Affiliate marketing comes with high earning potential, being a big source of revenue. Affiliate marketers are paid when a specific action is performed, in comparison with pay for clicks or impressions. Whether it’s signing up for a newsletter or completing a sale, actions related to affiliate marketing can be multiple, depending on what the client requires.
When it comes to the entire topic of affiliate marketing techniques, one of the most frequently used tools is SEO copywriting. Considering copywriting can drive the most organic targeted traffic to one’s website, you can understand why this has become the marketing segment most sought after in recent years.
Becoming a SEO Copywriter for affiliate marketing purposes means creating and sharing valuable, high-quality content for readers, content that also drives traffic to your clients’ sites and increases their conversion rates.
You may already have a website available, with a blog section, where you can use copywriting techniques for the main purposes of marketing certain businesses, and earning money doing so. But what exactly are your must-known tips here? The following guidelines will help you make the most of your SEO copywriting for affiliate marketing activities:
What does SEO stand for?
Before moving on to actual action tips, you should first fully understand what SEO is. You already know what happens when you use a search query, type it into Google an press enter. You get a list of results that are relevant for your specific search terms or phrases.
Those search results are shown as an outcome of SEO – search engine optimization. A simple definition would be: SEO is a technique of boosting the effectiveness of content for search engines, with the role of helping a site increase in rankings.
With SEO you’ll need to
- Do an extensive keyword research
- Select a specific term or phrase
- Use that particular keyword in your written content
Understanding copywriting
Copywriting refers to the science and art of writing content that determines the reader to take an action that will benefit a website – buying a certain product, subscribing to a newsletter, creating a wishlist, joining a specific network etc.
As a copywriter, you’re fulfilling the position of a skilled professional, writing copy for customer engagement, advertisements or promotions. You’ll need to know your audience, to know what choice of wording to go for in order to appeal to readers, and to know people in general. From the headlines you use to the sentences you incorporate, everything should be created with the main purpose of persuading readers to take a certain action
With experience and the right type of copywriting skills, you can be frequently sought after by businesses for marketing affiliation collaborations.
SEO copywriting
You now know what copywriting is, but what should you know about SEO copywriting in particular?
SEO copywriting is quite different today from what it used to be a while back. Things have evolved, and continue to do so, considering Google implements updates periodically.
SEO copywriting is the ability to create valuable content that readers can enjoy, but content that ranks well in Google as well. You need to consider Google’s ranking algorithms and its components in order to create content that actually delivers the expected end-results.
SEO copywriting means creating written content that is useful, engaging and valuable, while targeting specific keywords at the same time. Whether it’s creating content from scratch or optimizing it for SEO purposes, the main objective here is to rank higher in online search results.
As a professional SEO copywriter you should master the ability of writing meaningful content for your audience, and optimizing it for bots at the same time. Finding an optimal balance here is the key to success.
Copywriting tactics for affiliate marketing purposes
With clickbait marketing schemes oversaturating the market, getting readers actually interested in your content, and achieve the affiliate marketing results you desire can be more difficult than you’d initially expect. Even if you think of yourself as a great writer, in order to get users’ attention and determine them to convert, and thus get your share from your affiliate marketing contract, you need to keep in mind a few important suggestions.
Copywriting can in fact increase conversion rates, but you need to use the right tactic to make SEO copywriting work for you as a marketer, and for the businesses you’ll be partnering with.
What are the strategies you should focus on first here? What will help you create the right type of content for your intended goals? The following strategies are the ones to focus on first:
Know your audience
To achieve success in the world of affiliate marketing and SEO copywriting, you have to understand what your audience wants and enjoys reading. Posting on your site articles that aren’t relevant for the group of people you’re addressing to will only prevent you from obtaining the conversation outcomes you’re interested in.
The first and most important rule here is to get to know your audience. What do they enjoy reading? What are the topics that drive most interest, shares and likes?
The affiliate product you’re promoting should provide a solution to your audience’s problems. If you’ve limited your blog section to sports-related content, for example, you couldn’t just slide an article about printer toner. Maintain your content relevant for you copywriting niche will allow you to actually become a reliable source of information for end-users, and to determine readers to continue browsing your site and perhaps even convert.
Create content relevant to your client’s website
Your content may be relevant for your target audience, but is it relevant for your clients as well? Just writing an article on a topic you know your users will enjoy, and just sliding the link of your affiliate partner in a sentence somewhere is not the right way to go.
The theme of your articles should be linked to what your clients’ businesses are about. Combine all the right resources to reinforce the right type of message. Become a marketer only for businesses that are correlated in some way with your platform niche.
The perfect balance between meaningful content for readers and relevant content for your clients will help you reach the status of a successful SEO copywriter.
