Phase 2: Testing & Validation: Forever Affiliate Content Strategy - Minisite & Authority Site Okay. Welcome to Phase 2: Testing and Validation: Forever Affiliate Content Strategy for Minisites and Authority Sites. Everything you've done up until now has been finding a niches creating a blog. For the first time in this video we're going to talk about your content. In this section, we're going to talk in depths about exactly the kind of content that you want to have exactly how you're going to create it and exactly how you're going to optimize it from maximum income. In this video, I just want to give you an overview of exactly what it is you'll be doing, how you'll be laying that content out on your site and what goal that content is trying to achieve. It sounds obvious but there s a couple of little parts to this that really need understanding if you are to do this to your full potential. Minisite Content Strategy So in this video, we're going to talk about Minisites and Authority Sites. The content for both those different kind of sites, what it's doing, what it's trying to achieve. So, when it comes to the content for your minisite, remember, this is me talking about sites that promote just one product, it might be multiple keywords but a one main product. Forever Affiliate 2013 Transcripts 1
For your minisites, you're going to start with 5 to 15 posts in your testing phase. So this is the phase before you've proven that something definitely converts and will definitely make money. To establish a minisite, you're going to use 5 to 15 pieces of content. Now, why that number? From testing and this is both from my own results and from those of people who are also very good at this, other friends of mine who we get together and chat about these things. For some reason, minisites in the old-school sense like one-page sites or two page sites are not fairing as well in the search engines of lately. And there seems to be something about this number of posts, the number of pieces of content or rather indexed URLs that has a lot of significance for Google at the moment. I ve noticed, for example, on certain sites, will have around about three pages of content up on the site and now have started building links and doing some of the things we'll look at later. First, the links don t seem to be working as quickly as they normally would. And then I ve seen a number of examples where after I boost the content from three pieces of content to more like six to eight, something seems to happen, a threshold seems to get broken in the search engines and my rankings are able to move much more quickly. I don't know exactly what that is and I'm reporting on the results of my own test and the test of people who have done this as well. So five is really the minimum number of post, pieces of content on your site that you want to have to begin to establish a minisite. And at the top end, for the 15, it depends really on how many keywords that you have. So, when we found the products at the beginning, if you found that there was some products that had five Forever Affiliate 2013 Transcripts 2
quality keywords that you thought might very reasonably convert then you want to publish five pieces of content to get you started. If you saw that there were more and they looked like they should certainly be reasonable, you can published more than five. Really though, you want to go with the minimum number that you can in order to test this site. Because as I mentioned on the slides here, this will grow a lot once this site past the testing phase. Once it gets into the expansion phase, that number of pieces of content will grow rapidly. But at that point, you're growing rapidly because you know this niche is established now. This product really does sell. But in the beginning, you really want to publish just the minimal amount that you can in order to prove that niche, in order to get some traffic for those keywords and see whether it really does convert. So minimum of 5 but you can push that up to 15 if you think there's a good number of keywords in that niche that really need to be tested, that could well result in sales. Content Structure So, with the pieces of content, usually it's one article per keyword. So that means if you found the keyword, Pregnancy Miracle, you would write one article in Pregnancy Miracle. If there's another keyword that was like a Pregnancy Miracle versus other pregnancy cause or whatever it is, you might write a different post, a different article on that. So generally, it's one per keyword. However, for these product-named niches, many of the keywords that you'll see come up, lend themselves to being combined into one article. So for example, if I saw the top three keywords for this product where Pregnancy Miracle, Pregnancy Miracle Review, and Pregnancy Miracle Reviews, or even Pregnancy Miracle, Forever Affiliate 2013 Transcripts 3
