MODULE 6: Create Content For Your Website

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Jeff Smith
1

Course Outline

Use Keywords in Your Content for SEO

Now, you have set up your website and understand the SEO basics. It’s time to create some content for your website and get traffic.

Before that, make sure you sign up for Grammarly and install the Chrome extension. With Grammarly, you can create better content and save a lot of time as it will do automatic proofreading for you.

grammarly

To start creating content, remember, each post you write should have a target keyword in mind in order to rank on search engines. And as you create more posts, your chance of getting ranked on Google will increase, leading to more traffic to your website.

If you’re not attempting to get rankings in search engines with your content, your efforts will be wasted and you will receive little to no results in terms of traffic.

So the first thing you need to do here is to research and choose a profitable keyword which we have discussed in the previous module.

While creating content around target keywords is important for driving traffic, you should never do keyword stuffing. It’s an outdated practice. Not only will Google rank your content lower, but also readers will find your content meaningless and unnatural.

Writing content for SEO is a lot more than stuffing a few keywords within your content. Google updates like Panda and Penguin make keyword stuffing ineffective and forces content marketers to create quality and relevant content.

In the next lesson, I’ll talk about how to write content that people love reading.

Tools & Resources

Write Engaging Blog Posts

To promote products in affiliate marketing, you have to create content. Writing blog posts is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and it’s going to be the focus in this course.

In this lesson, we will look into how to write effective blog posts that can capture the audience. Your goal is to engage people and get them to immerse in your website content.

People have shorter attention spans nowadays, so you must make your content reader-friendly so that they won’t leave in seconds. Here are the tips for you:

1. Use Visuals To Elaborate Your Points

It is easier to catch people’s attention by relating your content to relevant images. A picture is worth a thousand words. This will lead to more engagement and hence more conversions.

Here are the websites you can find the royalty free photos to use for your blog posts:

Also, you can create some infographics that summarise your points in a picture. That helps people understand and retain memory. These are some free tools that you can use to make infographics:

Actually, great infographics may earn you some backlinks because some other websites in your niche may repost your infographic and link it back to you. That’s beneficial to your site ranking. I will talk about this in later lessons.

2. Use Smaller Paragraphs

Remember you are not writing a school essay. You are communicating with your reader about your product or service. Large paragraphs are intimidating and discourage people to read.

Using short paragraphs with white space within your content can enhance readability and as a result, enhance the conversion rate.

Don’t write big blocks of text in a paragraph. A good practice is that your paragraphs should be no more than 6 lines of text. Long paragraphs tend to discourage readers.

One more tip is that you should use either a bulleted or numbered list when appropriate to further break down the long paragraphs.

3. Use Simple and Consistent Font Type, Font Sizes And Colors

Never use random font type, size or colors everywhere in your website. Otherwise it will look very messy and reduce the readability.

As for the font and background color, don’t go too fancy. White background with black text is the best in terms of readability.

4. Divide Your Article With Headlines And Subheadlines

It is important that you break up your content into subparagraphs. Personally I like to use the H3 tag for the subheadlines.

The headlines should tell your reader what the paragraph is about so that people can skim through your content very quickly and understand the key messages. It will make your content much more readable.

5. Use Conversational Tone And Avoid Jargons

One of the biggest mistakes people make when writing their content is to sound like a school essay. That is not appropriate when it comes to marketing. 

Your goal is to get people’s attention and read your stuff. In order to do that, you have to make it like one-on-one conversation.

That can lead to far more trust and build a relationship with your audience. So make sure your content is communicative, just like you are discussing something with your friend. Try to use simple wordings so that everyone can understand.

6. Use Active Voice

Generally, try to use the active voice whenever possible. Passive voice sentences often use more words, and can be vague. It makes the writing unclear by keeping the identity of the actor secret.

Here’s an example of using active and passive voice:

Active: The candidate believes that Congress must place a ceiling on the budget.