Focus on quality
Are your articles well-written? Are they free of any grammar and spelling mistakes? Have you managed to convey your message in an appropriate manner? Quality is one of the key factors of great SEO copywriting. Your articles should be easy to read, with perfect grammar, concise and informative. Because sometimes, maintaining on-point quality isn’t easy, you can simplify things for you by using some writing services and tools. Here are some examples of resources that can help you maintain content quality:
Grab My Essay – even the best copywriter sometimes deals with a writer’s block, or simply doesn’t have the time to meet the deadlines of each customer. Grab My Essay is a writing service used by those in need of high quality research and original writing.
Grammarly – you can use this online tool to proofread your articles. Grammarly will underline any mistakes found in your content, related to spelling, grammar, punctuation and conventions.
Hemingway – perhaps you’re using redundant or complicated phrases without realizing, or your article isn’t readable in general. Hemingway app allows you to spot any issues with content quality and easily make improvements.
Twinword – this program helps you create richer and more diversified content. If you’re spending too much time searching for the right words, Twinword can help you, highlighting particular terms and correcting them.
Writefull – word alternatives and content quality feedback, that’s what Writefull offers. It also helps you maintain a writing style that is suitable for your target audience, by checking your article against an extensive database.
Get targeted traffic by using the right keywords
Keyword research stands at the base of SEO copywriting. You need to incorporate the right terms and phrases across each one of your articles. The link of your clients’ should also be associated with appropriate terms for the product you are marketing through your content.
Getting targeted traffic is critical for affiliate marketing – the more people reading your articles, the higher the odds of increasing conversion rates.
What you need to remember here is that the key terms that reach a specific audience will naturally be different than the ones targeting another type of audience.
Your keyword search should go hand in hand with search volume, and there are two types of search volumes to focus on:
- High volume keywords – highly competitive, but with potential in increasing exposure. A few examples would be: product x review, or service x benefits.
- Low volume keywords – niched topics, current events.
A combination of the right high volume and low volume keywords will allow you to get more people reading your articles.
Selecting key terms and phrases demands research from your part. Luckily, nowadays, you have quite a lot of useful tools for that. Copywriters are using Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Moz Keyword Explorer etc.
Be trustworthy
Today’s readers have become quite savvy. You can no longer incorporate affiliate links without them actually figuring out you’re trying to persuade to engage in a specific action. However, in order to maintain their trust, and keep them on your site, limit your ad placement and avoid clickbait.
Everything you write should be informative and relevant, and not just a block of content that visibly promotes a specific product. If you’re only recommending something for a profit motive, and your content isn’t genuine, you won’t be able to make it with SEO copywriting.
Add value to your articles, focus on readers’ likes and dislikes first, and only write content for products or services you know your readers would actually want or need.
Focus on headlines
You want high click-through rates, and for that to be possible, you need more than valuable content. Headlines have their own important role here. A mediocre choice in this department, and you could be losing the interest of readers as soon as they access your sites.
An article’s headline is what catches a user’s attention and persuades them into actually read the article. An experienced, and skilled copywriter will always work on crafting a good headline, before moving onto the body of the content.
Headlines that have numbers in them usually drive most interest, followed by titles focused on reader addressing and how-to articles.
You’re recommended to use proper tools and services for your headline generating practices. Tools that help you come up with topics and subheadings, services that can help you translate a killer headline in another language, and apps that allow you to find magnetic SEO-relevant titles. A few examples here are: IsAccurate, SEOPressor blog title generator, CoSchedule headline analyzer or Thrive Headline Optimizer
Note: headlines should be relevant to your target audience, and to include targeted keywords.
Meta description
Because you want to guide search engines back to your site, when a user is searching for a particular key term or phrase onto Google, use meta descriptions for each one of your posts.
A meta description helps search engines, as well as users to understand what the topic of an article is. Meta description can be considered as a concise explanation of your site’s content to Google. This description will be used by search engines as a snippet, when readers search for keywords relevant to your posts’ subject.
Your meta description should have a max. of 160 characters, should summarize the main idea of your post, and should include specific keywords.
Add appropriate text to pictures
Pictures associated to written content are essential for user engagement. Besides choosing appropriate images for the topics of your posts, and for the products you are trying to market, make sure search engines actually understand what the picture is about by adding alternative text.
Renaming your pictures for SEO will boost site traffic, allowing more keyword opportunities and sending traffic from Google image searches.
Conclusion
SEO copywriters with experience have started to look into affiliate marketing collaborations, considering the financial prospective these types of business partnerships involve. In order to make the most of your copywriting activities in this department, you need to be aware of a few important guidelines first. The suggestions highlighted above will help you achieve success in this field, so look them over with care and use them to your advantage.
About the Author
Marie Fincher is a content writer with a background in marketing, technology and business intelligence. She also does some editing work at Studicus. What inspires her the most in her writing is traveling and meeting new people.
