SEO in Affiliate Marketing 2024

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: SEO in Affiliate Marketing 2024
Host: John Wright
Published: Thu, 11 Jan 2024 15:30:00 +0000
Duration: 10:22

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: Welcome to the affiliate BI podcast. And today is going to be a solo cast episode where I'm going to be talking about SEO and affiliate marketing 2024. I can say that I've had the luxury to be able to interview a wide range of SEO guests, uh, pretty much in the past six months and the names are Matt Diggity, Kyle Roof, Victor Carpenko, Gabriela Covey, Sean Chaudhary, Fari Kuzoni, Mihal Suski and Karai Tugbuk Gubaru, if I've pronounced that correctly and yeah, I've just been lucky to interview them.

[00:00:38] John Wright: And there's a lot of things that have kind of, I've realized like what all these SEO people have in common in terms of what did they see for the future of both SEO and affiliate marketing. And a lot of the sentiments are pretty similar that SEO isn't dying. It's never really going to die.

[00:00:57] John Wright: And that things are changing in terms of like, you know, what do people need to do to be successful? And one of those topics is basically AI. And I get a chance to ask like, what are they doing for AI? What are they learning? What are they studying for their, um, like learning, what courses are they studying and what tools are they working on, uh, for basically going, how do we integrate AI into what they're doing? And the answers I've heard are all across the board from, I mean, content writing is the obvious one, but it's really taking it to another level and going, can you use chat GPT for doing SEO analysis on a website, um,

[00:01:37] John Wright: feeding it pages and saying, analyze this content, uh, tell me if you're optimized for a certain keyword or tell me if there's a lot of intent on this or simply put, even if you want to use it for content ideation or content summaries, you can feed it like a book, a large PDF and say analyze it or give me summaries on this. So this kind of makes life easier for your content writing team. I mean, there's just no, it's like an endless supply of ideas. Like you can seriously ask it for ideas on things and go, I don't know what I'm doing, but give me 10 ideas on a certain topic, uh, whether it's related

[00:02:16] John Wright: to blog posts, social media, or even video content, uh, going further into content itself, it seems that the type of content that might be more prevalent in 2024 and beyond is more on the video side. And why is that? Well, maybe because we're already being flooded with written content. And I think written content is always going to be valuable. But one thing I'm starting to realize is that people are buying from people. So as much as these SEO practitioners are advocating, not just doing content, but quality content and topical authority.

[00:02:53] John Wright: If you think about what topical authority is, it's, it's proving to the search engines that you are a real person. And it's also proving to them that you are the authority on that topic. So to be the authority, you've got to know your stuff and take research to the max and take product, um, led development to the max. And I think a lot of people don't do that. So when you think about what video does almost all of these SEO, um, uh, experts, they're all on video and many of them preach that this is their best channels for selling their products and services from a B2B point of view, as well as doing their own affiliate sites.

[00:03:32] John Wright: So I want to jump into an SEO book that I started reading and it's one I'm going to highly recommend. So as much as I have a little section that I want to talk about SEO books, I'm really just going to focus on a single book here, which is product led SEO by Eli Schwartz and the subtitle is the why behind building your organic growth strategy. And I can say I'm, I'm about a one third into the book and I'm all in on this book. It tells you to think about content and think about your ICP, like your ideal customer profile.

[00:04:10] John Wright: I think a lot of affiliates themselves don't really do this. And the ones that maybe don't even have any success at all, they're, they're looking at it from the end of the funnel. They're like, I want to make money and I want to make a lot of money. And they're not looking at the beginning of the funnel, which is what does my customer want and what can I do to create content for them and simply put a lot of people just don't really think about that. So I know for what we have to do as a B2B SaaS company is we need to speak the language of affiliates. And I can say that the strategy that we have been working on, it really speaks to what I see happening in this book, which is product led SEO.