Passive: It is believed by the candidate that a ceiling must be placed on the budget by Congress.

You can see that the sentence using active voice is much easier to read and understand.

7. Use Software To Analyse The Readability Of Your Content

Some softwares can help analyse the readability of your content. Personally I like using the Hemingway Editor and Grammarly to help me figure out what sentences to improve in order to increase the readability.

Tools & Resources

7 Principles of Writing Product Reviews

To promote products in affiliate marketing, you have to create content. Writing blog posts is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and it’s going to be the focus in this course.

In this lesson, we will look into how to write effective blog posts that can capture the audience. Your goal is to engage people and get them to immerse in your website content.

People have shorter attention spans nowadays, so you must make your content reader-friendly so that they won’t leave in seconds. Here are the tips for you:

1. Use Visuals To Elaborate Your Points

It is easier to catch people’s attention by relating your content to relevant images. A picture is worth a thousand words. This will lead to more engagement and hence more conversions.

Here are the websites you can find the royalty free photos to use for your blog posts:

Also, you can create some infographics that summarise your points in a picture. That helps people understand and retain memory. These are some free tools that you can use to make infographics:

Actually, great infographics may earn you some backlinks because some other websites in your niche may repost your infographic and link it back to you. That’s beneficial to your site ranking. I will talk about this in later lessons.

2. Use Smaller Paragraphs

Remember you are not writing a school essay. You are communicating with your reader about your product or service. Large paragraphs are intimidating and discourage people to read.

Using short paragraphs with white space within your content can enhance readability and as a result, enhance the conversion rate.

Don’t write big blocks of text in a paragraph. A good practice is that your paragraphs should be no more than 6 lines of text. Long paragraphs tend to discourage readers.

One more tip is that you should use either a bulleted or numbered list when appropriate to further break down the long paragraphs.

3. Use Simple and Consistent Font Type, Font Sizes And Colors

Never use random font type, size or colors everywhere in your website. Otherwise it will look very messy and reduce the readability.

As for the font and background color, don’t go too fancy. White background with black text is the best in terms of readability.

4. Divide Your Article With Headlines And Subheadlines

It is important that you break up your content into subparagraphs. Personally I like to use the H3 tag for the subheadlines.

The headlines should tell your reader what the paragraph is about so that people can skim through your content very quickly and understand the key messages. It will make your content much more readable.

5. Use Conversational Tone And Avoid Jargons

One of the biggest mistakes people make when writing their content is to sound like a school essay. That is not appropriate when it comes to marketing. 

Your goal is to get people’s attention and read your stuff. In order to do that, you have to make it like one-on-one conversation.

That can lead to far more trust and build a relationship with your audience. So make sure your content is communicative, just like you are discussing something with your friend. Try to use simple wordings so that everyone can understand.

6. Use Active Voice

Generally, try to use the active voice whenever possible. Passive voice sentences often use more words, and can be vague. It makes the writing unclear by keeping the identity of the actor secret.

Here’s an example of using active and passive voice:

Active: The candidate believes that Congress must place a ceiling on the budget.

Passive: It is believed by the candidate that a ceiling must be placed on the budget by Congress.

You can see that the sentence using active voice is much easier to read and understand.

7. Use Software To Analyse The Readability Of Your Content

Some softwares can help analyse the readability of your content. Personally I like using the Hemingway Editor and Grammarly to help me figure out what sentences to improve in order to increase the readability.

Tools & Resources

Product Review Template That Brings Sales

In this lesson, to help you get started quickly, I’m going to give you an example template that you can use for every product review you write.

You can produce content faster when you have a template to follow. While there are no fixed rules on the structure of a product review, it’s a good practice to include the following sections or elements in a comprehensive product review.

Introduction

  • Find an interesting way to start your review that taps into your reader’s emotions (e.g. what they’re passionate about, what is their fear, etc.).
  • Inform the reader what topics you will cover such as the benefits and drawbacks of the product.
  • Gives the reader a purpose or reason to finish reading the post.

