Most affiliate marketing programs look like this:
- Affiliate creates content that is targeted to keywords that will attract relevant traffic from Google Search. Users search, click through to the affiliate site, and find relevant, useful content about a product. The customer decides to buy, they click through to the merchant and they make a purchase. The affiliate receives a commission.
- Users search, click through to the affiliate site, and find relevant, useful content about a product. The customer decides to buy, they click through to the merchant and they make a purchase. The affiliate receives a commission.
- The customer decides to buy, they click through to the merchant and they make a purchase. The affiliate receives a commission.
- The affiliate receives a commission.
Example: I want the best hockey stick so I do a search for “best hockey sticks”. I click through to a review site and find a hockey stick that I like. They have a link to a hockey equipment merchant that sells it. I click through and purchase. The merchant makes a sale and sends the affiliate their percentage.
(Read “Affiliate Marketing Made Simple” for more detailed info)
What if your structure is a little different?
I’ve been working with The Good Kitchen and they use a different approach. They partner with gyms and health practitioners that share their philosophy for sustainable food consumption. These partners may not be producing much or any content to attract search traffic. But they have an audience that is relevant to TGK’s product.
To this end TGK produces original content for their affiliates to publish to their audience with the goal of producing traffic back to TGK’s site. So a little non-traditional but beneficial nonetheless.
How to Maximize Content You Produce for Affiliates
Since TGK is producing the content, it may as well get the most out of it from an SEO perspective. You could create and send content to your various affiliates. They could garner whatever SEO benefits come out of that article. But just like an ember dying outside of a campfire, sprinkling that content across the Internet won’t generate much total SEO benefit for anybody.
Since it’s their content, they should publish it out on their site first and then have the affiliate post to theirs with one crucial detail: the affiliate needs to communicate to Google that the content originated from TGKs site. Any links to the affiliates site will be counted as links to TGK’s site by Google, which will benefit their SEO and search rankings.
How to Tell Google What to DO
The affiliate needs to set up what’s called a canonical link. You may have clicked on a link URL that changes and takes you to another site. This is like that but it doesn’t take users to a different site, it only takes Google to the original site.
This is most commonly used to tell Google what page you want to appear in SERPs if you have duplicate content across your site. But in this instance we will use it to get the SEO benefits of any links or traffic to the affiliate site.
Here are some options for changing setting up a conical redirect:
- Add a rel=canonical link in the <head>
- WordPress – Use the Yoast SEO plugin
- What CMS do you use? Post to comments and I’ll update this.
Keep your Google Juice
I’m of the opinion that if you write the article then you should get the most benefit possible. Guest posting is one thing. But if you’re the publishing platform and/or the merchant and somebody else wants to use your content, you need to get a Canonical URL back from it.
Sources:
- http://neilpatel.com/what-is-affiliate-marketing/
- https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/
- https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical
- http://searchengineland.com/myth-duplicate-content-penalty-259657
- https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
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