Serpheus
Super Contributor
- Joined
- Jun 11, 2018
- Messages
- 69
So, this is my first journey thread. I'm into the affiliate space for the past 5 years and spend most of my time with SEO and Facebook. Till now I monetized my SEO blogs with Ads, Amazon, and some Clickbank. I decided to start this in response to the SEO follow along from @Akbal here.
This is my first "CPA&SEO" try. I usually sell Amazon products with a price point of above $120 so for calculation and planning purposes I will use similar conversation stats as I see on Amazon. An average SEO page converts at about 25-30% CTR to Amazon and 2-4% sales conversation there (4% is the lowest end of the spectrum I usually see, but I can't assume now that I will see a 20-30% purchase conversion on a CPA offer, but let's see)
You might be asking by now, why this is important? Forecasting. You need to know what to expect to budget how much you put into it (don't forget your time is "money" to). In my opinion, that's one of the most overlooked aspects of affiliate SEO. Therefore I will spend some time elaborating my thoughts.
Prerequisites:
1) I will use an already established but not authority blog. That means the blog itself is only getting about 3-4k organic traffic a month yet (I might conduct a further experiment with a higher traffic blog at a later stage). The URL has a UR/DR of 20/9 and a CF/TF of 10/16 (not great but decent for that test )
2) The product is closely related to the overall topic of the blog
3) I will include the product into already existing articles AND write at least one long-form article for the product itself
4) No direct "review" article type; all the articles are "questions/ problem-solving" style (not "best hammer" - but "how to nail it like a pro" "
5) No black hat - only white & grey hat tactics
6) Link building is only an option if the strengths of the domain can't get the KW to rank
7) dependent on the "success" I will consider building a PBN at a later stage
So there are the following steps involved:
Phase1:
1. Product selection (found three products on Maxbounty and Peerfly that fit)
2. Keyword research (I use ahrefs.com and long tail pro for that)
3. Competitor analysis
4. Content decision (size and type)
5. Content production
6. Content publication
7. Internal linking (check Google analytics which of your current pages receive similar traffic and place an internal link on those pages
8. Ad the KW's to your KW tracker
9. Sit back for a week and do nothing... (I know there are SEO gurus out there telling you, you should see traffic within hours and explain to you how to do that... I don't like to do it that way AT ALL, and I don't like pretending that I fully understand how Google does things and... you get the point)
Phase2:
1. On page optimization (if needed)
2. Drop some links on Pinterest
3. Sit back and wait for a week...
Phase3:
1. Start link building (if needed)
2. Monitoring
Phase4:
1. If the articles showed the expected 4-7 conversions per month, I would add additional 20-30k content for the same sub-niche to strengthen the domain authority
2. If I see even more conversion, I will add about 10 PBNs for the same KWs and sub-niche
3. If I don't see any result, I will go grey hat and build links...
4. If I already see some decent conversions I might run search ads to the best converting articles
Phase1:
As mentioned I found about 3 comparable products. I did some KW research for 1 angle. That angle showed that there is about 10,500 monthly organic traffic. Given the competition and the domain I'm working with, the best I can expect is a page1 position 5-3 ranking (without using a PBN or other grey hat methods). So on pos5, I would get about 8% of the search traffic, on pos4 about 9% and on pos3 about 13%. So let's say I get 8-13% of 10,500 monthly searches, that's about 840-1,365 monthly visitors. With a landing page CTR of 25% that would be 210-341 product page visitors and if that page converts at 2% that would be 4.2-6.8 monthly sales. With a product price of about $50, that's $210-$340 per month with that particular main KW. Going a bit deeper in it reveals that there is a minimum of 98,100 if LSI KWs are taken into account (dependent on the exact definition even sometime about 200k searches...). So, the KW's can make the tenfold of the above calculation. That's pretty ok for a first shot and a single angle. If that angle/product works out, additional keywords and angles are added. The goal is to hit about $250 daily with that only product and minimal ongoing maintenance.
A rough competitor analysis shows, that I will need at least 3k words for the main KWs to rank them. Finding the competitors is again relatively easy. I still use ahrefs for it, but any tool is fine. Create a list of the 5-10 highest ranking competitors, google "bulk website word counter" and use one of the tools you'll find and you have the info you need. I ordered the 3k article and some additional content for the already existing and ranking articles in the same sub-niche (as mentioned, the first step is adding the CPA offer to existing content).
Next is adding the keywords to your keyword tracker. With serprobot.com you can track 25 KWs for free, that will do it if you start.
