Small Business Marketing

Sources of Content for Affiliates

Written by Charles Mburugu for Gaebler Ventures

As an affiliate, it is crucial that you have your own website. Having a website is not the hardest part -- the hard part is that your website has to get traffic! Search engines are offering more credibility, and traffic, to websites with many pages of updated content. They reason that if a site has many pages that are regularly updated, the website has more credibility. So, how do you go about updating your content so as to draw more traffic to your website?

There is no doubt that the best kind of traffic is traffic from search engines. Search engines can deliver free highly targeted traffic.

So how do you get search engines to bring you traffic in the first place? And how do you prove to a robotic spider that your site deserves their attention? One word - content! Search engines have one major goal - to give their visitors quality content in line with what the visitor is searching for. A search engine will do everything they can to rank websites based on what they think is relevant. So ultimately, your responsibility is to figure how you can convince search engines that your website has better content on a certain topic than another website. In other words, you should better optimize your site for a particular key word than another website. The following are three sources for quick content to help you add to your website many pages that can be indexed by search engines and subsequently draw traffic.

Article Directories

Many argue that article directories are not good places to get articles because search engines may impose a "duplicate content" penalty. However, the truth is that search engines penalize duplicate PAGES, not content. These are two different things. This means that search engines are seeking for duplicate HTML as opposed to duplicate articles. It makes sense that certain press releases and articles may appear on several places on the internet. However, if the HTML is duplicated, the search engines sense that they are being tricked. Feel free to use articles from directories. But ensure that you are creating your own unique HTML files for these articles.

Blogs

Blogs have become very powerful and search engines love them. Why? Well, blog is a contraction of "web log", an internet journal. The title implies that the blog will be continually updated. Blogs are very simple and clean HTML with easily understandable navigation for search engines. If you don't have one yet, it makes sense to start a blog on your website.

Product Information/Reviews

How do you have helpful pages of content if you sell many articles and find writing articles difficult? Write short reviews of the product, or copy and paste information about that product. If you look for an electronic item in the search engines, you will realize that the highest ranked pages are not necessarily articles, but usually websites that sell the product. Some have the product reviews and others have just copied and pasted content from another company. Therefore, a quick way to obtain content is just to "borrow" technical reviews and specifications on the product. However, since this is repeated content, remember to place them into your own template.

Charles Mburugu writes for us from his home in Nairobi. He has a graduate degree in Business Management from Kenya Institute of Management. He is interested in writing about branding, CSR and intellectual property.

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