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One thing that really disappointed me for a long time is the lack of articles that talk about building links specifically for affiliate sites, which in my opinion is an incredibly difficult thing to do. The strategy involved in promoting affiliate sites is vastly different than it is for promoting a news or blog site for one main reason – you’re looking to protect your niche more aggressively than the owner of any other kind of website. This post will give some insight into getting backlinks to your affiliate sites, in the hopes of helping them rank for specific keyword terms.

I’m sure that most of the backlinking strategy and tutorial articles you’ve read all say the same thing: put your link in your forum signatures in forums that relate to your site topic, bookmark your sites, submit articles that point back to your site, post in blog comments and point to your site, build a following on Twitter and Facebook, etc. Guess what – practically none of this applies when you’re backlinking to your affiliate site. Why? Because all of these venues are filled with people like you – entrepreneurs, affiliate & internet marketers and domainers. Guess what, they are the first ones who are looking to steal niches and copy what you’re doing.

Antisocial Marketing

It could be that I’m overly paranoid (I am, and I admit it) – but I don’t want to put a link to my affiliate site anywhere near *any* location where an internet marketer is going to see it. The more you advertise your links in other places where internet marketers are, the more competition you’re going to create, since they will not only a) steal your niche, but b) steal your target keywords, c) do a reverse-backlink check of your site to see your linking strategy, and d) scrape and re-hash your content. Don’t believe me? Don’t put it past today’s internet marketers. They are simply ruthless and out to make yet another dollar per day.

Another ongoing fear is to put a link on a site within the same category where someone will look at it and say “holy crap! eBay has an affiliate program – people SELL these things on eBay? …and I can make commissions on this stuff?!” and you’ve just created yet another competitor-slash-BANS/PHPbay user. Yes, I have a sickening level of paranoia. What’s even worse is if this new competitor is someone who has many years of experience in the industry of the product you’re selling, and can provide better content than you can.

The only thing that matters the most right now in SEO, unfortunately, is link building. More links = better, it’s a simple equation. Descriptive anchor text is where it’s at. Since you will probably never get a high quality backlink for an affiliate site (just being a realist here), you’ll have to get oodles of low-quality ones to make up for it.

In affiliate marketing, you will want your site to rank for “selling point” long-tail keywords; the keywords that people type in while their credit card is out and are looking to buy immediately. The biggest mistake that I made in the beginning of my career is to rank for 2-word keywords, thinking that more traffic would equal more money. I was dead wrong. It just meant lots of web hits that amounted to no sales whatsoever. Start ranking for the keyword strings that a point-of-purchase customer is typing in, and you’ll be much more successful.

When it comes down to promoting an affiliate site, these are the tactics I’ve found to be the best strategy:

1. Free directory submissions: Most people hate them and complain that they provide no value, link juice or anything else. I beg to differ. I’ve gotten some very decent long-tail rankings which have brought in hundreds of dollars per month (no joke) just by submitting to dozens of free directories on a weekly basis, BY HAND. Yes, do it by hand and tweak it a little bit each time. Don’t point the same link to your site, it’s not going to help. In other words, one link should say “Discount widgets for less,” another says “The widget store” and yet another: “Widget sale.” Well, don’t use those annoying salesy terms, but think of something more professional…you get the idea. The main point is that search engines are seeing terms that all use a particular keyword in there, AS WELL AS synonyms of that keyword. That’s the one you’re looking to rank for, and these variations are all being inspected to cherry-pick that keyword.
2. Link building via social bookmarking: It’s a no-brainer. Bookmark every single affiliate store page to Delicious.com, use good tags with dashes in between them, dump your delicious account via the “export file” option and find other bookmarking services that accept delicious.com imports. Rinse and repeat, but use variations on the other bookmarking sites you use. I prefer to open up the delicious.com dump in a notepad file, and edit the titles a little bit, then submit the file. Once again, they key is to get ‘different backlinks’ that use the same general keyword. Do it over a period of a month – don’t bookmark all of your site’s pages at once on many sites at once, it will look spammy to search engines.
3. Strategic blog commenting: I don’t have to tell you this, but blogs almost always let you comment on posts by using a “name”, “website URL” and “email address.” Make your name be your site’s name, and your URL be your affiliate site. Write something useful and never, ever mention your site. The backlink is already there – it’s going to be your hyperlinked username. Newb warning: yes, it will be nofollow…but the day you learn that there’s nothing wrong with nofollow is the day you’ll be a better backlink builder :) When choosing blogs, look for ones in your product category that are very outdated with a blogger who is not very internet-savvy: believe me, there are many out there. The key is to sneak a link in the comment area of someone who is not going to know what affiliate marketing is, or probably even bother to click the link to your site.
4. Article writing: These will be the most powerful backlinks you’ll ever get. Write articles on Hubpages, Squidoo, EZine articles (be careful, it is an internet marketer’s hang-out), Blogspot, WordPress.com and other similar sites. If at all possible, set your account up so that it is isolated from the community as much as possible – don’t link out to others, don’t go crazy with tags, and don’t participate. This antisocial marketing approach minimizes the possibility of another internet marketer seeing what you’re doing and stealing your idea. Some webmasters like to top it all off with a nice ‘link wheel,’ which consists of building backlinks to your backlinks, which were originally pointing to your site.
5. Authority directory submission: I left this one for last, because it is expensive. It is possible to get an affiliate site listed in directories like Yahoo Directory, Best Of The Web and JoeAnt if you fit their guidelines – and all three of these are highly respected. This, of course, depends on your ability to swallow a hefty cost for the sole purpose of getting linked to from a good directory. The traffic will be nearly non-existent, but my personal strategy is “it’s all about the anchored backlinks,” not the residual traffic. When being listed on a directory, it helps to have a keyword term as a domain name. That way, you’re killing two birds with one stone: getting a backlink from a decent site, and getting a backlink that has the keyword you want to rank for (note that directories never let you have a listing that has anything except your website name as a backlink).

Remember one thing, the goal here is to advertise your affiliate site. Everything you’ve heard about social networking is a mute point – nobody is going to give half a crap about helping you promote your affiliate site. It simply will not be successful in a social marketing environment, unless you have some really wacky and interesting idea like a risque niche t-shirt site. All of the rules have changed. This strategy involves being unseen, and building backlinks in the shadows of the night.

Keep working at it and you’ll amass enough backlinks to get your sites ranked for helpful long-tail keywords, hopefully within pages 1-2 of major search engines after a year or two. Did I mention that most affiliate sales sites need a good couple years to start being successful? Patience is a virtue with affiliate marketing. Good luck with your stealth linkbuilding strategy – let me know if you have any other tips to add!