How Does [Product] Work?

  • Describe how the product works. You might want to mention what problems the product can supposedly solve and how it might help your reader.
  • You might include a bullet list that consists of product specs (e.g. product measurements, product features, etc.).

My [Product] Review (How Well The Product Works)

  • People read your article because they want to know what you think about the product. Ultimately, your role is to help the reader assess how well a product works to solve a particular problem. 
  • There are two basic ways you can find out how well a product works. You either try the product yourself (which is the best and most convincing) or you can read about the customer reviews and summarise the points.
  • Tell a few things you like about the product, and one (or two) minor things you don’t like.
  • It is a good idea to structure this section as a story. People relate well to stories and will often keep reading just to find out the story ending.

[Product] Pros & [Product] Cons

  • Include a bullet list with pros and cons.
  • Identify 3 or 4 things that are good about the product. Then mention one or two minor things that are not so great about the product.
  • This basically summarises some key points about the product to your reader and also provides people with some break from reading sentences and paragraphs.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this is where you summarise your key points and persuade your prospect to buy the product. 

Try to stress the product’s benefit and don’t mention any drawbacks in this section. Give your personal opinion that buying the product is a good idea as it solves a particular problem.

But at the same time, you don’t want to be too salesy. Because you’re the reviewer, not a salesperson. 

Where to Buy (Product Name)

In this last section, this is your final call to action. Make sure to bold it and make it prominent to draw the reader’s attention and click the affiliate link. 

Example: Click Here To Get 20% Discount on (Product Name)

Here, you tell your reader where to get the best deal. For example, maybe buying through this link can have free shipping, or 20% off, or have bonuses etc. You can also try to eliminate the risk by mentioning the money-back guarantee, if any, offered by the seller.

Exclusive Bonuses

In affiliate marketing, it’s unavoidable that you will face competition from other affiliate marketers. When people search for the product review, there are many reviews on the search results page, so how do you incentivise people to use your affiliate link to make a purchase?

You have to offer bonuses. Offering bonuses is the best way to give people a reason to buy via your link instead of others. Actually, it’s the game-changer.

Digital products are the best to offer as a bonus as you don’t have an additional cost to give away to more people.

If you don’t want to create digital products as bonuses, you can actually buy the PLR content or software.

I recommend IDplr.com and PLR.me, where you can get quality PLR content or software to offer as bonuses for your customers.

Tools & Resources

What Content Does Google Love?

If you want your content to get ranking on Google, you need to understand what Google likes and dislikes.

In this lesson, you’ll learn what content to create in order to earn the love of Google.

1. Long-Form Content

Various research proves that long-form content, which has more than 1500 words, ranks better on Google.

However, content length alone won’t improve your ranking. The reason why long-form content ranks better is that it usually covers a particular topic in-depth. Therefore, while your blog post should be around 1,500 words, your focus is on quality, not quantity. 

Apart from better ranking, long-form content is usually ranked for multiple keywords that you might not intend to. The reason is that long blog posts usually include a lot of relevant keywords. As a result, the posts will be ranked for those relevant keywords in addition to the target keyword.

Sometimes, your blog post might be ranked for some keywords that do not even exist in the post as Google might regard your content as top-notch and relevant to a broad topic.

Moreover, bloggers like linking to long-form content that is comprehensive enough to answer or solve a particular problem. So your blog post can attract more backlinks and referred traffic. 

2. Create High Quality and Relevant Content

If you want to rank high or outrank your competitor on Google, you have to create better content than others. There are three aspects that you can focus on.

Firstly, you should cover a particular topic more thoroughly than your competitors. Try to provide more up-to-date information and data. Most importantly, your content must be relevant to the target keyword. Google’s algorithm is becoming more and more intelligent in analysing the relevancy. You should create content that subtly targets keywords, not stuffing keywords.

Secondly, add visually stunning media such as infographics, charts, gifs, videos to stand out. 

