Look To The Long Tail For Affiliate Gold

As promised, and I've been meaning to do this for ages. But here's a look at how creating decent, unique posts on an affiliate blog can bring you not only traffic but the wonga that goes with it.

On my Easter Eggs blog I basically started it on 2nd January this year (I think) and was posting away, reviewing Easter eggs, detailing discount codes and profiling the merchants. I didn't pay too much attention to any Keyword Suggestion Tools or keyword lists or anything of the kind. I just wanted to keep it as natural as possible.

When I went back and looked at the data I was shocked at the amount of keyword variation. I know the site went up to 4,000 visits a day. But here's a look at the keyword distribution for the first 3 months of the year:



and that's just the first 5,000 records! Look at the long tail. Now look at it again knowing that the length of the long tail is actually almost 3 times longer!!!

Volume Occurrences

2,000 - 10,000 1
1,000 - 1,999 2
500 - 999 2
250 - 499 5
200 - 249 6
150 - 199 3
100 - 149 24
50 - 99 51
25 - 49 89
20 - 24 60
15 - 19 96
10 - 14 160
5 - 9 557
4 324
3 531
2 1605
1 14,742

(I'll tidy this chart up later)

yes that's right. There were 14,742 key phrases that delivered only one visitor! These search phrases delivered 76.15% of all traffic!

So what can you learn from this?

Well I may not have taken too much time thinking the about the posts but I have got to the situation now from doing SEO for many years that adding what I call "active keywords" into my posts and templates as second nature now.

I call "active keywords" those keywords that people add in with product or brand search terms that indicate an action or that they are actively looking to conduct an action. These keywords often include "buy", "cheap", "cheapest", "purchase", "best", "recommended" etc.

So when you look at developing a site and adding content, view it as a matrix. Your blog posts should form one side of the matrix - i.e. content keywords, whilst your template should look to form the other side of the matrix i.e include the "active keywords".

But don't look at that as a hard-and-fast rule, just a guide. As you'll interchange some of the keyword use to make your content more useful for your visitors. But try and do the matrix approach if you can.

If you do this then the keywords in each area of your page will help each other, they'll compliment each other and allow you to extend your reach way into the long tail.

I hate, however, how some people try and take the easy route and simply paste a range of keywords into their boiler plate in the expectation they'll manage to get the variation. This is just lazy! Add these keywords into your navigation by taking the time to write content about them. The keywords within the links will not only aid the page its on, but contribute to the pages they're refrencing! Stop being lazy and write content!

But also helping you achieve this is the length of your posts, make them 400 words plus at the very least. The more words you have the more opportunity of picking up long tail search phrases. It also helps you break out of any templated / boilerplate duplication issues.

In summary:

• Think of keyword matrices;
• Think of blending them into useful content;
• Try and write with length and uniqueness
  

I'm going to post about how to choose merchants and pre-qualify them before your site starts to attract visitors. Then I'll be looking at chocolate merchants themselves as to how they performed financially and operationally. I'll also be showing everyone how I'm using these learnings and expanding them to tackle this years Christmas shopping period with my Christmas blog. I started the site in March but next March I'll hopefully be showing if and how it worked.