choice, DA of the competitors… that’s all good. But once you've found, let’s say, 20 good keywords that check every point of this keyword research checklist, how do you select which ones to target?

The not-so-sexy cost of content creation.

I know what some of you have just thought “man, all of them!”

And that’s almost right. Just almost. We all have a budget. And with that budget (regardless of its size) we have to make the site profitable. Bring it to a cashflow positive state and be ROI positive as soon as we can, simply put, getting our money back and make a profit on top of it.

I’m all about long form content that covers topics in as much depth as possible. This isn’t necessarily the best way to do it, but it’s what’s been working for me.

Now, think about how long would it take you to write 20 good (I mean, really good) 3-5k word articles. That’s correct, a lot of time. Ok, we outsource it then.

At a (very) low price point of, let’s say, 2c per word (I truly meant good, when I said “good content”, and that ain't cheap) and an average of let’s say, 3,500 words per article, we’d be paying close to $1,400 for that content.

So (breathes deep):

There has to be a way to publish long form, high quality content without selling a kidney to fund the whole thing beforehand. And this ‘way’ is to pick the easiest and highest expected revenue keywords first, and then find as many long tail and LSI keywords around that topic as we can, pick the right products and put up a piece of content that’ll blow your competitor’s faces and bring home more $ than it cost, as fast as possible.

This is often referred as “Low hanging fruit” but not many take the time to define what a low hanging digital keyword fruit looks like…

So what I’m truly talking about here, is to publish less, but publish in such a way that, when we order an article to our favorite content agency, we KNOW that that piece of content will bring as much money back to our pockets as possible. And in that way, we’ll be able to re-invest more and more into our business.

But hey, don’t just believe my words. Let me show you what this strategy can do for your success.

Let's talk numbers.

Here’s a screenshot of the keywords I rank for with 36 articles and 85,000 words of content with just one 8 month old amazon affiliate site:

Over 11,000 keywords, with around 600 of them on first page, and 316 keywords in the top 3.

And as you see, i’m going after juicy, high search volume keywords with buyer intent.

How does that translate into traffic?

If you see, there’s a very clear “sandbox” period of around 5 months. I tried my best to reduce it with branded links and social signals, but on the early days of the site my knowledge about SEO was insignificant and I played it VERY safe.

Once Google started showing some appreciation for the site, the traffic has been consistently growing up to 900-1,000 daily unique sessions by the time i’m writing this.

Let’s have a look at the revenue this site has made in April

The vast majority of products I recommend are in a 4% cap category. With such “low” commission the site has already crossed the $1,000 mark I had set as a goal for… September 2017. But back when I set that goal I didn’t know how powerful this approach was. It was just “logical” for me, so that’s why I did it. I can only say i’m very happy with the results.

Alright so I hope that was enough to convince you to at least read the rest of this article and maybe go and try it in your own site.I’m going to go right to the meat and see what’s this “revenue oriented” keyword research all about, but before that I’d like to make a point clear:

You need to understand the industry.

Forget the guy with 400 sites that knows nothing about the niches themselves but has a big, well-greased machine and tested system to grow them because he’s 3-5 years ahead of us. I’m talking about guys like you and me, starting out, with just one site or maybe not even one.

The reason you need to understand the industry your site is based on is because it’ll help you understand the true motives people search for some keywords. The uses of the product. You need to know what the good and bad brands are. You need to be able to read a competitor’s page and gauge whether the article is absolutely brilliant or a piece of **** or anything inbetween.

And if you aren’t already, you need to be willing to become very knowledgeable, in both the industry your niche belongs to and the affiliate marketing industry.

This said, let’s go to the actual keyword research and content creation methodology

1. Find as many “best xyz” keywords as you can inside that industry

So, once you have an industry in mind (it may be a previous work experience, a passion of yours, a hot topic in your life at the moment) go and make a list of products used inside that industry. Browse blogs, amazon categories, tv shows, ask friends who work inside that space… make a list of at least 20 products. This is because I like to start with monetized content first.

