7 Reasons Your Compelling Affiliate Content Sucks.

Maybe the reason your compelling affiliate content sucks, is you were suffering writers block, or lacking time to put together a good article. Or you were just over it and needed time out. 

So you went to Fiverr , and hired the one who promised the most for the least $’s, and the article came back written in Pigeon English. 

You couldn’t afford any more money so you edited it yourself.

You might laugh, but it does happen and I don’t mean to disparage fiverr because there are many excellent freelancers there.

The need to continually put out new original content can be stressful. Lets look at some of the problems.  

The Problems With Content

1. – Affiliate promotional samples are short
2. – Spinning Existing Content
3. – Disjointed content
4. – SEO –  not specific
5. – Your Make Money Online business is the same old same old rehash of shiny objects,and expensive promises. 
6. – Content uniqueness.
7. – Writers Block.  Finding Inspiration for content

Affiliate Promotional Samples

Often these are short usually around 300 – 500 words. For SEO, this won’t cut it. The whole basis of any content is SEO.

Unless you can nail this then you are writing for the exercise.

Adding two Affiliate samples together is not going to help you. Although there may be a line or two that you could use, they are often old and no longer original. 

The accepted rule is.  Content for articles should be around 600 – 1000 words, and 2500 words and above is top tier. 

There are exceptions though. A statistic I saw a while ago said the average blog is around 300 – 600 words.

A Lot of Content Is Not Articles.

What about all the visual stuff out there, videos, photography, some courses, 3d niches, music, sketching. They may only have a couple of hundred words and still rank. 

Google loves long, quality content, 2500 words or more. It must relevant to the topic though.

Ok, that is a given, but it is not always necessary.

And if your going to spend the time writing long content, then make sure someone wants to know what your writing about. 

Most bloggers settle for 750 – 1500 words.  Provided other things like meta data and keywords are in the right places, you will go close to achieving a mid 80’s +, SEO score. 

And, there is nothing wrong with that.

Spinning Articles

This bird doesn’t fly. I am aware of the claims made about the various forms of  software. This one is popular,  but the reality is, Google is not stupid.

If you want to spin content from a blog post on another site and use it in a new post. The google crawl will pick it up.

Plus, there is the disadvantage of the new Headline.

How much different can you make it to suit the spun content, or vice versa, and will it rank? 

Disjointed Content

You haven’t mapped out how your post is going to take shape. You veer off topic, the links aren’t relevant, and it is hard to read.

I have first hand experience of this. It is not intentional. You just want to sit down and write, create something brand new that is going to change our lives and the world.

And you ended up writing crap. It didn’t matter, some of us learn the hard way. Come back and edit later. The positive take is you got something out there. 

But you should improve. Right? 

Sometimes it goes the other way, and we do create something new that is going to change the world.  Other times those days can be hard to replicate.

Writers Block (again). How robotic can a person be?. 

With affiliate marketing it can become a struggle to be compelling, and stay within the bounds of honesty, if your trying to have someone click a link and buy the widget or digital thing you are promoting.

SEO Not Specific

You researched for a headline using the latest whiz bang tool, then wrote a post where the headline had nothing, or very little to do with the content. 

Your selling an apple peeler, to get a higher word count you move onto peeling cucumbers.

You hit publish, submit it to Google, Bing, and other search engines.

It is indexed a month later and can be found on page 50. 

Make Money Online Business

For those in the make money online niche. Many move to attract attention to their website, and buy the latest $147.00,  $29.00 E-Book to generate traffic.

Then hand over a few hundred $$$ to someone who will push your promotion to their email list. 

A smorgasbord of shiny objects promising wealth and fame is often the downfall for many affiliate marketers 

Spending too much time with any of the below to get lookers at your product is also  time and money sucking. 

Social media marketing,  Viral marketing,  Video marketing, Paid advertising (PPC, PPV, Native, Media Buying), Influencer marketing

And others I have probably forgotten about. 

The problem of course, is income will take a long time to overtake expenditure.

Many in this niche do not have enough notes, or plastic (with enough credit), in their wallets, to maintain this type of promotion for any amount of time. 

In fact, this is the point where most give up. You need to get your SEO act together and start putting out good content. The reality is it is not that hard.

 

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Content Uniqueness

Every experts favorite statement. “Make your content unique“.

 

What the hell can you say about a portable hair dryer that hasn’t already been said, Instagramed, or sent viral across Face Book or Pinterest.

Finding angles can be hard. Is the research likely to tell you anything more than than what the product features tell you?.  Have a look it might be a dud. 

 Unless you can turn it into fun, content will always be a struggle.

On those days where you are struggling and overthinking a task, walking away is sometimes the best option.

Come back to it when you are feeling more relaxed. 

How do you do that?  Take a light – hearted approach to the process. Don’t write a story and become too attached to it, or try to predict what it can do.

A short engaging article which gets people talking is just as good as a long engaging article that gets people talking.

Write from the perspective of being helpful and not taking yourself too seriously. If 300 – 400 words is all it takes to cover all the relevant points, and some additional relevant content (why they should buy for eg. ), so be it.  

Finding Inspiration For Content.

There are lots of ways. Watch a movie, something said in a conversation, and what they call curated content  which can provide all sorts of ideas for any market. 

This is not to be confused with spun content. The two are chalk and cheese. 

Curated content comes in two forms. Content aggregation and content discovery. 

Content Aggregation 

 Is the aggregation of content, which simply means syndicating someone else’s content that you found from their feed. Example of a great tool. Feebly 

You are able to add, remove, and organize the various blogs and sites you want to follow, as well as de-clutter your inbox.

You can view the complete or partial article through the tool and access it anywhere as it is web based.

In a nutshell, an aggregation tools allows you to compile the sites you like to read, all in one place. 

Content Curation

Content Curation differs from content aggregation in that it requires a manual addition of content.

OK, sorry there is work involved. 

When done properly, the full process of content curation can take as much time as creating original content.

Sometimes more.

You have to source, repackage and share a ton of information.  This can be done more efficiently with automated tools.

But, you must also spend time filtering the content, adding insight and perspective, and building relationships with influencer’s and other publishers.

The best way to utilize this is to use it as a discovery tool. This may best be defined as 

The art of sourcing, filtering and repackaging all forms of existing content to share with a specific audience to add value to their lives and save them time.           See here.

An example of a great tool is Scoop  

The content is curated by its members, so you can follow topics, new players in the game and users, so you don’t have to do fresh searches. 

There is a lot to like about these tools, granted curation takes time, but as an idea tool for new topics that will be of value to your audience, it is time well spent. 

   You now have a place to grab some great ideas, next time you suffer writers block. ?

As an affiliate marketer or blogger, you need a constant stream of ideas for your playbook. 

Done properly, Google will love you too.  

But, at the end of the day just remember.

Curation can certainly lighten the load and open new doors, it will never replace the authority-building power that comes with creating original content.

Please feel free to leave a comment.

I have a small favor to ask. If you found this article useful could you share it please, some one else might find it useful too.

Until next time.

   You can usually find me here.