7 Terms Every Blogger Working with an Affiliate Program Should Know
Whether you’ve been blogging for years and joined an affiliate program to monetize your efforts. Or you’ve started blogging as a means promote your affiliate program pay per sale links. There is always more to learn about the craft. And brushing up you knowledge can not only simplify the blogging process for you, but help you to increase your income by getting your content seen by the widest possible audience.
7 Blogging Terms You Need to Know When Working with an Affiliate Program
1. SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality of your content to better able internet searchers to find your blog. SEO has a large remit, but it involves the following areas:
- Keyword use (see below!)
- Website speed
- Original content
- Trustworthiness
- Authority and expertise
- Readability and user friendliness
- Mobile friendliness
- The quality of the coding
- Formatting
- Regularity of updates
- Link management
2. Keyword
If you’re already blogging, there’s a good chance that you’ll know about using keywords, and the benefit it can bring to your business. A keyword is an indexing term (see below) that allows search engines to categorize your content. And this helps potential customers to find you. Keywords can be singular – such as ‘dating’. Made up of short groups of words – such as ‘dating offers’. Or they can be long-tailed, which are essentially short sentences detailing an aspect of your content – such as ‘dating offers for the over 50s’. Finding the best keywords can really help you to improve the SEO (see above!) of your blog. And help you to reach your target audience.
3. Indexing
Indexing is not something that you can do yourself, but it’s useful to understand the process. Every bit of content uploaded to the internet will be indexed by search engine bots. This is what allows Google – and other search engines – to categorize your content and decide where to place it and who to show it to. The better your keyword use and SEO, the more quickly and accurately indexing will take place.
4. Meta description
A meta description is a short explanation of what’s within a webpage’s content that you see when you conduct a web search. As an example, ours reads:
‘Affiliate2Day is the top high paying dating site affiliate program in the dating niche with pay per lead, pay per sale, & pay per first order offers.’
Meta descriptions are usually no more than 160 characters. And you can improve the searchability of each of your blog posts by giving them a unique meta description.
5. Alt text
Imagery plays a really important part of your blog. If you’re trying to attract dating traffic, for example, your choice of imagery can be enough to hook readers in. But with alt text, your images can also enhance your SEO. By choosing a good, relevant description for your images, you’re making it much easier for search engine bots to find and categorize your content.
6. Pillar content
The everyday focus for most bloggers working with an affiliate partnership program is the creation of regular content. It’s this that keeps your blog fresh and your readers coming back. And the more content you have, the more opportunity there is for promoting your affiliate network’s products and services. But if you want your blog to really shine and gain outstanding SEO, you also need pillar content. While the average blog post will be 300-700 words long, pillar content can be four times that length. It is the most detailed, the most authoritative, and the most original content that you are capable of creating. And it’s important because it increases the likelihood of search engines directing readers to your pages.
7. User generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is a fairly recent addition to the SEO armory. And it can come in a variety of forms. Most commonly in blogs though, UGC will be a section of reader comments. This can be beneficial for keeping your content fresh, and for demonstrating reader engagement.
Like everything online, blogging is a developing art. It began with people simply writing to express their views or feelings. And that was fine as a starting place. And it’s fine now if you’re not using blogging to progress your business. But as time moves on, so the skill behind blogging needs to grow too. And if you want to make the most of the opportunity that your affiliate program work can bring, it’s a good idea to stay on top of the evolving terminology of the craft of blogging. And everything that that means for your work.