[00:04:47] John Wright: And I think, I think anyone that does affiliate marketing, they should definitely grab this book and read it. I'd almost go as far as to say, you should read this book before you start an affiliate marketing because the numbers speak for themselves. It's maybe less than 1% of affiliate marketers will have success getting started in affiliate marketing. People aspire to be their own business owner, have a website, have a community or a YouTube or video channel, and they want to make money from this stuff and maybe work from home or maybe make more money than what they could working at a, at a regular job or any type of job. So I really think that if people take the time to invest in something like

[00:05:27] John Wright: this, this is definitely one place you want to get started. Another place that I think, um, you know, I believe a lot of people are having success because they take the time to study and do research is comes down to SEO courses. And there's two courses I'm going to recommend. And I know there's actually a lot more I could recommend, but I'm just looking at the ones that I know the people behind them and I've had a chance to look inside their communities and see, see what people are saying about the courses. So the first one I'm going to talk about is IMG courses, which is internet marketing gold. This is run by Kyle Roof and I think a few other people.

[00:06:04] John Wright: And I know some of the SEO, um, experts that have actually been part of the course creation of some of the individual courses. So I've looked through it myself and they described themselves as like the Netflix for SEO, and that's pretty much an accurate way of thinking about it. So highly recommend that one. It's not very expensive. You can get it as a monthly subscription. You're better off watching that stuff than you are watching, uh, endless hours of Netflix. That's not going to help you make money. And the next one is having the chance to interview, uh, Corai, who's got a conference coming up, uh, this year in Istanbul in September. So look out for that.

[00:06:41] John Wright: And his course is the topical authority and semantic SEO course. And a reason why I'm going to recommend this one, even though I don't have a, like I'm now part of their community. So I get to see what's, what kind of discussions are taking place behind it. But I have a lot of SEO friends that are affiliate marketers and they're more affiliate marketers than they are SEO practitioners in the sense that they don't have, um, an SEO agency, but there's one SEO that I follow and he's very private. And he told me that he's taken this course and he's like, this is an amazing course. If he says this course is amazing. Again, I'd love to give the person the reference so you can actually, um, put

[00:07:21] John Wright: some weight behind it, but because he said this course is like a must must take. I'm probably going to consider taking this course, even though I think I've got a decent level of SEO, but I'm always interested in learning SEO. So I know for these courses, there's lots to learn behind it. And yeah, if you're excited about SEO, I think SEO is not dying. And like I said, just asking all of these SEO experts, like what do you see as the future of SEO? Do you think it's too late to get into affiliate marketing because all the big players have all the money and they're able to buy the way to success. And almost all of them have without hesitation said, no, that's not the case.

[00:07:58] John Wright: But I know if I ask the people in the affiliate marketing side of business, especially in iGaming, is it too late?

[00:08:05] John Wright: And most of them kind of say, yes, it's too late. You need, you need a lot of money. You need, you need investors to, to really make this work. I'm not going to say that you don't need investors. That's one way of doing it. But if you really have the bootstrap mentality, you will always be able to find people that have bootstrapped a business with almost nothing. I mean, look at what's prevalent today for affiliate marketing. These are social media channels. They are the video channels like YouTube, TikTok, um, you know, shorts, you name it. And people are able to do this on a budget. I mean, simply put, you can literally get started with like no website at all.

[00:08:43] John Wright: You can just have your phone and you can just go ahead and just start making videos, upload them to YouTube or TikTok or have them on a single channel. You can be a Twitch streamer. And once you start building your audience, you're going to start getting traffic. The only thing you need to do is just start monetizing it. And that takes a little bit of work and a little bit of effort. But the, the key, the key component of success is kind of like the consistency. It's like, take something that you want to do, do it well, repeat doing it. Learn, get better. Like just try things and experiment because if you don't do these experiments, you're not going to know what works and you're not going to know what content resonates with your audience.

[00:09:22] John Wright: And even more importantly, if you are doing affiliate marketing and watching which content leads to more sales, you won't know this unless you're not testing. So good luck for 2024.

[00:09:35] John Wright: I'm really pumped for what AI is going to do for SEO for affiliate marketing. Um, I think there's definitely a point in time where people need to look at spending more time in the AI space, let alone with SEO. But I can say that if you're part of a lot of these SEO communities, you're going to get exposed to, uh, what, what kinds of tools people are using in the AI space. So thank you so much for listening. And once again, as always, I just want a big favor. If you can do that, which is ratings and reviews, wherever you listen to this podcast. They do, do me a great favor and you know, I'm trying to leapfrog and get

[00:10:11] John Wright: this podcast in affiliate marketing to more people and educate the space of what does business intelligence look like in affiliate marketing.