Now, we’ll go to KWFinder (or any other keyword tool of your choice) and search for those things one by one, but instead of just looking for the “item” we’re going to look for the “best item”.

(By the way, if you need to get KWFinder, we have a discount for you here.)

So, I’m going to go ahead with this a make a proper example showing you what I mean.

I’m going to choose cooking for this example. I’ll put the product ideas in a spreadsheet like this:

This list of 20 keywords ideas took me 2 minutes to put it together. Browse around Amazon and think about the industry. Don’t discard any idea yet. If you come across a product, write it down and put the modifier “best” at the beginning.

Now let’s go to KWfinder and start going down the rabbit hole. I’m going to check for “best ____” keywords and replace them on the list, adding search volume and the KC score.

So, after a whole 8 minutes checking in kwfinder, here are the results. As you see, some of this keywords are VERY juicy in terms of search volume. Some of them are crazy competitive as well.

But there are a few interesting. Let’s highlight them.

In green you’ll see easy keywords (kwfinder KC<30, in yellow moderately competitive keywords (KC<40), and then the ones which are too competitive are left as they are.

2. Once you have some promising keywords, analyze competitors.

So let’s say you have to choose between very low competitiveness score and ok search volume or slightly more competitive and a lot more searches.

​I’m going to do deep competitor research for best meat slicer and for best meal prep containers, as both would be interesting keywords to target, at least from what we know.

Of course if our initial list of 20 products brought back nothing interesting, then keep browsing around amazon, see what the top 10 results for those keywords were, go to those blogs, see what other products they are promoting, etc; or you could think of a different industry and do this first step all over again.

So let’s check the competition for both first. I’m using the SERP tool from KWfinder but you can use the MOZbar and a manual check in google as is taught in this niche research guide and you’ll be fine. We’re going to check the metrics of the page/domain, how well optimized are the articles for the target keyword (here’s a great on-page guide for you. Run the checklist on your competitor’s to gauge their on-page strength)

  • Best Meal Prep Containers

(Click to enlarge)

Well, that’s a lot of data. Here’s what a not too strong competitor would look like (hint: we want to see this kind of weak competitors populating the first page)

DA (domain authority) <30, PA <35, CF<40, TF<20, low number of shares (last 3 columns)

DA and PA are MOZ metrics that indicate how “strong” a domain or page is. The lower the better, with at least a few results under the marks stated above. CF and TF are Majestic metrics, and are a similar way to estimate how strong a page is.

An overly simplistic, yet decent way to do this is: If you see a competitor with all his boxes marked green, it means it isn’t very strong. A lot of red boxes means danger, thou shalt not try, or otherwise a competitive, hard-to-rank keyword.

What do we see for this particular keyword?

Overall high domain authority, with a reddit thread, an amazon listing and a pinterest board and a walmart page (best xyz aren’t ecommerce keywords, so I wouldn’t worry about amazon or walmart) Overall the pages don’t have almost any links pointing at them hence the low PA, which is a good sign.

Let’s have a look at the other sites, their content length, onpage SEO, and we’ll think about the actual quality of the content. Here’s a summary of it:

The longest article has 2200 words, with the shortest having 750words, the majority of pages have a weak or very weak on-page SEO, some of them are really outdated, and the general quality of content is rather poor with just a couple of exceptions.

  • Best Meat Slicer

(Click to enlarge)

Right off the bat we see four low DA sites ranking on top, an Amazon listing, and two big players so we’re going to have a look at the competitor’s one by one to see if there’s something we can do better than them. Here’s a summary of the competition:

A UK targeted site (not truly a competitor if you’re going after US), content between 1200 and 4500 words and quite decent for most sites, some of them have ugly articles in terms of UX (massive walls of text), ok on-page SEO and a few poorly optimized or very outdated pages.

3. Deciding what we need to create to win.

Let’s make a quick recap and comparison of what we’d need to beat the competitors in both cases, lengthwise.

