SEMPO Blog | Top of Search = Top of Mind ®

Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing in 2019

July 12, 2019 • Digital Marketing • 33

During the last decade the affiliate marketing industry has been constantly in flux. If you want to ensure you’re using your time and money wisely, it’s imperative that you stay well-ahead of the curve and predict industry changes in advance.

Fortunately, affiliate marketing is bigger than ever and there’s plenty of space to get involved if you want to establish a new online business. These tips will help you get started.

Find the Right Marketplace

There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there in almost every niche imaginable. Finding a program that pays a high commission is just one step in the process. You’ll also need to find a product or niche that will hold your interest for the long haul. Affiliate marketing takes time, and it could be months until you start seeing viable results. If the topic you’re developing content for doesn’t engage you, then you’re only limiting your chance of success.

An affiliate marketing agency is always a good starting point as they can assist you finding a product and industry that’s right for you. In addition, an agency can help you devise a marketing strategy that will work best for your niche.

Select a Viable Commission Format

There are various types of commission, each with their own positives and negatives. Rather than going for a niche or product that has the highest commission, it’s always worth researching the other formats to ensure you’re choosing one that will provide the greatest long-term profit.

One Tier – Gain commission when a sale is generated from your affiliate link. This is the most common form of affiliate marketing and, generally, offers a larger commission than multi-tier systems.

Two Tier – Gain commission from other affiliates you have referred when they generate sales. With this approach you don’t have to make the sales yourself, but you will have to find others willing to market the product that you’re endorsing. Some affiliate programs have more than two tiers, allowing you to also generate commission from third, fourth or even fifth tier affiliates.

It’s far better to retain existing clients than to generate new ones. Therefore, recurring commissions provide the most viable way of creating a long-term, sustainable business model. If you find an affiliate program that offers recurring commissions within your niche, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Keep a Diverse Affiliate Profile

Keeping a diverse affiliate profile is more important than ever. Relying on a single product or website is a huge risk. You can never predict if a vendor will change the terms of their agreements and reduce commissions, or even halt their affiliate program altogether. If this happens and you don’t have a diverse affiliate profile, your business could seize to exist overnight.

If you are currently only focusing on one particular product or niche, start exploring new opportunities as soon as possible. Even if you’re conducting business ethically and taking all the correct steps to ensure longevity, there’s only so much within your control.

Create Valuable Content

There’s a common misconception that Google’s algorithm is erratic. Bloggers, particularly those in the affiliate marketing world, often report substantial drops in traffic after major Google updates. While algorithm changes can result in seemingly unjust rankings, it’s important to remember what Google’s primary goal actually is: to prioritize the best and most valuable content on the web.

Just because you’re engaging in affiliate marketing, it doesn’t mean your website can’t be valuable. In fact, the most successful affiliate marketers focus 90% of their efforts on developing valuable, engaging content. Fundamentally, if you follow the rules and don’t try to hack the system, you’ll be fine.

Due to algorithm changes, affiliate marketers have been hit hard on multiple occasions throughout the last decade. However, if you take the time to learn both what to do right, and what not to do, there’s no reason why you won’t develop a profitable and sustainable business.
Read More »
Running A Small Business? Here’s What You Should Know About SEO

July 9, 2019 • Featured, SEO 101 • 74
Having a website for the modern business is virtually compulsory – people find you through an internet search in many of the cases. That means having a website and if you want to show up in those search results, that meaning SEO or search engine optimisation. While this may seem daunting and is probably something you want to hire out to an SEO agency or a freelancer like me, though it is good to understand the basics. Before you make contact.

Make your website easy to navigate

The first thing you are going to do is to start with the layout of your website. This might not seem like part of SEO, but it is – it is about user experience and this is the most important thing. Google ranks websites that users find easy to use and get around without problems, so site structure is an important place to start.

By navigating, we mean things like what is on that top menu of your website. If you have two sets of services, a blog and a contact page, these are the things on your menu. Don’t overfill it but don’t make it hard to find the important stuff.

Cover the on-page SEO basics

Once you know what you want on your website and how to structure it so people can easily get around, you then want to look at the basics of on-page SEO. There are quite a few elements to this but let’s start with a few basics.

The meta title is the headline at the top of the page and this should be unique for every page and post on the website. It should feature your primary keyword phrase and be the only H1 on the page. You should also use this keyword in the URL which should be as short as possible and not include the date.

The meta description is the other important part. This is a short snippet around 150 characters that tells people what the page is about. It is a small sales pitch to entice them to click and should include that main keyword phrase.

Keyword and content

When you start creating the content on the page, there are different approaches depending on what it is. Blog posts are different to sales or product pages, email sign up pages and contact pages. But there are a few basics to include in all of them:
- Main keyword – this should feature towards the top, in the first 100 words and through the copy a once or twice though in a natural way. DON’T keyword stuff and add it over and over again as this just won’t help.
- Semantic keywords – these are phrases that relate to the keyword or use the words in a different order, and it is good to use these where suitable
- H2 with keyword – at least one H2 heading should have the keyword and there should be more of these to break up the copy and make it easy to read
Look at page speed

One thing to monitor as you add content and other features are site speed. This is how quickly the website loads when someone clicks a link. It should be as quick as possible because it is a rating factor for search engines.

