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Great content will always work. You do have to be careful with guest blogging—don't rely on it.

Basically, if you want to rank an affiliate site on Google, the key is to —almost—not be an affiliate site. 50% of the content on your site should not have any affiliate links on it at all, and you should corral your monetized content under a single category, ie, "Reviews." This makes for a better user experience = Google will rank you higher.

It also forces you to come up with categories that are more than subtle advertisements. Most importantly, this setup puts you on the track to becoming an authority site within your niche = people will be happy to link to you.

This may seem very limiting, but it works really well with Amazon since people don't mind clicking through to that site. ClickBank? I don't know. Don't really use them.

Naturally, some sites will still rank that are little more than thin monetized content. Some sites slip through the cracks. Don't mind them. They will probably get slapped eventually.

The rest of your site should be full of valuable content that's focused broadly on your niche.

Tips:

Regarding guest posting, ask yourself: Would I still do it if the link was no-follow? If not, you probably shouldn't do it. Guest posts need to provide value beyond your own SEO.

Sounds like you know better, but just in case: article spinning is well and truly dead. Google can detect it, and they won't rank it.

Private link networks can still work, but I would stay away from them nonetheless. They won't remain invisible to Google forever. Content marketing works just as well or better and is much safer. Of course, this is dependent on content quality.

Also, stay away from exact match anchor text and don't chase site-wide links. Site-wide links don't give much of an SEO bump, and they may be targeted in the near future by Google.

The Hummingbird rebuild focuses more on broad terms and longtails than it does specific terms. That's why you want a robust site that covers your niche from every angle. Think in terms of how people are phrasing searches these days:

• "Vacuum cleaners that don't have bags."
• "Vegan pizza chains in New York."
• "Power tools with rechargeable batteries."

My boss constantly reminds me that Google is a content beast. So, we feed the beast with relevant and entertaining content. Everything passes through copyscape. Nothing is spun. You have to ask yourself - how much am I going to invest to make money?

Set a budget. Set a plan. Get it right.

Charli

Hey Brock,

It can be difficult to rank an affiliate site. However, I would prefer writing a blog post or just having a page that pre-sells your affiliate offer for you.

Once you have this page set up, just buy paid traffic to send to your page so that they can read and see what your product has to offer. Many fail at affiliate marketing because they expect cold traffic to automatically convert when sent to an affiliate page.

Hope this helps!

-Josh

Ranking the type of site called "affiliate site" this particular user is talking about is no different from a regular site. It's pretty much the same search engine optimization methods which is good on-page and off-page optimization.

Thanks for the great answers everyone. I'm going to try some of these ideas and see how it goes. I never really thought of posting articles and what not to go along with a lot of the affiliate items.

I do wonder how sites like Thisiswhyimbroke.com rank, when they have absolutely no content.

Write down what you want from your affiliate site/s, targets, views, and money you want to spend.
Pick a niche where you can write good quality content/get someone to write good quality content.

Build a mail list from the start and make sure you've got useful content, a big mistake a lot of people make is making an affiliate site with no real value.

Go for long tail keywords and remember that google spam detection is getting better every day and it's going to keep improving. If you can see it's spam then so can a crawler.

Find a keyword and stick to it.

Use social media and social signals. (good for reputation and getting traffic without search engines)

Don't rush, if you rush then you'll most likely get caught out, there's really no such thing as a quick buck so make sure you take your time and try to do everything properly and if you can't do it properly then just take your time at least.

I find people are spending so much time trying to make links unique when it would most likely be easier to just get real, unique links because the content you have is good. So just think about your niche and what you're selling and ask what the person you're selling to needs to know.

And sites like that can rank by getting a high PR link from a number of sites and you can still rank a site on page 1 Google with spam but it will most likely get black listed/de ranked after 2 maybe 3 months max.

Keep adding valuable content on your site.keep track of your site traffic,and take a note of popular pages,so you can add some more content based on your reader's view.

Those strategies can still actually work but you must change your niche, also you can try to get some back-links.

It depends on the niche and the KEYWORDS you want to get a bettar ranking for! You should choose them REALLY careful, then start posting GOOD and UNIQUE content, build backlinks on Good websites (*Use Social Bookmarking sites for every article for example is a good idea to boost your rankings!)

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Do an analysis competition, lots of keyword research, good quality content, backlinks, blog commenting, the list goes on!

These are the steps I take to rank any affiliate site.

1. Publish at least 10 posts before building a single link.
2. Make sure the the homepage and the supporting posts are properly optimized (I.e. keyword in title, alt, etc.)
3. Group the posts under relevant categories and noindex the categories and tag pages to prevent duplicate content.
4. Keep the number of affiliate links on the site at a minimum.
5. Build relevant and high authority links slowly.

Above all, be consistent. The steps above is by no means exhaustive but it's a good starting point.