To start making money with affiliate marketing, you should be using funnels to build your opt-in lists and affiliate marketing blogs to increase your chances of attracting as many targeted prospects as possible. And to maximize your affiliate marketing leads, you need to use every possible form of search engine optimization (SEO) on both your blogs and your squeeze pages that lead into your affiliate funnels.
These days, quality backlinks from related sites are a big part of off-page SEO, and they can go a long way towards improving your affiliate marketing results by helping your affiliate blogs and squeeze pages rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs). As the search engines see it, if related blogs in your same niche feel you’re worth linking to then there must be some good content on your site, content the engines should be showing on their SERPs.
Commenting on other people’s blogs can be a powerful source of quality backlinks if you know what to watch for. The first step is to find the top 20 or 30 blogs in your niche. That’s not hard to do – just enter your main keyword or keyword phrase followed by ‘blog’ in your favorite search engine. Check through the results and find blogs that fit your site’s topic and seem to be updated regularly.
Next, look for posts that already have comments and use ‘View > Page Source’ from the top menus to see the coding for the page. Scroll through til you find the comments, and look for the link to a commenter’s site. By default, WordPress blogs add a piece of code to these links that says: rel=’external nofollow’. This tells the search engines it’s an external link and not to have their spider follow that link. Why WP would be that unfriendly to commenters is beyond me, and obviously to a number of others as well since there are dozens of plugins available to get rid of that ‘nofollow’ attribute.
So from your list of the top blogs in your niche, immediately disregard any blog still using the ‘nofollow’ tag – just cross them right off your list entirely. Smart affiliates don’t waste their time with partial results – you want both the potential traffic clicking on your link AND the search engine boost, so only bother with those blogs that offer you both.
Now that you have a list of blogs that target your niche and use one of the do-follow plugins, start visiting them and leaving comments regularly. Understand that your goal is both to get traffic from that blog’s audience and to get another backlink. As such, you have to leave intelligent, relevant comments. Good blogs have comment moderation, meaning your comment won’t show until it’s been approved, and fluff or spam won’t be approved so don’t waste your time and the time of the blog owner.
The more often you comment on a blog the greater your exposure to their readership, and the greater the chances of them clicking through to check out your blogs and squeeze pages. Don’t use links in your comments – blogging software will link your username to your URL automatically. Pay particular attention to blogs whose comments also link to your latest blog post and/or your Twitter account, as these are bonus values for you.
If the site shows it’s using the CommentLuv plugin, you’ll see a link to each commenter’s last blog post under their comment, using their post’s title as the anchor text. When you isolate the blogs using this plugin, be sure to use your keywords in your blog post before heading over to leave your comments – this ensures your keywords will be part of the anchor text linking back to your own blog, another SEO benefit from your blog commenting activities.
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