Content for Affiliates and Affiliate Managers

How to Make Content Work for You

As an Affiliate or Affiliate Manager one of your most important jobs is developing not only the basic infrastructure to help move your sales from one level of up to the next, but also to give your affiliate sites an edge in a highly competitive industry. One of the easiest and most effective things you can do to improve your affiliate’s sites is introduce original, high quality and informative content. We're working on a series of articles to highlight how content can help affiliate marketers and how significant the return on investment to develop and execute a plan surrounding the content that you have on affiliate sites.

Quality Scores and Bounce Rates

Anyone running a Google AdWords campaign should know how significantly a good quality score can affect the cost of doing business. Currently the largest factor in the Quality Score seems to be Click Through Rate (CTR), develop a high click through rate your quality score goes up and you're CPC goes down. On-page content can have some influence on your Quality Score but perhaps from the content point of view the most interesting part of the of adding content to an affiliate page, is the opportunity to turn people who would otherwise bounce into visitors that stay a while on your site.

Being able to direct people to a page of information that is well-written, informative and on-topic can reduce your bounce rate and effectively give you a higher value for the traffic that a PPC campaign bring to a site. Relevant copy that will capture a reader’s attention and prevent them from bouncing yields a better the opportunity to gain the users trust, engage the user and convert. A user that bounces is a waste of money, therefore, finding ways to keep visitors from bouncing gives affiliates a greater chance to build a relationship with the visitor and effectively means subsequently provides greater value out of their traffic. The value of increasing your engagement with visitors can not be underestimated! Where trust has been built through timely, on-topic information there is a greater opportunity to turn traffic into conversions. Investing in content is a can add significantly to the bottom line and provide a healthy return on investment. Ask yourself this question, "Who's more likely to convert, someone who lands on your site and sees one page, or someone who finds what the information that closely addresses their need, builds a trust through a well thought out article and provides a solution."

Preventing Google Slaps

Thin affiliate sites have been the subject of previous Google slaps and, while it's difficult to know for sure exactly why Google chose to slap some sites and not others, there are a few pieces of the puzzle that we can draw together. SuperAffiliateMindset.com has a great explanation of the March 2008 Google slap that came down and what sites tended to be most affected. It seems that the sites that got hit hardest tended to be sites that had little content or content that was posted in a haphazard way. Which really highlights the need for affiliates to support their most valuable sites with regular, high quality, original articles. The last thing that an affiliate or affiliate manager wants is to be shut down by a change in the way that Google Adwords creating a genuine site that provides top quality articles, linkable articles is a great way to safeguard yourself against any changes in Google's policy.

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