There are lots of things that can slow down your website – large images (in terms of the file size), lots of plugins on WordPress, poor quality hosting. You can get tools that help you assess your site speed and advise you on what to do.

Master the basics

Even when you plan to outsource SEO to an expert, it is worth understanding the basics and how what you put on your website factors into these. Then you are in a better position to start seeing that important organic traffic.
Read More »
6 Important SEO Tips For SMBs

May 24, 2019 • Local Search • 167
Due to rising competition, it can be difficult to rank #1 on Google’s local business results. Here are 6 important SEO tips for small and medium businesses that will help you get there.

1- Optimize For Medium Tail and Question Keywords

Optimizing your website for relevant keywords should be your first port of call. Optimize for medium tail keywords that can send targeted traffic, but have less competition.

Additionally, you should also target question keywords. These will pull customers that are already deep into the buying cycle. Remember, keyword optimization is based on semantics because Google always identifies the intent of the user before it presents the results. Make use of tools like Ubersuggest to achieve optimal results.

2- Acquire High Authority Links Using HARO and Guest Posting

Links still remain one of the biggest ranking factors. As a small business owner, it becomes difficult to compete with bigger brands who have higher budgets for link building. However, there are two strategies that work effectively for an SMB. These are acquiring links using HARO and building links using guest posting.

HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out. You can register for the HARO site as a source and HARO will start sending you around 3 emails on a daily basis containing requests from journalists for story content. The key here is to sponsor local events and remain in the news so you can forward the information to reporters when they ask for it. You won’t see magic happening instantly but if you remain consistent, you will definitely be able to acquire links from highly authoritative news sites.

Another great way of building links is using guest posting. Under this strategy, you find sites related to your niche which are looking for authors or contributors and send an email to them requesting contributor status. Once you are accepted, submit your content and add links to your website in the content body or author bio.

You can easily find out the sites where your competitor is placing their guest posts by using tools like the Backlink Checker from Neil Patel. Simply enter your competitor URL and this tool will quickly find the top sites that are linking to your competitor. This tool is absolutely free to use.

3- Leverage The Power of Structured Data

Structured data is often overlooked by SMBs. I have often seen small business owners following SEO basics, such as optimizing the title tag, description tag and the content body, but failing to leverage structured data.

Structured data helps Google and other search engines to better understand the content of web pages. For example if you have a recipe site, specifying cooking temperatures, the ingredients used, and cooking times, etc. can all be defined explicitly by Google algorithm. This will help Google to display the defined information accurately in the SERP itself, improving the overall user experience.

The most common forms of structured data are of the following:
- Organizational schema markup — helps to elaborate the company information in the SERP.
- Person schema markup — helps to elaborate the information related to an individual.
- Local Business markup — lets the customers find information such as address and phone number related to a business.
- Product markup — specifies information related to a product like it’s price, quantity, color, etc.
4- Build Citations and Reviews

Citations and reviews are two important elements of local SEO. A citation is a quotation or a reference about your business, and reviews are written by genuine customers. Both citations and reviews are crucial to get your site or local business listing up on the Google search results.

For building citations, you can make use of a tool named the WhiteSpark Local Citation Finder that will help you to find the best citation opportunities for your business. The tool will identify your top local competitors, analyze their citation sources and discover relevant citation opportunities where you can list your own business.

For effective monitoring and building of online reviews, you can use a tool named Review Tracker. This tool helps to monitor your business reviews scattered around the web using a single dashboard. You can easily monitor and respond to reviews right from the dashboard. The tool also helps you to generate new reviews for your business using email campaigns and SMS, etc.

5- Keep Your NAP Consistent

NAP stands for name, address and phone number. If you want your business to rank on the top of local search results, you need to keep your NAP consistent across all the platforms where your business listing might be present.

Your business NAP should be accurate and regularly updated across the entire web. An accurate NAP signals Google about the consistency of the business address across all directories, review sites and other digital channels, allowing it to rank your business higher in the local search results.

6- Use Interactive Content Marketing

Interactive content marketing is a form of content marketing where you persuade the user to take an action, and then make the content automatically update based on that action. Below are the important types of interactive content that you can use in your content marketing strategy:
- – Quizzes
- – Contests
- – Interactive ebooks
- – Games
- – Interactive videos
- – Calculators
- – Interactive infographics
- – Polls and surveys
A quiz is one of the best ways to drive people into action. People love to play the quiz and share it with their friends and families; therefore, you are able to generate lots of social media buzz and backlinks.

