Link Building for Affiliate Sites (Without Buying Them)

Building links to affiliate sites is hard, and it makes sense. When people link to you, your pages rank higher in Google. You get referral traffic and you make more money. But what are you offering them? Value for their audience? Now, while it's hard to get links to money pages, it's far from impossible. Plus, you don't necessarily need to get links just to money pages in order to rank. So in this video, I'll share some link building tactics and strategies to get backlinks to your affiliate site without buying them. Stay tuned. Now, before we get into the tips, I want to note that I fully understand that a lot of people buy links to their affiliate pages. But if that's what you're looking for in this tutorial, you're not going to find it here. All of the tips, tactics, and strategies I'll share with you today are in line with Google's Terms of Service. So with that out of the way, let's get on with the first link building strategy. And that's to get inspiration from your competitors' most linked to pages. Now, chances are, your competitors' most linked to pages are not going to be highly commercial. Reason being, more people will link to pages that add some kind of value for their content. But these pages are still important because as you get more backlinks to them, the authority of those pages increase. And because you own the site, you can add internal links from these pages to effectively pass page rank to your money pages. So to get started, you'll need to find one of the bigger affiliate players in your niche. Assuming you were in the personal finance niche, that might be a site like NerdWallet.com. So I'll take that domain and enter it into Ahrefs' Site Explorer. Next, I'll head over to the Best Buy Links report. Now, just by looking at the titles and URLs, you'll see that some of their most linked to pages are how-to guides on popular topics, data studies, and free tools. Another example is this affiliate site in the ultra-competitive web hosting space. Their most linked to page, by far, is a stats page. And even though the page redirects to a new domain, you'll see they're taking advantage of the power of internal links in their navigation. As well as in point 31, where they link to their best web hosting company's page and specific hosting company reviews. Now, it's important to note that just because you create content on the same topic, it doesn't mean you'll get links. You'll need to reach out to prospects, which would likely be the people who are linking to the pages you gained inspiration from. And to actually improve your hit rate on outreach, it makes sense to analyze the link profiles of these pages, look for what we call linkable points, and see if you can improve or innovate on the topic, ideally so it supports these linkable points. We have a three-part video series where we did this for a stats page, which I highly recommend watching. I'll link up the videos in the description. Alright, the next link building strategy is to run Google Ads for queries that are a part of the vicious cycle of SEO. The vicious cycle of SEO is a theory that top-ranking pages continually get links because of their high ranking position. And because that page continues to earn links, it continues to rank high, resulting in a vicious cycle. Now, not all pages will get links because of their high ranking position. Pages that are part of this vicious cycle tend to be reserved for specific queries that attract bloggers and journalists or people with the power to link to a page. For example, stats pages are a perfect example of this. Let's say you're writing a blog post on why you should adopt SEO as a marketing strategy. And as you're writing your post, you might want to include a stat to strengthen a point. So you'll probably go search for it in Google, visit a top-ranking page, find the stat they were looking for, and then cite the page where they found it. Link acquired. Now, the easiest place to find these queries is with a keyword research tool like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. Just enter a few broad queries related to your niche and then run the search. Next, head over to the matching terms report. Now, to narrow in on these queries, let's hit the include box and search for words like stats, statistics, fact, and facts. I'll also hit the Any word tab since we want to see all keyword ideas that include one of these words in addition to one of our seeds. Hit apply and you'll see a list of potential topics worth going after. Now, outside of stats pages, it's tough to find these types of queries at scale. But there are ways you can look at a page's link profile to see if it's a potential participant of the vicious cycle of SEO. The strategy in a nutshell is to compare a top page's link velocity with its estimated organic traffic. And the higher the percentage, the more likely it is that the topic is a natural link magnet. To get started, you'll need a backlink analysis tool like Ahrefs' Site Explorer. So I'll paste in the URL of our SEO stats page and run the search. Now, there are a few things we'll do here to validate the topic. The first thing is a two-second check to see if the page has consistently been getting new referring domains over an extended period of time. And on the referring domains chart in Ahrefs' Site Explorer, the graph will look something like this, where it's going up and to the right on a somewhat consistent basis and at a somewhat consistent velocity. Checked. Next, you'll want to see that they've ranked for their main topic for an extended period of time. To do that, let's head over to the Organic Keywords report. As you can see, our page is ranking high for the main query, SEO statistics. Now, if I hit this button to open the position history graph, you'll see that our page has consistently ranked at or near the top of Google for this query for over a year. Checked. Third, you'll want to see if the referring domains earned over this period are actually decent. Meaning it's not a bunch of spam from Blogspot, coupon sites, form profiles, or whatever. So let's head over to the Backlinks report, and then we'll need to set some filters. First, I'll set a minimum DR filter of something like 30, which will weed out a lot of low authority sites and link spam. Next, I'll click First Seen in the table heading, which will order the table from newest to oldest backlinks. And from a quick skim, it looks like most of the links are relevant and many are from good sites. Checked. Now, the final and perhaps most important thing to check is the ratio of new referring domains to estimated organic traffic. And this should give you a very rough estimate of how many clicks it'll take to earn a backlink. To find this number, let's head over to the Overview 2.0 report. Now, because I know this page has consistently been ranking high for the main query over the past year, I'll choose the one-year time frame in the chart and make sure that monthly is set in this dropdown. Finally, I'll export the report. Now, after some cleaning and some basic Excel formulas, I ended up with a sheet that looks like this. And all I've really done is calculated the number of referring domains that were earned each month, then I divided that number by the average organic traffic estimation, giving us this percentage. And as you can see, the percentage of organic visits to referring domains is quite high. Meaning, a good number of visits from Google search is likely to lead to a backlink. Now, if we compare that to a less linkable topic like keyword