  • Best meal prep containers: 2200+ words.
  • Best meat slicer: 3500+ words.

Let’s run a cross check with another keyword tool, in this case SEMrush to see how competitive do those 2 keywords are.

  • Best meal prep containers: 68
  • Best meat slicer: 72.

In this case, taking the KC scores from both tools, and having done a manual check of competitors in both cases, I’d say meat slicers are slightly more competitive than meal prep containers, but both are low-competition keywords anyway.

This is a perfect case for us. We want to decide now from a revenue standpoint. Which keyword is going to be my money maker?

4. Making revenue estimates to help us pick the right keywords.

For this, you can use this spreadsheet.

Here’s how it looks like and a brief explanation of how it works​

(Click to enlarge)

The only things you need to populate are the four colums marked in pink. Your keyword, its search volume, the average Amazon price, and the comission % according to the category the product belongs to. Use this chart for reference:

If you aren’t sure of the category something belongs, pick the lowest % it could land on.

It will populate the rest using an average position of #4 for both the keyword and the long tail searches (the next column) and It will tell you how many visitors can you expect that article to bring to your site.

Then at a very conservative 35% CTR to amazon (meaning, for every 100 visitors to your site 35 of them click on an Amazon link) and a conservative 5% conversion rate on Amazon, you could expect X sales.

Then manually insert the average price for the products you’d promote on the article. Column L will then spit a value. That's the bare minimum you could expect that article to produce per month.

Long tail searches is set by default at 2x the Local searches to bring a very conservative number back. You can expect that number to go as high as 20 or 30x if you've used plenty of long tail and LSI keywords.

So, let’s get these two keywords through our revenue spreadsheet and see what comes up!

(Click to enlarge)

We could expect a bigger revenue from the meat slicers article even if the search volume is lower, because the products are so much more expensive.

5. Cost vs revenue

So in both cases, the bare minimum we could expect from those articles isn’t very appealing.

Our cost would vary from $45 to $70 to get the article up (if, again, we go for a superior length than our competitor’s and we aim for proper good quality) so we’d be waiting a few good months to become ROI positive from that expense (once the article ranks!), which doesn’t help us growing the site as fast as we would like.

There is however something else to consider.

If you get better rankings, and higher CTR to amazon, and your content and product selection is so darn good that people REALLY want to buy the stuff you talk about, your expected revenue can go MUCH higher.

Like, 10x what you’ve seen there easily. CRO is a thing, and it’s your friend.

6. Wildcard and what’s best for your site.

There’s one factor completely out of your control and that isn’t foreseeable. And that one is that visitors you send to amazon for some $5 plastic tupperwares to carry their grilled chicken breasts for the gym, may end up buying a $479.95 exercise machine and bring a super nice commission for you with it.

However, if we know that possibility is in fact there, we could also aim for low expected revenue keywords with great search volumes because we’d be sending a LOT of people to Amazon.

Also, when you have a site already or have a set of keywords around which you want to build a site, think of what’s best, most consistent for your site.

If your whole site revolves around, let’s say, meat processing tools; then the meat slicer is your way to go (as Google will favor your site because you have a high relevance on the topic) and also because a visitor checking for meat slicers, will likely find meat grinders and meat smokers and the other sorts of stuff you may have on your site very interesting. If you have a proper internal linking structure in place, your visitors will navigate around and maybe buy some other stuff you recommend at a completely different article.

7. Maximizing expected revenue

For those willing to go the extra mile and ensure that each dollar spent on content comes back from content bootcamp with a lot of new dollar buddies, here’s what I do.

We’re going to check for other variations of the same keyword. In particular for “review” and “comparison” first, then go for long tail searches and LSI keywords.

So let’s say it’s meat slicers. We go to kwfinder and search for meat slicer reviews and meat slicer comparison.

  • Meat slicer reviews: 880 searches
  • Meat slicer comparison: 10 searches

I start with these two because I recommend you to always have a separate section (h2) for the individual product reviews, and another heading for your comparison tables, which you should place right at the very top of the article, as close to the fold as possible, to satisfy impulsive buyers.