Current Rankings:
Current CPA Income:
0 Conversions
0 Income
How to go forward:
I will update the thread with rankings and income report every Monday. SEO is a game of patience. Therefore I don't expect so see any results the next 3 month. Still I hope the existing articles will show some conversions in the short term.
All questions and inputs are welcome!
This is my first "CPA&SEO" try. I usually sell Amazon products with a price point of above $120 so for calculation and planning purposes I will use similar conversation stats as I see on Amazon. An average SEO page converts at about 25-30% CTR to Amazon and 2-4% sales conversation there (4% is the lowest end of the spectrum I usually see, but I can't assume now that I will see a 20-30% purchase conversion on a CPA offer, but let's see)
You might be asking by now, why this is important? Forecasting. You need to know what to expect to budget how much you put into it (don't forget your time is "money" to). In my opinion, that's one of the most overlooked aspects of affiliate SEO. Therefore I will spend some time elaborating my thoughts.
Prerequisites:
1) I will use an already established but not authority blog. That means the blog itself is only getting about 3-4k organic traffic a month yet (I might conduct a further experiment with a higher traffic blog at a later stage). The URL has a UR/DR of 20/9 and a CF/TF of 10/16 (not great but decent for that test )
2) The product is closely related to the overall topic of the blog
3) I will include the product into already existing articles AND write at least one long-form article for the product itself
4) No direct "review" article type; all the articles are "questions/ problem-solving" style (not "best hammer" - but "how to nail it like a pro" "
5) No black hat - only white & grey hat tactics
6) Link building is only an option if the strengths of the domain can't get the KW to rank
7) dependent on the "success" I will consider building a PBN at a later stage
So there are the following steps involved:
Phase1:
1. Product selection (found three products on Maxbounty and Peerfly that fit)
2. Keyword research (I use ahrefs.com and long tail pro for that)
3. Competitor analysis
4. Content decision (size and type)
5. Content production
6. Content publication
7. Internal linking (check Google analytics which of your current pages receive similar traffic and place an internal link on those pages
8. Ad the KW's to your KW tracker
9. Sit back for a week and do nothing... (I know there are SEO gurus out there telling you, you should see traffic within hours and explain to you how to do that... I don't like to do it that way AT ALL, and I don't like pretending that I fully understand how Google does things and... you get the point)
Phase2:
1. On page optimization (if needed)
2. Drop some links on Pinterest
3. Sit back and wait for a week...
Phase3:
1. Start link building (if needed)
2. Monitoring
Phase4:
1. If the articles showed the expected 4-7 conversions per month, I would add additional 20-30k content for the same sub-niche to strengthen the domain authority
2. If I see even more conversion, I will add about 10 PBNs for the same KWs and sub-niche
3. If I don't see any result, I will go grey hat and build links...
4. If I already see some decent conversions I might run search ads to the best converting articles
Phase1:
As mentioned I found about 3 comparable products. I did some KW research for 1 angle. That angle showed that there is about 10,500 monthly organic traffic. Given the competition and the domain I'm working with, the best I can expect is a page1 position 5-3 ranking (without using a PBN or other grey hat methods). So on pos5, I would get about 8% of the search traffic, on pos4 about 9% and on pos3 about 13%. So let's say I get 8-13% of 10,500 monthly searches, that's about 840-1,365 monthly visitors. With a landing page CTR of 25% that would be 210-341 product page visitors and if that page converts at 2% that would be 4.2-6.8 monthly sales. With a product price of about $50, that's $210-$340 per month with that particular main KW. Going a bit deeper in it reveals that there is a minimum of 98,100 if LSI KWs are taken into account (dependent on the exact definition even sometime about 200k searches...). So, the KW's can make the tenfold of the above calculation. That's pretty ok for a first shot and a single angle. If that angle/product works out, additional keywords and angles are added. The goal is to hit about $250 daily with that only product and minimal ongoing maintenance.
A rough competitor analysis shows, that I will need at least 3k words for the main KWs to rank them. Finding the competitors is again relatively easy. I still use ahrefs for it, but any tool is fine. Create a list of the 5-10 highest ranking competitors, google "bulk website word counter" and use one of the tools you'll find and you have the info you need. I ordered the 3k article and some additional content for the already existing and ranking articles in the same sub-niche (as mentioned, the first step is adding the CPA offer to existing content).
Next is adding the keywords to your keyword tracker. With serprobot.com you can track 25 KWs for free, that will do it if you start.
Current Rankings:
Current CPA Income:
0 Conversions
0 Income
How to go forward:
I will update the thread with rankings and income report every Monday. SEO is a game of patience. Therefore I don't expect so see any results the next 3 month. Still I hope the existing articles will show some conversions in the short term.
All questions and inputs are welcome!
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