Final Words

SEO is an investment. It helps you to keep your business on top and gain quality traffic. If you follow the SEO tips above, you will defeat your competitors and solidify your place in the top of the search results.
Read More »
Steps To Think About If You Want To Sell SEO Services

May 14, 2019 • Featured, SEO 101 • 264
So you have taken the best SEO courses and have proven results on a number of test cases. You are confident in your ability to help others develop their SEO and want to start your business. But what steps do you need to think about if you want to sell SEO services? And how do you start getting those customers?

Preparation

There are hundreds of quotes about being prepared that can be applied to your new business – you’ve heard them before. Thing is, they are right. If you don’t prepare for your new business and the clients, you will get then you are likely to fail or at least to find it takes a whole lot longer to build your business. There are a few things you need in place before you start approaching paid clients:
1. A good CRM system – whether this is a dedicated tool or a system that uses things like Trello, you need to organise your client relationship management process. It helps you track leads, see what needs to be done next and watch those potential former customers who could become live leads again
2. A professional email – you need to have a domain email such as [email protected] rather than relying on a free Gmail or Yahoo address. Not only is it more reliable but it also portrays a much more professional image for potential customers
3. A website that uses what you do – you not only want to have an SEO friendly website design but also have some content on there that demonstrates what you do in action. This helps people to see you really do know what you are talking about.
Understand your prospects

With your foundations in place, you can start to do some customer research and find a niche that you want to focus on. You want to know the potential customer’s business and have a system to quickly get this information when a lead comes along. By knowing what they do and need, you can better tailor your services to them.

You should also look at their competitors and use them for inspiration. If it works for them, there’s no reason you can’t tweak it and make it work better for your customer. Also, look at any general trends in SEO that will have particular relevance to your target customer.

Start to understand the right fit

When you start out, there’s the temptation to grab every customer that comes your way. But you do want to be a little discerning and establish if they are the right fit for your agency. The reason for this is simple – when they are, you do your best work. When they aren’t the right fit, it is a struggle and the results will often show this.

There are four factors to consider when qualifying customers:
- Budget – ask them to prioritise between time and budget and if they pick the latter, that’s a good fit
- Authority – do they have a work email address for proposals and other materials?
- Need – is their business digital ready and therefore your services will have an effect?
- Time frame – how soon do they want to see results? Make sure this is realistic and if they want things too quickly, this can be a negative sign
Prioritise who to sell to first

Once you have a firm picture of who you want as clients for your business, you can start to prioritise who to sell to first. This will make it easier to create customised proposals and approaches and also means you will better understand their businesses without any research to make that instant connection.
Read More »
Vital SEO First Steps For A New Website

April 18, 2019 • Featured, SEO 101 • 256
When you launch your first website, it can be quite daunting – you do all of that work, set it to live and nothing happens. But that’s okay because that is perfectly normal. However, if you don’t have the vital SEO first steps covered before you hit publish, there’s a chance that nothing will happen for a long time. Cover these key areas, however, and you have a better chance of starting to see organic traffic.

Understand what search engines look for

Before you design, write or sketch a single thing for your website, it is important to understand what search engines such as Google are looking for. By creating your website with these principles in mind, you have a better chance of catching their attention and getting that important traffic.
- Content – are you creating content that is relevant to what users are searching for?
- Performance – does your site load quickly and work properly? (If using WordPress avoid bloated code editors, like Visual Composure)
- Authority – do you have useful content linked to other authoritative sites (and are planning for other sites to eventually link to you)?
- User experience – is the site easy to use and navigate so users can get around?
Vital SEO first steps

With these principles in mind, you can then move onto looking at those vital SEO steps to use in the creation of the website to help cover these main areas and provide what search engines and, most importantly, users are looking for.

The domain name

Choosing a domain name isn’t as tricky as many would think. You will likely want to call the website after your business, but do you go for a .com, a .co.uk or one of the other variations? A .com website is considered the top level and is always desirable but if you can’t get it, a .co.uk website is great if you are based in the UK.

Do your keyword research

Keyword research and analysis is something to learn from the start because you will always be doing it. There’s no point writing a piece of content with keywords that no-one uses or phrases that are too specific for normal people to ever think about. Finding the right tools such as a good SEO checker will help you get into practice studying and analysing keywords from the start. SEMRush is a good place to start.

Create the website

When it comes to creating the actual website, a good priced web design company will be your friend. There are some great DIY options out there, but the time involved in learning all of the things you need to learn is often counter-productive. A good web designer will be able to create a site that is attractive but more importantly functions well, loads quickly and is easy to navigate, two of those key areas mentioned above.

Create the content

Armed with keywords and having a website to hold it, you next want to create content. There is plenty to do and you can do this yourself, hire a freelancer (www.peopleperhour.com) to do it or a mixture of the two. You will want web page content for sales pages, product pages and other core pages such as About Us. You will probably also want blog content for using in content marketing.

Technical SEO

These vital first steps are then backed up with technical SEO elements which can include things like meta descriptions, title tags, XML sitemaps and more. While I would recommend you set up Google Search Console and go and use an onsite website crawler which will highlight any low-level issues. Ahrefs.com and SEMRush are worth a look.
Read More »