What, don’t tell me you were considering not using tables! See this:

(Click to enlarge)

I placed a unique tracking ID for every link inside my tables to see if they were worth the hassle of making them. They are. Also native ads placed at the very bottom of the article brought a decent amount in April with the 12% flat rate for the month.

Ok ok, so with the “best”, the “reviews” and the “comparison” keywords altogether we have 1370 searches per month. Hold on, this is getting interesting. What about long tail?

How many different meat slicers are there?

  • Best electric meat slicer: 30 searches
  • Best deli slicer: 30 searches
  • Best home meat slicer: 260 searches
  • Best commercial meat slicer: 90 searches

That’s just a few I found very easily using kwfinder’s suggestions.

We’re going to add them to our article (that’s correct, instead of making multiple short articles targeting one keyword each, we’re going to group them inside the same article. It’s 2017 and Google is all about long form content now.

I’ll show you how to do this in a really good way in the next sections

Let’s have a look at other keywords we could include into our piece of content to get the highest ROI from it.

We’re going to go to this brilliant tool

LSIGraph: LSI Keyword Generator

And then to this one

http://answerthepublic.com

Input our base keyword (without “best” at the beginning) and we’re going to get TONS of suggestions:

Please notice the scroll bar. SO many suggestions.

To keep those keywords organized, I usually copy and paste them on a notepad and then I read them one by one and mark those that I think would be interesting to include.

From answerthepublic, I typically try to pick at least 5 questions (you’re welcome to pick more) that are very relevant to the topic, then I include a FAQ at the bottom of the article, inside the buyer’s guide. The meticulous buyers will appreciate having that info.

That all helps me increase the amount of keywords I rank for, higher traffic and overall, getting as many people to see my content and check the products on amazon as possible.

8. Using this keywords to create a great piece of content.

Alright so we have all these great keywords that promise to be low-competition, cover a lot of different aspects of the same topic and should bring us a ton of traffic to our site, right?

Let’s see how to use them to select the right products and create a content guideline to provide our writers with (or to make your article-writing hours much more productive).

One of the most important things to bear in mind here is this:

Content isn’t King.  We the publishers aren’t either. 

We’re both, in fact, servers to our audience. They are the Kings and Queens who spend their valuable time using our site and shopping on Amazon so every word we put in our site it’s got to be aimed at helping them.

That’s why we didn’t stop at “best meat slicer” and went to gather a lot of other searches and questions people search for around “meat slicers”.

To be able to create a piece of content that solves their informational needs.

With this said and sticking with the meat slicer example, let’s move on.

Our article could be called “Best Meat Slicer 2017 Reviews and Comparison”

We add the year as it’s proven to rank for extra keywords and maximize our traffic potential. People constantly look for the most up-to-date information. Here’s a great article you can read about this.

We add the “review” and “comparison” words on the title to help us rank for “meat slicer reviews” and “meat slicer comparison”

Then we would have the following structure.

Article Structure

  1. Introduction.
  2. Meat Slicer Comparison Chart (this is a classic comparison table, how you set it is up to you)
  3. Meat Slicer Reviews
    1. Product #1
    2. Product #2
    3. Product #3
    4. Product #4
    5. Product #5
  4. Buyer’s Guide
    1. Important feature #1 (i.e. blades)
    2. Important feature #2 (i.e. power)
    3. As many as there are needed for this product.
    4. Any other relevant informational content we consider it’s worth including, such as safety recommendations.
  5. Meat Slicer FAQ
    • Question #1
    • Question #2
    • Question #3
    • Question #4
    • Question #5
  6. Conclusion

Bolded points are main sections and should be wrapped around an H2 tag. The other bullet points, should be wrapped around H3 tags, both for making our content user friendly and well organized and for SEO purposes, as we have keywords on those headings.

Main sections are clear. How do we use our already done keyword research to find products?

Let’s go back to answer the public. This time, lets see the prepositions tab.