Thirdly, pay attention to the user experience. For example, font type and size should be appropriate for reading. Write short and easy-to-digest paragraphs. You can also use quotes, bulleted lists, bolded sentences when appropriate. Having a table of content is great if your blog post is very long.

3. Regular Content Updates 

Consistency in posting new and updated content is important. If you create content regularly, Google will assign authority to your website for a particular category of content. Authority will lead to faster and better rankings. So I would suggest creating at least one new post a week. 

Moreover, updating your content has a positive effect on your ranking. Google will notice the frequency of updates and tend to like ranking frequently updated pages. Outdated content may drop in ranking and have less traffic gradually.

There is a free tool by Animalz that can be connected to your Google Analytics account and identify pages that may need an update based on the declining traffic.

For posts that have large updates or changes, you might consider republishing it as a new post. For example, you might have added a significant amount of new content or examples.

Tools & Resources

Create a Content Calendar

Publishing content regularly is the key to success in affiliate marketing. New content can increase your odds of ranking on Google and drive more traffic for sales. 

In order to stay organised, you should create a content calendar for your affiliate marketing business. A content calendar is a schedule of when and where you plan to publish upcoming content. It will help you keep track of the upcoming posts, status updates, planned promotional activity, updating old content etc. This is particularly useful if you have a team and need to coordinate with each other.

If you don’t have a content calendar, you will likely forget things, publish less and neglect updating old posts. These are the common mistakes of many affiliate marketers who don’t achieve any success.

Creating a content calendar may seem daunting if you’ve never done it before. But once you get used to the process, you’ll see how helpful it can be.

The goal of a content calendar is to make things easier and more organised for you and the team.

You can design your content calendar according to your own preference. But for creating an effective content calendar, here are some tips for you:

1. Choose The Right Tools For Creating a Content Calendar

Choosing the right tool for a content calendar can greatly help with efficiency and analytics tracking.

If you are just starting out, you can use Google Sheets to create a simple content calendar.

But as your website grows and you have a team, you should get a content calendar plugin to help. CoSchedule is a super powerful and helpful WordPress plugin for this.

CoSchedule features a content calendar where you can schedule not only your post’s publication but also your social media promotion. It makes posting and promoting your content simple and easy to remember.

2. Keep It Simple At The Beginning

While a content calendar is important for getting things organised, you should keep the calendar simple at the beginning. You can then gradually build in more details and functionalities into the calendar.

If you have team members, you should inform your team about the items on the content calendar and conduct training when required.

3. Include the Important Dates

You should start with the important dates and deadlines. These dates may include draft due dates, deadlines for publishing a post, deadlines for designing graphics and dates for promoting the content.

4. Specify the Form of Content to be Created

You might have different forms of content in marketing products. For example, there might be blog posts, email campaigns, social media posts, infographics etc.

For some content types, you may also need to break out the steps of creating a certain type of content. For example, writing a blog post may involve steps like keyword research, outlining, writing content and design. You should set a schedule in an “assembly-line style”.

5. Include the Details For a Piece of Content

For each piece of content you plan to create, make sure you include as many details as possible such as the topic, reference materials, target keywords, responsible person etc. 

This can avoid mistakes and produce content efficiently. This is very important if you hire people to produce content for you.

6. Track the Status

Your content calendar should be able to track the status of the tasks. Make sure you set realistic deadlines beforehand, otherwise you might find yourself missing a lot of due dates.

7. Include Links to Published Content

Your content calendar should include the links to the finished work. These links can help you find any piece of content afterwards. It’s very helpful if you want to interlink the relevant content together later on.

The Content Hub Model

A content hub model means creating a set of interlinked, related content that all link back to a central page or money page. 

For example, if you’re promoting a weight loss supplement, you could create a content hub for that weight loss supplement. You aim to do internal linking from other relevant pages to the money page to boost its ranking.

Why Should You Use a Content Hub Model?

