If you are an affiliate marketer looking to make passive income, you are in the right place. SEO and affiliate marketing are two powerful tools that can be used together to earn passive income on your WordPress website. 

This article outlines the step-by-step process for using SEO and affiliate marketing to make money on your WordPress website. 

In it, you’ll find actionable tips and strategies to help you succeed in an arena where the majority of affiliates make paltry earnings. You’ll receive insights on how to conduct keyword research the right way and craft compelling content that doesn’t get buried under other search results. You’ll even get tips to maximize your results and boost your affiliate revenue. 

Without further ado, read on to discover how you can combine SEO and affiliate marketing to generate a growing source of passive income on WordPress.

What is Affiliate Marketing? 

Affiliate marketing refers to the process through which affiliates earn a commission for promoting the products or services of another person or company.

There are many ways to promote affiliate products, including paid advertising, social media, email, and webinars. But the most commonly used method for promoting affiliate products is to simply embed the affiliate links in your posts.

You can then promote your content using effective SEO strategies to ensure that attract the right audience who are interested in the types of products you recommend. 

SEO is essential for success as an affiliate marketer. It’s the absolute best way to ensure the profitability of your affiliate site from day one. 

With the right SEO strategy, you’ll be able to improve your search engine visibility and drive large amounts of targeted website traffic. In turn, this leads to improved conversion rates which translates to more affiliate sales.

Benefits of Building Affiliate Marketing Strategies

The biggest benefit of building affiliate marketing strategies is to generate passive income.  You don’t have to create your own product or handle fulfillment, customer support, or any other issues associated with trying to bring a product to market. 

Simply find quality products from other companies that you can promote, and use your marketing skills to start earning commissions right away. 

Beyond the tangible financial gains, the appeal of passive income is that it gives you time freedom. You’ll be able to generate income without having to trade hours for money.

But of course, you must have effective strategies to be able to make this work. And that’s why I recommend using SEO for affiliate marketing on your WordPress website.

Why Use SEO Affiliate Strategies?

One of the best reasons to use SEO as an affiliate marketer is that organic traffic is cheap. 

You get 100% margins, unlike affiliate marketing promotion strategies like social media or PPC ads where you have to pay for every click. And, when done right, SEO will provide you with a consistent flow of targeted traffic for years to come. 

Another good reason to use SEO as an affiliate is that the clicks you get from Google and other search engines are more likely to convert, which can be a powerful strategy to fuel your long-term affiliate success. 

Also, ranking at the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages) gives your site authority. You’ll be able to establish yourself as an expert on a particular topic, and the more credible you and your site are, the more people you’ll be able to reach and convert with your offers. 

Sure, SEO strategies may take longer than others to implement and see results, but building an organic presence for your affiliate marketing business will pay huge dividends down the line.

How to Use SEO and Affiliate Marketing For Passive Income on WordPress

The very first step in building a successful affiliate marketing business is to ensure that you have a well-optmized website to build on.  

Using WordPress as a platform for generating passive income will make it easy to combine SEO and affiliate marketing effectively. Not only is the platform easy to use, SEO-friendly, and highly customizable, but it also comes with thousands of plugins to expand your website’s functionality. 

Once you have your WordPress website, you must choose the right niche (that is, a profitable one with high buyer intent and demand) and set up your website to adhere to performance best practices (e.g. using reliable web hosting, choosing and SEO optimized theme, and adding essential plugins like Yoast SEO).  

Keep in mind that if you want to make more revenue, you may need to take extra steps to ensure success.  For instance, things like online communication tools may be able to enhance your affiliate marketing efforts by driving your audience to affiliate deals that make the most sense for their situation, but also pay you a fair commission. 

With that out of the way, you can focus on designing SEO webpages to rank first on Google for specific keywords. You can then use those keywords to build lucrative affiliate partnerships.

But how exactly do you go about designing a high-performing webpage? 

Here are some steps to follow when creating your content.

1. Research Keywords (Strategically)

Affiliate SEO keyword research is the first step toward successful affiliate marketing and SEO. Once you’ve enrolled in relevant affiliate programs, it’s time to create high-quality content inside which you’ll place your affiliate links to the products or services you recommend.

But before you can create the content, you must first conduct thorough research to ensure that your efforts bring results. 

While there are free tools you can use to help you find lucrative keywords such as Google Search, Google Trends, and YouTube’s autocomplete, you’ll likely create a higher-converting keyword list by using a premium tool like Ahrefs. 

Ahrefs is an excellent tool for keyword research. It can help you find important keywords that rank well, You can then write targeted articles around those terms. 

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Just make sure you understand your target audience well so that you can find the words and phrases they use when they are searching for content like yours. Once you have a list of keywords to guide your content creation, it’s time to move on to the next step.

2. Choose the Right Content Types and Create Quality Content

Blogging and affiliate marketing go hand-in-hand. If you can create engaging content, and insert your affiliate links naturally within the text, you have a good foundation for a successful affiliate business. 

