Asking whether backlinks are still relevant for SEO is like asking whether marketing is still necessary for a business to drive leads and sales. While a good product speaks for itself, one of the main functions of your marketing efforts is to increase sales and scale your business.
The same goes for your content and backlinks. When you have unique, quality content that is also actionable and provides value to your audience, you are bound to earn backlinks organically.
Reading: How to create a backlink in my new affiliate website
But a strong backlink strategy can give your affiliate marketing website a much-needed boost in terms of traffic and authority. A website’s backlink profile remains an important ranking factor for Google. This makes backlinks an integral part of SEO.
In this article, I will review and review link building strategies for affiliate websites. The goal of improving your backlink profile is to rank higher for your targeted keywords, which will then generate more traffic and affiliate sales.
Backlink Quality vs. Quantity
Having a good backlink profile is crucial for content-driven affiliate marketers to increase sales. But not all backlinks are created equal. Everyone wants contextually relevant links from websites with a high domain rating (DR) that publish quality content. Your ability to attract such links organically or through collaborations will depend on your own DR, the quality of your content, and the reputation you’ve built in that niche.
That’s why I recommend looking at your ability to rank for relevant keywords in your niche as early as the stage when you’re choosing your affiliate products. Sure enough, you can gradually improve your ranking ability, but you have to start somewhere.
Choosing your link building focus between link quality and link quantity isn’t worth it. You need traffic to build an audience, but you need conversions to earn affiliate commissions. So the middle ground is the best option. Prioritize quality links, but don’t miss an opportunity to get links from sites with slightly lower DR. Content relevance and quality are also important. Don’t dwell on the reviews too much.
Occasionally you might come across sites that seem to have good DR but their traffic is almost non-existent. These websites are mainly used for link building purposes and are similar to the link farms that were popular in the past. It is better to stay away from cooperation with such sites as you have nothing to gain from their links.
Link Building Strategies for Affiliates
Your ranking for organic results mainly depends on the number and quality of the backlinks and the relevance and quality of your content. If you have chosen a saturated niche where all keywords are high difficulty, you need a lot of backlinks and referring domains pointing to your articles. That is, if you want to rank on the first page.
Below is the SERP overview for the “best SEO tools” using Ahrefs, a popular keyword among affiliate marketers. It has a difficulty rating of 78, which makes it difficult to rank for, especially if your DR isn’t in the same range as the sites on the first page.
So what is the best strategy to get backlinks to your affiliate marketing -build website? Creating detailed and useful content that is unique and relevant to your target keyword is a good place to start.
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But as an affiliate blogger, you can’t rely solely on organic links. To successfully and effectively build relevant links, I would narrow it down to the following three strategies:
- Guest Posts
- Content Collaborations
- Roundup Insights
Let’s take a closer look at each strategy.
Guest Posts
It’s still worth submitting guest posts. It has two main functions: building your personal brand and authority is one, and improving your domain score with quality backlinks is another.
And the more respected and higher DR site you publish your guest post on, the better more authority you gain from it. Another benefit is that lining up your next guest posts will be easier if you can already reference previous work.
When you’re just starting out, you need to start small and tackle sites that are less picky. After you’ve published some content, you can also apply to be a contributor in content publishing communities like Business2Community, where it’s possible to create high-quality DoFollow links to your partner website. But only place relevant links that add value to your guest post.
Just like every article on your website, every guest post is a big investment of time.So choose your topics carefully and use your own expertise and experience. Run your own experiments and try to avoid recycled ideas. High DR sites can afford to be picky because you need them more than your content. They have no shortage of guest posting spots. The only way to gain more bargaining power is to make sure your content is spectacular.
How to create a guest post
The process of publishing your guest post usually follows following the same pattern:
- Find sites that accept guest posts and read their policies
- Create a topic(s) relevant to your chosen sites
- Write a guest post and submit it to these sites
- Start writing your guest post while you wait for their approval
- Remember, on one link to relevant articles on your site
- Add images and other visual elements for your article
- Submit your draft if accepted, or submit your pitch to other sites
- Make changes when prompted and send the final valid version to the editor
This is just to give you an idea of the steps involved in guest posting. Your job is to match the right article to the right website. In some cases, you may have written the guest post before posting it. Some sites even ask you to send a draft right away.