We want to look for this kind of keywords (extracted from answer the public)

meat slicer with sharpener

meat slicer with built in scale

meat slicer with metal gears

meat slicer for raw beef

meat slicer for restaurants

meat slicer with scale

meat slicer with built in sharpener

meat slicer to make jerky

meat slicer for frozen meat

meat slicer for kitchenaid

As it lets us know what kinds of meat slicers do people search for.

To select products now, we’re going to search for meat slicers, then for the other variations like meat slicer with sharpener, with built in scale, etc. If we’re lucky, we’ll find some good products for each “variation”.

Then I typically select the best seller/amazon’s choice for the category (if it really is a good product, it isn’t always the case) as a best bang for the buck or editor’s choice.

Then I try to find a “premium” product too.

You have to give choices for different budgets.

It’s a classic misconception to think that just because we wouldn’t spend $X on a particular product, other’s won't either.

There’s a lot of people willing to pay a premium to get the most badass product. Place it there.

Once you’ve find 5 products that offer a wide range of different prices and cover some of the variations of the product people are looking for (you won’t always be able to find a product for each little variation) this is how your your “product reviews” section should look like (I’m going to pick 5 random meat slicers for the example)

  1. Meat Slicer Reviews
    • Chef's Choice 615 as best bang for the buck
    • BESWOOD250 as best meat slicer with built-in sharpener
    • Presto PS-10 as best deli slicer for frozen meat
    • Presto PS-12 as best meat slicer for restaurants
    • KitchenWare Station ms-12 as Editor’s Choice

For us to rank for extra keywords, we’ll add keywords such as “chef’s choice 615 review” in the alt text of the corresponding images, and we’ll include the “best meat slicer for built-in sharpener” or the other similar keywords we’ve picked inside the actual review.

So even if the writers don’t do this for us, it’s super easy to edit the article once we get it from the writer and add just one line saying something like “after comparing all models, we conclude this is the best meat slicer for restaurants” or the something on that line.

Now onto the FAQs

We go to the “questions” tab in Answer The Public:

Here are some of the most interesting keywords:

How to oil a meat slicer

how to clean a meat slicer machine

how to sharpen a meat slicer

how to operate a meal slicer

how to use a meat slicer

what to clean a meat slicer with.

We can use this keywords to create a FAQ section that will provide with helpful and more importantly, demanded information.

So that the guideline we’d use and provide our writers with, would be very close to this:

Article Structure

  1. Introduction.
  2. Meat Slicer Comparison Chart (this is a classic comparison table, how you set it is up to you)
  3. Meat Slicer Reviews
    1. Chef's Choice 615 as “best bang for the buck
    2. BESWOOD250 as “best meat slicer with built-in sharpener
    3. Presto PS-10 as “best deli slicer for frozen meat
    4. Presto PS-12 as “best meat slicer for restaurants
    5. KitchenWare Station ms-12 as “Editor’s Choice
  4. Buyer’s Guide
    1. Important feature #1 (i.e. blades)
    2. Important feature #2 (i.e. power)
    3. As many as there are needed for this product.
    4. Any other relevant informational content we consider it’s worth including, such as safety recommendations.
  5. Meat Slicer FAQ
    • How to oil a meat slicer
    • how to operate a meal slicer
    • how to clean a meat slicer machine
    • how to use a meat slicer
    • how to sharpen a meat slicer
    • what to clean a meat slicer with.
  6. Conclusion

When you are THIS specific about what you want, you have a two-fold advantage. One, the writers only need to “fill the gaps” so you make their job easier, and second you get exactly the kind of structure you want for the keywords you want to target, etc.

9. Now it’s your turn.

If you’re reading this, I want to thank you for taking the time to read this 4,000 word long post.

Now it’s your turn to use this technique to your favor to create a really good website, one of those that make the internet a better place by providing EXACTLY the content people are looking for.

To your success,

Alejandro.

36 thoughts on “Revenue Oriented Keyword Research (The Blueprint!)”