The better your content speaks to your target audience, the more conversions you’ll get. For this reason, it’s important to truly understand your audience so you can address their questions, desires, and challenges with your content.

The best type of content to create for your affiliate SEO is long-form content. According to SEMRush, long-form affiliate content outperforms short-form virtually all the time. 

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Your affiliate content can be in any format, such as:

• Product reviews
• How-to guides
• Product comparisons or Versus posts
• Product roundups
• Product alternatives

Long-form content works so well for affiliate marketing because it satisfies the reader’s intent. It answers questions thoroughly which helps to keep people on the page. 

Great long-form content is easy to read. It’s not blocks of text, but rather, it’s scannable and contains images, videos, infographics, gifs,  bullets, numbered lists, and other ways to break up text into easily digestible bits. 

If you want to take things a step further, try to include an free download that users can get in exchange for sharing their email address with you.  This will allow them to get access to a nice resource that they can reference whenever needed, and then you can use email automation to deliver on your promise and steer them into purchasing an affiliate product that you feel is a good solution. 

Leverage the Power of Listicle Articles

It’s important to consistently create engaging, stimulating, and helpful content for your blog. One of the ways you can provide value to your readers and boost your affiliate efforts is to leverage the power of listicles. 

Listicles are among the best formats for affiliate blog posts because they are another way visitors naturally search online. 

For example, if someone searched for: “best air fryer for weight loss”, it’s likely that the top search results would include a long-form article about “the top X ways to use an air fryer to prepare healthy meals”. 

This is the same tactic I use on my own website to rank and convert on various topics. 

I create listicle articles with multiple similar affiliate products or services which allows me to maximize the results from my efforts. 

Not only do I provide immense value to my readers through meaningful content, but I also appeal to users with the highest purchase intent. By giving them the exact information they need, I solve their problem, build trust, and boost my conversions – all at once. 

3. Include a Powerful Introduction

Once you have your keywords down, and have decided which type of format to start with, it’s time to write your post – starting with the introduction. 

The introduction lets the audience know what to expect from your post. It serves to let readers know whether or not the post contains the information they are looking for, but perhaps more importantly, it contains the “hook”, an opening statement designed to create anticipation so readers are motivated to find out what comes next. 

So, for example, the hook for an article like the one you’re reading now one might include a compelling statistic or anecdote about the potential of creating passive income through SEO and affiliate marketing.

4. Use Relevant Call to Action Buttons

As an affiliate marketer, your entire success rests on your ability to convince visitors to click your affiliate links. For this, you’ll need to have clear call-to-action buttons on your page. 

Make sure each call to action is clear in the emotion you want to evoke. The written text on the button should be engaging and persuasive. 

Keep it compact, use as few words as possible, but make sure the wording is a concise statement on its own, such as “Download now!” Or “Buy now!”, etc. It’s best if the CTA elicits some sense of urgency. 

You can use multiple CTAs throughout your content, but just be careful not to overdo it.

5. Use Comparison Tables and Lists 

Comparison tables and list are essential tools for affiliate marketers. I like to use them in the conclusion of each affiliate post.

You’ll find plenty of WordPress plugins for comparison tables, lists, and boxes that convert. Many of them have been proven to help increase your conversion rates significantly, such as Affiliatable. 

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I particularly like this product comparison table builder because it’s easy to use. In just a few clicks, you’ll be able to easily create superb product comparison tables for your affiliate website without having to deal with pesky code.

6. Strategically Place High Paying Affiliate Offers

Yes, the word “strategic” appears in this article a lot. That’s because you need to put careful thought into many of the processes associated with successful affiliate marketing. If it was simple and easy, everyone doing it would be successful. 

There are many ways to place affiliate links efficiently within your content, but placing the highest paid affiliates at the top of the lists is one of the best strategies to employ in affiliate marketing. 

7. Track Keyword Performance and Refresh Articles

Once you’ve got your foundation built out with your site and content strategy, you need to continually monitor the results to see how keywords are trending using keyword rank tracking software.  If you see a keyword dropping in the ranks, you should focus on continuously refreshing the content over time so that you can not only maintain your rankings in the search engine, but hopefully keep increasing your market presence for more site traffic. 

The Rundown

To recap, here’s a rundown of the SEO and affiliate marketing tactics you can use to build passive income on WordPress. 

Create an optimized WordPress website and use high-quality themes and plugins for SEO and affiliate marketing. Research relevant keywords for the products you intend to sell. Plan your content by determining what works best for your target audience, and use content creation best practices to create content that converts. 

This includes having a powerful introduction, using relevant calls to action throughout the doby of your content, and leveraging comparison tables and lists in your conclusion. 

With this simple yet powerful strategy, you’ll be able to succeed where a lot of other people have failed and build a successful SEO and affiliate marketing business that generates a healthy source of passive income for years to come. 

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Ron Stefanski is an online entrepreneur and marketing professor who has a passion for helping people create and market their own online businesses.  You can learn more from him by visiting OneHourProfessor.com

You can also connect with him on YouTube or Linkedin.