If you want to improve topical visibility and find it hard to rank for some competitive product review keywords, creating a content hub can help a lot. 

Content hubs work by passing link authority and topical relevance from the other related pages into the money page. By concentrating internal linking onto one page, you improve that page’s ability to rank.

Moreover, if you are publishing lots of really great content on a specific topic, then you are naturally starting to position yourself as an authority in that area. Having it interlinked together like a hub makes it easier for users (and Google) to access all related content, further boosting your authority.

Also, people like linking to high-quality web pages. You will see more natural backlinks to your content hub pages, which can further boost your domain authority and improve your website SEO.

How to Implement the Content Hub Model?

content hub model

There are two main types of content in the content hub model:

  • Pillar content – the main post or money page targeting a more competitive but high traffic keyword. Usually, it should be the product review page.
  • Cluster content – supporting blog posts explaining the subtopics related to the pillar content. Usually, it should be related to the affiliate product you are promoting.

The pillar content and supporting cluster blog posts should be interlinked. This can strengthen the semantic relationship between the articles and Google will see a better topical relevance of the posts.

To use a content hub model, simply organize all related keywords into keywords lists. One keyword list should become topic clusters or a content hub, meaning all the keywords are related to a certain topic. And each keyword should be a separate blog post.

Let’s take a look at a specific example:

If one of the content hubs on your blog focuses on promoting Wealthy Affiliate, the keywords and content titles may look like this:

Focus keyword and pillar article title:

  • Wealthy Affiliate Review (The Ultimate Wealthy Affiliate Review)

Focus keywords for possible cluster articles:

  • How much can you make with affiliate marketing
  • How to make money with affiliate marketing
  • Success Stories of Wealthy Affiliate
  • How much is Wealthy Affiliate

Remember, you should take keywords as separate content topics and there should be a natural relationship between them in order to constitute a content hub.

Generate New Content Ideas

In this lesson, I’m going to talk about how to generate unlimited content ideas. Many people struggle to brainstorm content ideas. But actually, it’s very easy if you use the techniques in this lesson.

1. Getting New Content Ideas From Old Content

Your old content is a great source for generating new content ideas. But only a few marketers take advantage of them.

With every new piece of content you create, you can get additional ideas outside of the main topic to create sequels, spinoffs, and other related content.

In a 1,500-word blog post, it’s likely to have a number of key points or topics. You can easily create a separate blog post for each of those key points or topics.

Consider the subheading or subsections of the old content. Those tangential ideas can be turned into dedicated blog posts. Any ideas that are not already the main point of a piece of content can become the main point of a new blog post.

Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself. It’s different to create a detailed blog post for an idea that is briefly mentioned in the original post.

After creating the spinoff pieces, you can add internal links from the old blog post to the spinoff pieces.

Moreover, you can read your old posts and see what is missing when looking in hindsight. You can then create a new blog post for the missing points.

2. Searches Related To

You can find new content ideas by simply scrolling down to the bottom of SERPs.

Type a keyword or phrase into Google. At the bottom, you will see “searches related to”. Google gives you many similar keywords or phrases, which are actual entries done by users.

You can get some clues of what people are searching for a certain topic.

You can uncover more content ideas by clicking these related searches continuously.

find long tail keywords

3. People Also Ask

Did you realise that Google features a “People also ask” box in the middle of SERPs? This snippet gives you ideas of what questions searchers have asked related to the keyword you type in.

“People also ask” is clickable. When you click it, more questions will pop up for you. You can create new content to answer these questions.

find long tail keywords

4. Google Autosuggest

This technique is similar to the Alphabet Soup Technique where you can rely on google’s autosuggestions to generate more content ideas. Google keeps giving you ideas as you type in your query.

generate new content ideas

5. Answer the Public

To generate blog topic ideas, Answer the Public is a very useful tool. By simply typing in a target keyword or phrase, it will generate many lists of content ideas. 

