Hello 🙏,

​

A lot of questions I get asked in DMs about affiliate sites revolve around the investment of actually buying and testing the products.

Frankly, my opinion is that you should actually do the work – test stuff. Put the time and effort in to add value to people’s lives here.

Yes, there are examples of sites growing hugely without real product photos or tests – and you can 100% get away with it with certain tactics…

(Editing other products to look like you’re really testing it, adding AI backgrounds to look like a home environment when actually a standard product photo, speaking in first-person and claiming real tests, etc.)

But it relies on getting away with it, rather than just consolidating your position as a titan in the niche.

Also, if it’s not real, authentic, and value-adding, then yes you’ll get traffic – but you won’t get sales $$$...

…You won’t pull on the heartstrings of your readers in the same way as an authentic review that understands your audience would, or give them the info on the specific parts that trigger buying actions – and you’ll be poorer for it
​

That being said, I fully understand that this takes a lot of time, and you have to spend money on this to make it work.
​

So, here’s my Surface Area method of affiliate marketing – to help you maximise your ROI on your cash invested.

---

AD:

The new podcast that carries on where Niche Website Builders left off! 🚀​
Subscribe to our YouTube channel @ForteGrowthPodcast​​
​​
​Hosted by James de Lacey and Gareth Boyd.
​James used to host the Niche Website Builders podcast and we will run with a similar format.
​
Here's what to expect with Forte Growth Podcast:
​
- Insights from industry leaders.
- Stories that will motivate and inspire you.
- Covering e-commerce, niche sites, marketplaces, capital fundraising, and businesses transitioning from offline to online.
- Weekly release every Tuesday.
​More information at www.forteanalytica.co.uk/podcast​

---

1. Get your topical map

Overused buzzword time. But do all your keyword research and cluster your keywords so you know exactly what you’re building with your site.

How many affiliate pages is it? And beyond that, how many:

• “Best” posts / “Best Cheap” posts
• “VS” articles
• Single product reviews
• “Alternatives” posts of these popular products
  ​

If you already know all of these, then that’s helpful. But, this method will actually help reveal the best “Vs”, “alternatives” and “review” keywords to go after.

So, I suggest first finding the “best” product round-up keywords in your niche. You can form your affiliate clusters from these, as I’ll show you here.

2. Create a G Sheet, and have every single “best” affiliate keyword in your niche site topical map as a column

It doesn’t matter if you have 100 columns. It’s expected for serious niche site builds of 500+ pages.
​

Here’s an example for a vacuum site build:

• Best heavy-duty vacuum
• Best cheap vacuum
• Best cordless vacuum
• Best shark vacuum (pseudo-branded search)
• Best car vacuum cleaner
  ​

However, make sure you’re not cannibalising here. It’s essential to check the SERP and validate each keyword to make sure Google is actually showing the long-tail articles, not the general “best vacuum” articles from high DR sites to be risk-averse.

(There are nuanced factors which can suggest you could rank this long-tail article and sculpt a new long-tail search intent, and when you can’t – but this is dependent on the query itself, as well as your site’s site-wide quality score. Below as certain site quality score threshold you are not trusted to be a thought leader, and the machine learning algos will not trial your content to see whether this new intent should be sculpted. You’ll just not get indexed. But that’s for a different newsletter….or my course when I drop it lol.)

For example, “best X for the price” almost always shows “best X” articles. But there are more nuanced options you’ll need to check for yourself.

3. Scrape all the products on every page

Then, Google every single “Best” keyword, and either scrape all the headings on each page and then delete all the headings that are not a product name, or manually write up the products that feature in each article.

If a product features multiple times, I recommend writing x2, x3, x4, etc, after the product name.

To make this easier to read across hundreds of articles, you can add Conditional Formatting that detects when the call contains “x2”, “x3” etc, and changes the colour of the cell based on this.

Then, for this set of keywords, you’ll have a bird’s eye view of what the popular products from each article are.

4. Use this data to find the most popular products

For most niches, the same products will feature on the main seed keyword “best vacuum” as well as a lot of the longer tail versions like “best cordless vacuum”, etc.

Your data now shows which products appear in perhaps 50 of the 100 “best” keywords.

Here’s where the surface area part comes in.

If you have 100 “Top 8 Best X” affiliate keywords – we’ll assume each has an average of 8 products.

​

Then you have a 100x8 grid -- 800 affiliate-product-squared².

​

Out of these 800 product units, let’s assume that there are 400 unique products featured by existing competitors.

If each product featured equally across every article, if you purchased 4 products and tested them, you’d only achieve a 1% product testing surface area.

However, with your research, you now know the top products appear very prominently across these keywords, for example:

• Vacuum 1: features in 65 of 100 keywords
• Vacuum 2: features in 55 of 100 keywords
• Vacuum 3: features in 48 of 100 keywords
• Vacuum 4: features in 47 of 100 keywords
  ​

If you just purchased, tested and reviewed these four vacuums, you’d achieve a 215 affiliate-product surface coverage, out of the 800 products that appear across the entire affiliate topical map.

That’s more than 25%!

Literally.

If you then wrote your 100 “Best” articles, and featured these products in that same number of posts, 26.875% (215/800) of the total products you recommended would have real product reviews and insights attached to them. Even though you only ordered 1% of the products.

Doing this Surface Area research beforehand means you can look like a real authority, with first-person reviews on a lot of products, at a far lower investment cost.

And you’re not expected to have hands-on testing on 100% of the products anyway – nobody except Wirecutter realistically can do that.

But, like the old adage of “I don’t need to outrun the bear… I just need to outrun you…”

You just need to test more products than your competitors. And most of them barely test anything. The bar is not high.

5. Use these products to build up the rest of your affiliate keyword targets

Now you’ve decided which of the most prominent and visible products you’ll really test, you can flesh out the rest of your affiliate keyword clusters.

If you’ve picked the most popular products, these usually have the most search volume for “Review” keywords, as well as “Vs” keywords for comparing them against other products.

For “Vs” keywords, you only need to have tested one in order to put together a really compelling review that converts well.

…Well, actually you don’t really need to have tested any. They’re the easiest to just brute force sales from without tests. But, if you have some real photos, then this definitely helps.

You now have a full affiliate site prepared and ready to go.

The downside is if you’re picking the most popular products, the “Review” and related keywords are usually really competitive.

So be prepared to grind it out / blast out links – which obviously costs money. Nobody’s linking to your buying guide for free, except perhaps the manufacturer if you make them an award or something.

So, that’s the Surface Area theory of affiliate sites

Enjoy. It’s obvious, but when illustrated like that, I hope it’s helpful. Basically, it’s how to get the most bang for your buck, and how to get the real insights from real product tests that actually convert.

Most people convert 5-10x worse than they could if they just thought deeply about what pain points, and the micro intent behind the keyword search, that they’re trying to solve.

It’s all sales and psychology, SEO is just a way of driving traffic to the sales offer.

So don’t discount this – think about what the audience needs to know, which segments are visiting the page, and push the right offer to each segment, clearly.

And, if you want to skyrocket your affiliate clicks and sales, obvs buy Lasso.

​
​

Until next week,

Jamie I.F. 🔥
​