  1. Wow. I’ve read ALOT of content on Affiliate marketing but this is the best piece I’ve read so far specifically on Amazon Affiliate. I love have you broken down the entire process in an easy to understand manner. Now I’ll just refer my writers to this post 🙂

    Keep up the great work!

  2. wow dude thats one epic post man great content. it would be amazing if there were videos to back all this u and watch out its done in real time and step by step to follow. maybe in the membership when im in there lol

  3. Lashay J. Lewis

    Wow, I picked up so many nuggets in this. Thank you for not being selfish with your knowledge and actually teaching us what is helping you. I just have 2 questions.

    1). Are your H2’s the keywords you found using the LSI Graph? Do you look at their search volume before you decide to make them H2’s or does search volume not matter so much in that case?

    2.) What was your back linking strategy. I do see you that you said you played it “safe” and thats what im doing now. I’ve been looking for someone to help me with guest posting but im having trouble finding a good person for that. Besides the social signals and the branded links ( doing that now) what has been your back-linking strategy?

    Congratulations on all your success!! I know what its like to work in a restaurant!

    1. Hey Lashay

      1. For my H2s I use “xyz comparison chart” , “xyz reviews”, buyer’s guide, FAQs and Conclusion. It’s on the H3 where I add the LSI keywords (which I sometimes check for search volume and try to add those keywords that have at least a few searches)

      2. I did quite a lot of blog comments (in the exact same way Bryon teaches), social profiles, press release (all nofollow, branded and naked anchors), one Hoth platinum and one branded tumblr which I boosted with Hoth Boost (had a nice discount coupon so I gave it a shot), few directories and other low-impact links using all branded anchors. Then after I felt a bit more confident, I did an scholarship campaign, got some local citations, and I’m right now starting with PBNs.

      And, thank you! Yeah, you probably understand why I focused so much on this business then!

  4. Patrick Ginise

    Alejandro, what an awesome article. I learned a ton and was able to incorporate much of it into my latest articles right away. I also plan on going back and redoing many of my older posts as well with your techniques. You did a great job of explaining each step and made it easy to follow along. I’m now also looking to add comparison tables but I am unsure which to use. Can you suggest a good table plugin that you have experienced success with? Much appreciated and keep up the good work.

    1. Hey Patrick,

      I’m using Tablepress and a plugin called Magic Liquidizer to make the tables responsive

      By default tablepress tables look a bit ugly but they are very easy to customize with CSS even if you’re coding impaired like me because there’s a lot of people using it and plenty of online documentation and solved questions on things such as how to create buttons, change colors, width of colums, etc etc.

      On a sidenote, make your tables so that products are on rows and characteristics on colums. Google reads tables better this way (nice for those featured snippets!)

  5. Hi Alejandro, AnswerThePublic… what an incredible tool – bookmarked! With this article, you just upped everyone’s game. Thank you so much for sharing 🙂

    1. Thanks Steve! I wish I could remember where I first read about answerthepublic so I could give proper credits. It really is a great tool!

  6. AnswerThePublic!!! Thanks for sharing this resource! I’ve never heard of it… Just forwarded to my writer and already working on adding FAQ sections to some of my best articles. Also – your article structure is really helpful. Going to use that as well with my writer for future articles.

  7. This article was one of the most informative, in-depth, well-written, amazing articles I’ve ever read. Thank you so, so much for sharing. I have two questions: 1) how do you handle affiliate links after the Fred update? What’s the optimal way to place affiliate links or buttons to send visitors to Amazon without getting penalized? 2) How long does it take to rank on the first page with one of your articles that targets (as main keyword) a keyword with has a KD<30 , given a length of at least 2,000 words, fully on-page optimization and some internal or inbound link building?

    1. Thanks Stephanie! Let me see those questions..

      1/ The same way as before haha. No, honestly, I try not to go overboard but I reckon my articles have between 25 and 35 amazon links on them. For 2500-3500 words of content, it works at around one each 100 words, but it’s hard to bring the number down. Each table has 10 links (5 images, 5 buttons) and each product review has 3 or 4 (image, in-text, and two buttons) and sometimes 1-2 links at the bottom on the “conclusions”. I do notice other articles with fewer affiliate links ranking better, but I can’t confirm that the correlation equals causation there.