Pregnancy Miracle Reviews and/or Pregnancy Miracle Book, for example, all those three keywords lend themselves to be in combined in one article. I would write one article and I could easily write one article that would have the title Pregnancy Miracle Book Reviews or Reviews of the Pregnancy Miracle Book, or something where all of those keywords would be contained within the title and so within the URL of the post. And I would do the rest of what it takes to rank for those individual keywords when it comes to my link building later. There wouldn't be a point or it wouldn't be worth doing to write one article for Pregnancy Miracle, another one for Pregnancy Miracle Reviews and another one again for Pregnancy Miracle Book. Because the people that are searching for those three phases more or less and possibly with slight differences are all the same. And they're looking for the same things, they want to know the same things about the product, you can easily cater to them with the same piece of content. So, when you have your keyword list from the beginning, you'll do some judgements like that to decide whether any individual keyword needs an article for itself or it can be combined and catered to do searches of multiple keywords with just one article. Minisite Homepage Content So, this is an important point now. A Minisite will be trying to have its homepage rank for its main keywords. So what we would be trying to achieve here assuming the Pregnancy Miracle example is we would have a main article, a main post on the homepage of the domain. It would be written on two or three of those top keywords assuming they existed. It Pregnancy Miracle, Pregnancy Miracle Reviews, Pregnancy Miracle Book, let's say for the sake of example. Forever Affiliate 2013 Transcripts 4
That main article that I wrote would be sitting on the homepage and we would be trying to make the homepage, just the URL, pregnancyhelper.org, rank for each of those main three keywords. For the main keywords, it's not the case that the post that you write will have a URL like pregnancyhelper.org/pregnancymiraclereviews and you want that post URL to rank for those three keywords. It's always easier to have your homepage rank than it is to have a post page rank. A little bit easier, anyway. So, the easiest thing to do is try to have your homepage rank for those keywords. So that's the strategy that we use, the Minisite, the homepage, the main URL will be trying to rank for the main keyword or keywords of that product. And the other posts, let's say if there's something different that does come up, that doesn't fit with that main article that we wrote, say like, Pregnancy Miracle versus other pregnancy product, the article I wrote on that keyword, it on its own unique URL slash Pregnancy Miracle versus other pregnancy products, whatever, that URL will be what we're trying to rank for that particular keyword. So the homepage try to rank to the main keywords, other posts rank for their own chosen keywords with their own chosen URLs. I hope that make sense. The minisite uses an announcement post, so what we do, after we publish that article, we use that plugin that we install before called WP sticky to stick that main article, that main post in its entirety to the homepage. So when people come to the homepage, that article will be right there at the top in its entirety for everyone to see. That will be the first thing that people see. And then the other posts will appear below that in a normal blog style list. So, the main article at the top, the other blog post would just appear below it. That is very important because it means that the homepage can sell but it can also look as though it's always updating because it will be always updating. When you add new Forever Affiliate 2013 Transcripts 5
content to the site, the bottom of that homepage will change because it's showing a blog style list of posts. So when you add a new post, it appears there on the homepage. So that's a really important step again because it accomplishes both of those goals. So, announcement sticky post, that main article at the top of the homepage, stuck there, it never moves. There's a list of blog post below that that's continually refreshing as you add a new pieces of content to that site. If you can picture that and if you can't, you'll see it soon in the coming videos as we set everything up. Anyway, if you can picture that, that is how your Minisite will look, that is how it will utilize its content and that is what we'll be trying to rank for what in all the different little parts. Authority Site Content Strategy So, from there we'll move on to Authority Site Content Strategy. Authority Site Content Strategy is a little bit different. On your Authority Site, usually remember only the one that you'll have, maybe two, this site really is just the more content the better. What you will do with this is start working from the beginning to just gradually add your content and grow your content rather continually. Obviously, there's no upper limit, the more content this kind of site has the better and the more content you have out there, the more possibilities you have to rank for those long tale keywords and do what I called before fishing, where you find other keywords that are worth targeting that prove to be profitable that you can then focus more of your resources around; maybe build a Minisite on and dealt into that little market segment further. Forever Affiliate 2013 Transcripts 6
The Authority Site, as opposed to the Minisite, the Minisite can do this through the expansion phase sometimes, but usually it's mostly for Authority Sites, you're going to use a mix of content where some of your content is going to be for product names where it's just the kind of articles we're going to talk about soon which are just reviewing a product and helping people who are looking to buy that product. And also, general interest content which is designed to increase your traffic, to potentially rank for some keywords and to get social traffic, to get shares, to get traffic from those other parts of the Internet that's a lot of times with the Minisite you can't really take advantage of. So just high-level content, just stuff that's interesting to people that's a value in that people will share around. And that will also help make your site more credible in the search