Be prepared that it can easily take a couple of months from start to finish, especially when it comes to reputable sites. Not all websites will respond to your pitch, and many of them will reject it. That’s why you should be flexible and pitch multiple websites right from the start.
Content collaborations
Link building partnerships with other bloggers are an effective way to supplement your backlink profile. These backlinks are incremental to the links you get organically or through guest posting. Or in some cases, content collaborations can involve partnering with other bloggers for guest posts. But what really sets them apart is the mutual relationship.
Content and link collaborations are based on the original concept of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. They rely on mutual trust. If you endorse someone’s content by linking to their article, expect the same in return.
To get started with content collaborators, compile a list of potential partners in your niche and contact them. You can also join blogger communities on social media or create a new one.
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The benefit of joining a community is that you don’t have to contact the same partners one after another if you want to collaborate with them again. Simply publish your cooperation offer in the community and select the partners whose content seems to offer the most added value. Relevance is key to all content partnerships. It’s okay to be picky. There is no shortage of potential collaborators.
How to choose collaborators
When choosing the bloggers to work with, consider at least the following:
- Relevance: To ensure the co-promotion is mutually beneficial, the blogger should create content in the same niche as you and have a similar target audience.
- Domain Rating: To make the exchange equal, consider the domain rating. The DR score is a measure of a website’s authority based on its backlink profile. The higher the DR, the more authoritative the site is. Therefore, a backlink from a high DR site is more valuable to you as a trust signal. Enter your potential partner’s domain on a website authority checker before proceeding with the collaboration.
- Traffic size: For an equal exchange it also makes sense to work with bloggers who are more or less in the same phase of traffic growth. Use a web analytics service like SimilarWeb or any SEO tool to check website traffic statistics.
Roundup Insights
Aside from guest posting and content collaborations, submitting comments to Roundups remains another useful strategy for earning backlinks. This strategy involves sharing your insights on a specific topic and publishing them in a Roundup post that also links back to your website.
Compared to the previous strategy of working with other bloggers, the advantage of Roundup Insights is that you can earn valuable links without having to link back to anyone’s website.
That’s the downside. You can never be sure if your comments and links will be published or not. It helps if your site has decent DR and traffic as people prefer to link to authoritative sites. A certain credibility as a blogger and expertise in the topics you comment on also make it easier to publish your findings.
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is still the top platform for roundup insights, at least based on the number and range of requests. But on such platforms, those pitches that are not accepted by the author are usually wasted as each comment is tailored to a specific request and has no other use.
I’d recommend trying it out to see if it’s worth your time. Answer at least 10 relevant inquiries and calculate your success rate. Choose topics in which you have experience, follow the guidelines, and write down your findings, but don’t spend too much time on them. If none of them get published, the answer is clear and you can move back to other link building strategies. Also consider that sometimes you will get a positive response weeks or even months later.
Conclusion
As a content driven affiliate marketer, you need backlinks to build your domain rating and rank higher for relevant keywords in your niche. Earning affiliate commissions is highly dependent on your ranking ability. You want your product reviews to appear on the first page of search results.
It is important not to focus on just one link building strategy, but to combine them all so that they complement each other. Guest posting requires a lot more time and effort than simply collaborating on content or summarizing insights, but they are typically associated with more authoritative sites.
Not all backlinks are created equal. Never use reciprocal links excessively and make sure what you link to actually adds value to your article and is contextually relevant.
If you are interested in reading more about affiliate marketing, you may want to check out our Ultimate Guide or Tips on Making Money From Affiliate Marketing. And join our Supermetrics Affiliate Program to earn 20% recurring commissions from every sale.
About Johannes Rastas
As Affiliate Marketing Manager at Supermetrics, Johannes is focused on expansion of the Supermetrics Partner Program and working with existing partners. He also works with SEO and content on a daily basis. Feel free to contact him on LinkedIn.
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