      2/ There’s no hard answer to that. Factors such as site age and topical relevance matter a lot.

      I rank straight to page 1-2 for new keywords that are <30, with 100 words more than any competitor on page one (it isn't always a 2,000 word count sadly) , solid on-page and as many internal links I can place pointing to it… for keywords that belong to a category where I already have 24 different articles and some solid page 1 rankings, because of topical relevance.

      I do the same for other keywords where I have only a few articles about the (broad) topic and I rank page 3-4 and it moves slooooowly… So to put it in a simpler way, the more content you have around a very specific topic, the easier you'll rank for those keywords. That's where niche sites have a big advantage.

      1. Thank you very much for your answer! You are providing super valuable information for those who would love to start an affiliate niche site. Super grateful!

  8. Awesome post thank you. About outsourcing the content…do you pass your chosen keywords to the writer? Who does the product reviews, you or the writer?

    1. I pick the products, tell them which specifications to include, to add a pros/cons list and they write the reviews.

      The keywords I pass to the writers are the main keyword (so that they understand what the main topic is) and the FAQ keywords. The xyz review and xyz comparison I add later on the two H2 headings for the respective sections.

      1. Thank you for your prompt answer Alejandro. Would you care to recommend a good writing service with affordable rates?

        1. I’ve been using Human Proof’s article packs and a Fiverr writer who’s a hobbyist on my industry for product review articles. I tried close to 20 different upwork writers with little luck till date but I know people that get good writers there as well.

  9. Hi Alejandro, this is a brilliant guide for writing a buying guide as well as doing a proper research for a niche site. Thanks for sharing the two links ‘answer the public’ and LSI generator. Great for getting content ideas. Thanks a million!!!
    All the best from Anke

    1. Thank you Anke! Those two webs are a goldmine, both for long tail keywords and LSI keywords, but also for content ideas to write supporting content around our main topics.

  10. Hello Alejandro, thank you for this valuable piece.

    I want to apply this to my website. However, my site only target a baby product category e.g. car seats. Once I write this kind of guide, then I would have to cover everything. I may have the opportunity for another guide since my site only target car seats. What do you think I can do in this case?

    1. Once your main niche (let’s follow your example and say car seats) is properly covered with a best X car seats post, a handful of individual reviews of car seats, another bunch of informational articles about car seats, car safety when driving with children, car seat A vs car seat B, etc, you can definitely look into expanding to another niche inside your main industry (for instance, baby strollers) and build the same kind of articles to cover it properly (which is very important from a topical relevance perspective as well) and in that way you can keep growing the site ad aeternum.

  11. What a fantastic article full of very useful tips and strategies. Thanks so much for sharing this, Alejandro – it’s given me some motivation to step outside the tiny box I’ve been ‘living’ in! 🙂

  12. Daniel Walters

    Well, thank you Alejandro and kudos to Bryon Brewer for a fantastic, no holds barred, “guest post”. I am an aspiring affiliate marketer who is trying to get my first website up. I have done much research and there is always those gaps of knowledge that still seem to exist, even though I have done exhaustive research and learning through free resources online teaching niche site creation. Well I think those gaps have just been filled by Alejandro. What a great , informative post for a novice like myself. This post is a true gift; a wealth of knowledge. My work has just begun, of course, but I know at least, I have focused direction to accomplish building an affiliate website. This post might be the best post I have ever read for teaching the process of building an affiliate website. Thanx, to both of you for “secrets revealed here”.

    1. Thank you Daniel for your kind words, I’m happy to know that this article has been of help for you to fill those gaps in your knowledge and have a clearer idea on the next steps.

      Nothing will give you more answers than actually trying stuff, so keep that focus and go for it!

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Copy link
Powered by Social Snap