engines because it's not just the case that every phase is a content on your site has a purpose of promoting something, it's just a high quality site that mixes up the kind of content between those two. That will really help you build your authority, both with your readers and with the search engines as the site grows. So the homepage with an Authority Site, it doesn't have any sticky posts like the Minisite, it's just a blog format. It's a blog format with a list of posts, that's really all. Nothing else to say there really. Very, very simple with the Authority Site. Authority Site Category & Widget Setup On the Authority Site, each product you promote or topic you write on needs its own category. On the Minisite, category is not particularly important, you can leave all the posts in the category of uncategorized if you wish, there's not going to be many of them and it doesn't matter what category they re in anyway. Forever Affiliate 2013 Transcripts 7
For the Authority Site, very different, each thing needs its own category. The reasons for that are a couple but the main one is that you're going to want to show different banners and different monetization depending on what thing it is you're writing about. So if I've got like a big pregnancy authority site, on the pieces of content that are about Pregnancy Miracle, I need to have my visitors see the banner and the affiliate links for a Pregnancy Miracle and to see them in the sidebar. But when they're on another posts, that's promoting how to choose the sex of your baby or something like that, I need the banners and the affiliate links for that product. And the only way you can do that is by putting both of those kinds of posts in different categories and then I'm going to talk about that next. Then using the categories widget in your sidebar to allow the best crawling of all the site's content. So, again, not relevant for minisites but when it comes to your Authority Site, now you're going to go into your widget's menu and WordPress appearance and then widgets and drag the list of categories into your sidebar. That will just make a list of categories show up so when the search engines land on the homepage of you site, the search engine spiders they will be able to easily and quickly crawl with just one link down into each of your categories and hopefully from there all of your pieces of content, so that's very important, categories widget in your sidebar. The of thing that you need for this, for the banners part, there's a plugin called Widget Logic that you should use to help you show those different banners depending on the category. So basically, all it does is makes it so that when you go into your widget's menu there's a kind of widget that you can drag into the sidebar called Widget Logic and when you drag it over, you paste the code in that like you normally do for a widget of what it is you want to show in the sidebar and then you Forever Affiliate 2013 Transcripts 8
get a set of options you can choose between that tell you about where you want that piece of content of that banner to show. So you select, I only want that banner to show in the category of Pregnancy Miracle, for example, and then that banner will only be seen for the posts that are in that category. So that's extremely important as well. Not only that, but you'll be able to use the same plugin to configure your opt-in form. So with the opt in form on your Authority Site, you might not use it for every piece of content that you have. For example, if you're promoting something like Pregnancy Miracle and you're attracting visitors from the search engines who are already looking for Pregnancy Miracle, you don t necessarily want to put those people onto a list of yours. You don't have to put them onto a list because you already know what they want to buy and you're already facilitating them buying it. So you don't want to get in a way of their purchase and block yourself from a commission like that. So that post doesn't need an opt-in form anywhere near it. But other pieces of content that you write on just general pregnancy tips for example, you're not going to be able to monetize that quite as easily, you'll test of course to find out but assuming that the people aren't ready, you quite yet to buy the product Pregnancy Miracle when they're rating that more general post, then you might put them onto a list. It might be more valuable and more profitable to put them on to an email list so that you can just gradually introduce them to that product and then eventually have them buy not only that but multiple products of the people who are currently pregnant. So, when you have this plugin installed, you'll be able to put the opt-in form code into your sidebar using one of these Widget Logic widgets so that it only shows on the categories of pieces of content that aren't related to a product. That might sound complicated but it's very, very easy when the time comes to do that. Nothing really Forever Affiliate 2013 Transcripts 9
more to be described doing that. You ll certainly be able to figure that out and if not you can ask us a question about. From these two slides it s basically a picture, I hope, of the content that you're going to use on the two kinds of sites that you'll have, how it s all going to work, how it will fit together and what will be the different purpose for each of the kinds of content. There's nothing in the next slide to recap. This is all relatively simple. I hope you found that valuable and we'll be back in the next video to actually look at starting to create your content now. Forever Affiliate 2013 Transcripts 10