Affiliates Blog Tour: Maximizing Affiliate Program Content

Affiliates Blog Tour: Maximizing Affiliate Program Content

We are jumping into week three now with the Affiliates Blog Tour and it’s been going great! If you’ve just discovered us, you’ll want to catch up on the previous tour posts.

Thanks to Rhonda White for hosting this stop on the tour!

Do you know that many affiliate programs provide you with free content?

It’s pretty ingenious if you think about it. Content is King on the internet so if an affiliate program really wants to sell it’s products, it is super smart to generate high quality content for their affiliates.

Good affiliate programs provide their affiliates with pre-written articles, blog posts, email promotion text and sometimes even special reports that can be used to provide valuable info to your readers and subscribers while promoting their products. In most cases, these are considered ‘free reprint content’. This means that you can use the content anywhere online, so long as you include the author bio and provide the live link that they have included in their bio. (In this case, the live link will be your unique affiliate URL so don’t forget to include it!)

Do Make It Personal

You aren’t permitted to edit the article itself, but you can write a blurb to introduce the article and include your own thoughts there. Or you can write a closing thought paragraph after the author bio if you wish. So long as the article content isn’t changed, you’re not breaking any rules.

A few affiliate managers have gone so far as to provide ‘private label rights’ content to their affiliates. In that case, you’re welcome to rewrite the content anyway you like so long as you’re using it to promote their products, they’re happy as a clam. If they do allow rewriting, please do take advantage of it. The more you can make it your own, the better.

Do I have to worry about ‘duplicate content’ issues?

We wanted to address this question because we know that a lot of you are thinking about it these days. If you’re not sure what we’re talking about, let us briefly explain.

Search engines index the content that we publish on the web so that it can be found by their search clients. Getting your content indexed is easy. Getting that content ranked well for specific search terms is complex and challenging – it depends on a lot of factors.

Reprint content is generally not going to rank well in search engines like true original content would, given proper optimization. If you’re working hard to rank well for specific keyword phrases and want to be conservative about every content choice you make, you may not want to publish reprint content – or you can make that page of content ‘no-index’ so that search engines don’t even consider it.

I’ll tell you that I don’t think that much about it yself. If I want to share a great article with my readers, I’m just going to share it and not worry about what the search engines think and as you’ll see in this next segment, there are a lot of other ways to use this content that don’t involve search engine indexing at all.

Use Articles Creatively

You’re not limited to publishing affiliate content on a website. You can add it to a newsletter, work it into a tips list, fit it into an auto-responder or post it on a forum (if the forum allows it). You can include relevant affiliate articles within your own Special Reports and eBooks. It’s a great way to add value and slip in some passive income sources.

Another creative idea is to read the article as part of a video or audio podcast – just make sure the full author bio and link is included in your show notes.

Feel free to use the articles more than once! Don’t just place the article on your blog and call it good. Use it every way that you can for maximum mileage.

What if an Affiliate Program doesn’t offer content?

Ask! Write the affiliate program manager and ask them for the specific types of content you’d like to use. They will likely commission a writer to create whatever you ask for. If they don’t – it’s their loss!

Tishia Lee, Affiliate Manager for Mom’s Talk Affiliates and Kelly McCausey, owner of Mom’s Talk Network are touring the work at home web with great tips on affiliate marketing, check out the full tour schedule here.