Being King of the Hill Can Lead to Conquering Mountains

When you're first getting started in affiliate marketing and you look at the massive authority sites at the top of the Google SERPS it feels like a massive uphill climb to get any authority or outrank them anytime soon. New affiliate marketers will try to write about everything in their niche, chasing any sign of a keyword they could maybe rank for. Now, while putting out relevant content is a solid habit to have, there's a strategy that makes more sense to your reader and more sense to Google.

This is the strategy of Keyword Clustering and many of you follow it.
Instead of trying to own the entire mountain, your goal is to conquer one single, small hill first.
And there's real benefit to it, for both you and your readers.

Keyword clustering is all about going after a tightly related group of related, long-tail keywords. These aren't the "big dog" keywords in the niche. They're more specialized. Let’s say you’re in the coffee lovers niche. As a beginner, it would probably be really hard to rank for a competitive keyword like "best coffee beans." But what if you clustered "Moka Pot Brewing"? You could write:

• How to grind coffee for a Moka pot.
• Troubleshooting: Why your Moka pot is bitter.
• The best stainless steel Moka pots (review).
• Moka Pot vs. French Press: A comparison.

The best part about this strategy, is now instead of trying to go after keywords you can't rank for and feeling like just another random blogger talking about coffee, now you're the Moka Pot Brewing expert. And Google starts to recognize that authority.

It's also really beneficial to your readers. They can follow a group of tightly related articles easily. It makes sense. There's a flow. And for a bright, young website this is big.

And now that you've gotten that cluster under your belt, you go after the next.

What's great is you'll be speaking directly to those specialized members of your target audience. Believe it or not there are a ton of people out there making searches related to your cluster, and when they arrive at your post and find exactly what they're looking for, this is direct value. Get that engagement going, and now your website is starting to fill with life.

It's ok when you're just starting to feel like your content is falling on deaf ears. Just keep writing. Keep clustering. Trickles of traffic become streams. Those articles can find life weeks after they're published, you just have to keep on pushing forward.

You got this!

What Do You Think?👇🏻

• Are your last five articles all about different, unrelated topics, or are they all interconnected?
• Can you identify the smallest possible sub-topic in your niche where you could be the world's leading expert?
• If Google looked at your site today, would it describe you as "The expert on [this precise thing]" or "A beginner who talks vaguely about everything?
• If you committed to ignoring the major keywords in your niche for the next 30 days and only focused on two specific 5 article clusters, do you think your overall traffic would go up or down?