Many newbie affiliates are swamped in the sheer amount of information when they first come in this industry. It is understandable, without a background in some sort of entrepreneurship, or at least marketing, it is too much to grasp. So, for my newbie readers, I will talk about a fine example of a minisite, and we will also learn at last what I mean when I say “SEO’d to shit”.
The student credit card niche is one that is quite competitive, and that is because there is money in it. I found this site, http://www.studentcreditcards.com which is the textbook example of how a niche affiliate site should be like. Open the site in a new tab so you can see it as we discuss about it.
First of all, the layout is simple and nice, nothing to say here other than that it works. Sometimes clean is good. The lady on the laptop is a no-copyright image, free to use. The header has links with anchor text “student cards, credit school, consolidate, credit reports and blog”. Obviously, these are the targeted keywords for this guy’s SEO campaign. All is good, but I would whore it out even more, writing the link as “credit card blog” and “credit home”.
The domain itself is amazing, studentcreditcards.com, and a newbie affiliate is unlikely to get his hands on something similar, but the important thing here is to understand the power in keyword domains for this technique. Please note that this is a special case, and the keywords in the domain are 2, yes two, “student” and “creditcard”. We have to consider it as two, although it might be in reality 3. It just goes together, you cannot say “hard” and “drive”. Again, special case, in other niches, we go for 2 (two) keyword domain names. Always. But, if you happen to fall on a 3 word domain that the phrase has a lot of traffic, by all means register it. I have a longtail keyword domain that ranks (for its own phrase) with only a page and a title.
Ok, onto the pages now. A simple glance and you can see that there is a lot of text, that means plenty of spider food, springled with seo keywords like “fico score, negative credit profile, credit line” and a bunch of others. Please note that the page is very light, fast loading and plain html. Now, I personally would not go for plain html, I would make it a blog. Studentcreditcards.com has a blog, so that saves the problem a bit.
When we click the blog, we basically see a lot of articles, about credit report and credit cards and debt consolidation, all the classic keywords, slapped on a simple template, with a blog, used for its pinging utility. They update with a post every once in a while, which are basically more “credit report” articles, and that keeps the freshness factor at satisfying levels with minimal effort.
So, this is a good example of a niche affiliate site, please take note on the points I suggest to change, and simply make one for yourself. This site is ridiculously easy to rank for “student credit cards”. Throw a few dozen incoming links with the above anchor text, a few quality ones from nice sites, and you are done. Onto the next project.
What you need to make a site like this is:
- A keyword domain
- A clean theme
- 20-30 articles
- 50 backlinks with the keyword domain in them
The bare minimum for a site like this is 10$, if you plan to do all the writing and linkbuilding of course. A more modest price with quality work would be +50$ for the articles, and another 50$ for modest linkbuilding. There is no cap of course… A 110$ investment on a procedure that you are familiar with can allow you to pump one of these every month easily. A credit card signup is about 30$, so you will get the initial cost back very fast. Learn, adapt, and replicate.
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