Answer the Public excels at visualizing ideas in multiple formats. They connect ideas via similarly related keywords, questions, prepositions, alphabetically and more.

Not only will this tool show you what people are searching for on Google, but it also finds the questions people ask on various forums, social media networks and more.

In the free version of Answer The Public, there isn’t a fixed number of free searches per day. This amount varies based on traffic and usage of the tool at that particular moment.

They sometimes experience extremely high volumes of searches and have to reduce free search limits to keep it functioning.

find long tail keywords

6. Quora

Quora is a reputable Q&A forum where people ask questions and users chime in to provide useful answers. 

Given the large database of Quora, you can use it to do content idea research. People have already searched specific terms and asked them in a question format. So you can really take some popular or trending questions on Quora and write a blog post for it.

quora research

7. Find Viral Content Ideas Using BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a great tool for brainstorming content ideas that are popular on social media platforms.

buzzsumo

Simply type a keyword and  BuzzSumo will present you with the most trending and popular topics that are generating clicks and shares.

It also breaks down its findings according to social networks. This feature allows you to identify what content is performing best on different social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

BuzzSumo has a free plan that provides limited search results across the Discovery, Content, and Influencer features. You can go to have a try.

Tools & Resources

Accept Guest Posts

Creating content for your blog takes a lot of time and effort. If you want more quality content for your blog, you should consider accepting guest posts.

In this lesson, I’m going to talk about why you should accept guest posts and how to do that on your website.

Why Should You Accept Guest Posts?

Accepting guest posts is no different from getting free content for your website. Also, you can build a relationship with guest bloggers.

Many guest bloggers will share their guest posts on your website, which will subsequently promote your blog. This can lead to more social media shares and, hopefully, links to your site.

Here are the benefits you can gain from accepting guest posts:

  • A different voice, opinion or different view about a subject – your website can have a different opinion or fresh perspectives with the contribution of guest bloggers.
  • Free content for your blog – you can write less with guest posts. You just have to edit for quality control but it is much less time-consuming.
  • More time to do other tasks – Publishing a guest post once in a while can free up some time to do other tasks.
  • More social media exposure – Normally the guest bloggers will promote his/her article on social media and as a result, your website will get promoted as well.
  • Give your blog the feel of a professional publication – Guest writers make your blog feel more official, helping it blur the lines between blog and magazine.

Create Guest Posting Guidelines

Once you open your blog to guest posts, you may receive a lot of inquiries from people who are seeking guest post opportunities. 

To reduce the number of inquiries and give people a better understanding of your expectation, you should create a guest posting guideline.

In the guideline, you should at least indicate the length of posts, the preferred topic, or any incentives you might be willing to offer.

For example, these are the criteria you may use:

  • Content must be related to online marketing.
  • Content is SEO optimised.
  • Is original content.
  • Is 800 words or more.
  • Includes a featured image
  • Includes proper headings, formatting, spelling and grammar.
  • No affiliate links in the article
  • If we accept and publish your article, you give High Income Source full rights as the exclusive publisher of your article. This means we can modify your article however we like.
  • Also, you will not be able to republish your article anywhere online, including your own site.

You may want to add more items to filter bad guest posts, especially when your website has lots of traffic and has many guest posts to choose from.

What to Do Before Publishing a Guest Post?

Before you publish a guest post, you should do the following to maintain the quality of content on your website:

  • Check for uniqueness – Use a plagiarism detection tool like Copyscape to ensure that the content is 100% unique. You can also search the title on Google and read some similar articles to see if the content is duplicated.
  • Text formatting, add images etc. – You should optimise the on-page SEO of the guest posts. For example, you should add correct headings (H1, H2, H3), break the content into smaller paragraphs, add images with relevant ALT text etc.
  • Internal linking – Internal linking is good for SEO, so try to add a couple of links to your existing articles.

Tools & Resources

In the next module, I will teach you some advanced SEO tactics to help you rank higher on search engines.

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