The Ultimate Guide to Affiliate Website Links

Ever since the Big Daddy update, throwing up an affiliate site then firing a few links into the domain sadly doesn’t work anymore. The “Supplemental Index” & “Aging Filters” are now an affiliate marketers worst nightmare. These changes have had a noticeable effect on two things:
The Quality of Affiliate Websites
Increased PPC Competition & Prices
Nowadays setting up disposable affiliate websites is not as easy as it once was. Not only that, Affiliate Marketers are now faced with a new challenge:
How the hell do you drive natural links to a website that’s clearly just promoting affiliate products?
I’m going to address some of the techiques I use & some of the techniques I’ve seen on other blogs to overcome this issue. This should hopefully help you dominate your niche & take your affiliate websites to the next level. Leaving your competitiors to sit back & cry.
1. Creating a Blog on the Affiliate Site
The nature of blogs & the information they provide make them very linkable. Writing indepth posts about a particular topic or subject can attract natural links to your blog, which you can then filter into your Affiliate Product pages. Blogs are also received much better on Social Networking sites.
Pros: Effective Allows you to direct targeted internal links Keeps content fresh
Cons: Time Consuming Lack of knowledge in the area to write fresh articles
2. Creating the Affiliate Site as a Blog
Many affiliates have been cutting out the middleman & using blog platforms such as Wordpress right from the getgo. This allows them to integrate articles in with affiliate reviews to make the whole site look much more natural. I’ve found this particular technique to be quite successful. This will attract links to particular posts which can allow you to deep link with relevant anchor text into product reviews.
Pros: Allows more flexibility with content Affiliate links can be hidden seductively within posts Easier to do well on social networks since your site doesn’t look like spam
Cons: Time consuming Easy to lose interest if you’re not converting If you build up a readership you feel like you need to blog often
3. Squidoo
Squidoo is a great way to support affiliate product reviews. Simply create a new account & write an overview for each product review in its own lens. Tag the lens as much as possible & also join as many groups as possible. Next interlink all the lenses together using a links plexo & choose the anchor text you want to rank for. Now also link back to your affiliate website with the anchor text you want to rank for from each lens. Bookmark the lens using Onlywire. Wash rinse & repeat.
Pros: Squidoo links pass a good amount of authority Squidoo lenses rank very well naturally so this can provide extra exposure & inbound links to the lens
Cons: No cons other than time
4. Dominate the SERPS
Are you wanting to rank for a particular term? Then dominate that term by flooding it with as many of your own targeted pages as you can. All linking back to your original Affiliate Site.
I.e.
http://www.myspace.com/earnersblog/ & http://www.squidoo.com/earnersblog/
Register a page on:
Squidoo
Googlepages
Blogspot
Myspace
Wordpress
Typepad
Spaces.Live.com
Feedburner
Register User Profiles on:
Digg
Mybloglog
Bumpzee
SEO Moz
Stumbleupon
Last.fm
Use all these relevant pages to link back to your own site, which will help increase your serps ranking for that targeted keyword. If these pages rank well & dominate the serps it will also increase your overall market share & push out competitors, which is always a good thing
Pros: Ability to dominate for a particular keyword Can leverage off other sites link popularity
Cons: Time consuming May take time to get all the profile pages indexed
5. Forums
Register on related (& unrelated if you wish) forums. Set your signature with the anchor text you want to rank for. Go back to some of the older posts with pagerank & authority (I like to use the Strongest Subpages Tool to find authoritative pages).
If you’re feeling particularly inventive, make a load of posts then come back in 3-4 weeks, edit the post & insert your links. This will avoid detection by the mods & admins.
Also search for forums that have VBSEO enabled. You can find heaps by using this query. VBSEO rewrites user profiles thus helping that page rank better for the chosen keyword.
Pros: Thousands upon thousands of forums to utilise
Cons: Profile may get banned for spamming if you’re not making relevant posts Forums may require a certain number of posts to use signatures
6. RSS Feeds
Using RSS & XML feeds are great ways to get inbound links quickly, check out these posts:
Using RSS Feeds for Backlinks
Automated XML Backlinks
Check out the RSS top 55 for more places to grab RSS Links from.
Pros: Can accumulate a lot of backlinks in a short period of time
Cons: Scraper backlinks are spammy & may provide no overall value
7. Blog Commenting
Finding blogs that don’t have the nofollow enabled is a great way to spend a day. Set up an excel spreadsheet, hell even write a script to do it for you. There’s a dofollow plugin now that will remove the nofollow tag on Wordpress. Start your research there, you’ll soon find lots of blogs that are Dofollowing (i.e. Easy Pickings).
Pros: Quick easy links
Cons: May get deleted if your anchor text is too spammy Quite a bit of research involved
8. Sponsoring themes & templates
I mentioned this before in my sponsoring wordpress themes post. There hundreds of different templates you can sponsor, it doesn’t have to be just wordpress.
Think Joomla, Movable Type, Vbulletin, Invision Power Board, PHPBB etc.
Pros: Cost Effective Can gain lots of links very quickly
Cons: Can’t control who is linking to you Many sitewide links could trip spam filters
9. Link Bait & 301 Redirect
This is perhaps one of my favourite techniques at the moment. Create a blog purely for linkbait purposes & write articles for Digg, Netscape, Reddit & Stumbleupon. Once you’ve gathered around 1,500 links 301 redirect the pages & blog to your existing Affiliate Marketing websites to boost their authority.
Pros: Good way to fight supplemental results Possible to amass a large amount of links organically & very quickly
Cons: Links may not be relevant to your niche & may not help your affiliate pages rank any better (think a bit about this one ;)) Writing a popular story can take time & a lot of perseveration.
10. Link Feeder Sites
This again is something that Eli touched on a while ago in his post about Link Laundering. Basically you’re using existing sites that requires registration to build targeted backlinks to your Affiliate Sites. These can be software download sites or even reciprocal directories. If you set up a nice network you can instantly get about 200-300 links per day to sites or pages that you specify with the anchor text that you specify. Check Eli’s post out for more detailed information.
Pros: Can build targeted links very quickly Can choose the anchor text
Cons: No control over the quality of sites the links go on Too many links with the same anchor text could trip the spam filters, so rotation is necessary.
So there you have it, a breakdown of some of the top methods you can use to really boost your affiliate websites up in the serps & start capatilising on the traffic you’re missing out in