research, you'll see that the ratio of new referring domains to estimated organic traffic is quite low. Meaning, most people who visit this page are probably there to learn rather than to link. Now, it's important to note that you shouldn't use these percentages as absolute guides, considering the referring domains numbers will include low-quality links too. It's all about relative comparisons, which can vary from topic to topic, page to page, and niche to niche. Ultimately, you'll have to test your theory and run some ads to the page to see if it results in links. So for our SEO stats article that we ran ads to, we had a total of 22 referring domains from 1,664 clicks. Meaning, around 1.3% of paid visits resulted in a new referring domain. We have a full video on how we built links using Google Ads to our SEO stats page, so I'll link that up in the description. Alright, the next tactic is guest posting. Guest posting is when you publish content on someone else's site. And while it can be a great strategy to get yourself in front of other audiences, it also works as a link building strategy because you have some control over the pages that are linked to. So to find prospects, you can use a tool like Ahrefs' Content Explorer, which will help you find relevant content and websites in your niche. So assuming I was in the personal finance industry, I might search for a broad keyword like budgeting. Next, I'll set a domain rating filter to a range like 30-60, which will weed out a lot of low-authority sites as well as the huge news publications that'll be tougher to get a guest posting gig. I'll also set a minimum website traffic filter to 5,000, which will show us pages from websites that are likely to be in good standing with Google. Finally, I'll hit the one-page-per-domain filter since we don't need to pitch the same website multiple times. Now, with around 30,000 websites, we'll need to prioritize our prospects appropriately. So let's head on over to the Websites tab, which will show us the top 100 websites based on our search results. And all I'm going to do is sort the table by authors because if a website has multiple authors, chances are they're accepting guest posts. From here, just skim through the domain names and look for ones that look like they're relevant to your niche and pitch accordingly. We have a full video on how to do guest posting, so I'll link that up in the description. Alright, the next strategy is to create link-based data studies with strategic partners. You probably already know that data studies attract backlinks. To prove my point, 4 out of our top 5 blog posts are or used to be a data study at some point. Now, for a company like Ahrefs, it's easier to create these studies because we have petabytes upon petabytes of data. But for an average affiliate site, you probably won't have any data or at least anything that's meaningful to the community you serve. However, there's a good chance that others in your industry have access to this data. And beyond access, strategically partnering with other site owners can have multiple benefits. More on this in a bit because first, you'll need to come up with an interesting idea that will appeal to your target audience. And ideally, you'll want it to be something that a.) hasn't been done before and b.) can't be better served by another source. For example, creating a study on American debt would probably be a tough topic to tackle because you'd only be able to sample a small portion of these people, plus there are official sources that already release this data. Unfortunately, there isn't a formula to come up with these ideas, so you'll have to brainstorm some on your own or with your team. But to try and get your creative juices flowing, a few examples we've done in the past include a search traffic study that shows that nearly 91% of content gets no traffic from Google. A study of 2 million featured snippets and what you can learn from them in a study on how long it takes to rank in Google based on 2 million random keywords. Alright, once you have your idea set, you'll need to find strategic partners. And by strategic, I'm talking about big sites who have an email list with your target audience. Now, if you're a nobody in your industry, people are less likely to be excited about partnering with you. So an alternative is to pay these site owners for a sponsored newsletter. And in that newsletter, you can promote a simple survey and briefly explain why they should take it. This is how you can collect data. For example, if I had an affiliate site on baby products and I wanted to create a data study on how much parents trust Google for medical advice, I might contact industry leaders like BabyCenter and The Bump. I'd also contact large mom blogs who would also have my target audience of moms on their email list. Now, the beauty of this strategy is that after you create your data study, each person who helped you collect data will be potential prospects to amplify your content. And this leads to more eyeballs, which can lead to more links. On top of that, you get the added benefits of earning new email subscribers and establishing yourself as an authority in your niche. Now, in terms of actually getting links to the page with some intentional effort, you'll need to do some prospecting. And in my opinion, the best place to do this is in Content Explorer. Now, because our example study is on how many parents trust Google for medical advice, we could run a title search for something like Dr. Google, which is a common phrase people use to describe medical advice from Google searches. Then it's just a matter of visiting these pages and looking for a good reason to contact the author. For example, this page states that 35% of U.S. adults have gone online to try to identify a medical condition in themselves or someone else. And if your study has something interesting to add to this, like, 35% of parents search for information, but only 10% trust Google for self-diagnosis, then it could potentially be an interesting angle for your outreach email. Alright, the final tip I have for you is to use HARO to power your homepage. HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out. And it's a place where journalists can connect with sources and sources with journalists. Now, the great thing about HARO is that a good chunk of the sites are authoritative. And best of all, you don't have to do any cold outreach. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Journalists are the ones who are asking you to reach out to them, which makes getting links much easier. So to get started, sign up for a free account as a source and you'll get regular emails from journalists asking questions. And all you have to do is answer those questions the best you can. And if they used you as a source, you'll usually get a link back to your site. Now, while the majority of these links will point to your homepage, it helps to create a healthy link profile of branded anchors and you can use this page to funnel page rank to your money pages. And this is a pretty common strategy that affiliate sites use to rank revenue-generating pages. Now, while tactics are all well and good, the best and perhaps most cliche way to get more links to your affiliate site is to create content that's significantly better than your competitors. This makes outreach much easier, more effective, and more enjoyable. So go and try these out for your site. And if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share, and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials. I'll see you in the next one.