Evergreen Content Tactics for your Affiliate Marketing Group
When Elliot at Coupon Affiliates reached out and asked me to write about evergreen content, I was flattered. It’s a topic that comes up in SEO planning all the time, but often gets forgotten about in the race to find the ‘hot new thing’ that people are searching for.
And yet it’s an important way to get high quality backlinks to your site, and increase your domain authority in a very organic manner.
Why is it called ‘evergreen’? Because an evergreen tree performs well both in the summer and in the winter. While other trees shed their leaves and go into hibernation when things get cold, evergreens are soaking up energy and slowly growing year round.
So as you might suspect, evergreen content includes the kinds of video clips and articles that continue to bring in traffic for years. This sort of content remains true, useful, and frequently searched no matter what season it is and no matter what the latest hot trend might be.
With that in mind, let’s examine how you can leverage evergreen content in order to grow your affiliate marketing group.
Give your Affiliate Marketing Group Just the FAQs
A detailed Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section of your website can rapidly become your most popular content. Not only will your current affiliate network love you for providing well organized answers to their queries, but a good FAQ attracts new customers and affiliates as well.
How? When people don’t know something, they often type the question right into Google. In fact, 8% of all searches are just questions that need answers, rather than a general information hunt. If your FAQ covers the answer to that question, the chances of you hitting the front page are much higher.
Make sure that every question on your FAQ has a unique ID in the heading. That way you can link a specific answer by adding the ID’s hashtag (#) after the address.
Coupon Affiliates has an example of this in their changelog, where you can link to any past version notes that you like. For example, here’s the direct link to version 5.10’s patch notes.
ID tags are a great way to make any FAQ more useful and more organized!
Tutorials Will Grow your Affiliate Marketing Group
You might need to update these slightly from time to time as product features change, but the popularity of a good tutorial is beyond denial. Not only does it answer specific questions, much like a FAQ does, but it also shows off the features and ease of use of either your products or your sub-affiliate tools.
While text tutorials are great, and the descriptions can really help on the SEO side, video clips are by far the most popular way to present tutorials. In fact 83% of people polled prefer video tutorials over audio or text.
So in addition to any text based tutorials you plan to provide, include a handful of video clips to illustrate evergreen processes. In other words, if a particular procedure is very unlikely to change in the near future, make a video of it.
The two main options here are explainer videos and subtitled videos. If you’re comfortable doing voiceover work, or you want to get a freelancer to do it for you, that’s fine. But automating the process as much as possible by using standard explainer or subtitling apps makes your time investment much more reasonable, and allows for easy edits in the future.
Coupon Affiliates has many examples of this in their documentation, for example, take a look at their video tutorial on setting up a registration system for your affiliate program. This page includes both a video tutorial, and a written version for those that prefer to read.
Testimonials and Use Cases are Always Relevant
Everyone wants to see proof that your product, your system, and your business actually works. Testimonials allow you to either confirm your own credibility, or borrow the credibility of your umbrella organization.
A good testimonial stands on its own. People shouldn’t need a ton of context to see that someone is happy with your product and your organization. Ultimately, you’ll want to provide a summary of your relationship with the testimonial-giver in one paragraph or less before quoting their praise. If you want to go into more detail afterwards, you can.
You’ll find that you can use quotes from these testimonials all the time. They can be embedded in your other articles, or linked from social media and blog posts. They are, in a nutshell, the gift that keeps on giving.
Product Reviews are the Ultimate Evergreen Content for your Affiliate Marketing Group
Do you prefer to have a kind stranger do all of your work for you?
That’s exactly what using product reviews entails: Letting users share their positive experiences in a way that will convince others to have a look at what you’re offering.
Without a doubt, the best review site to use is Trustpilot. They’re seen as a fair, neutral authority that works across hundreds of industries. They don’t have a particular national bias, nor do they accept some of the worst industry practices (paying for reviews, review forgery, etc). Much like Wikipedia, the community is self policing, reporting any foul play or review manipulation that they see.
The first thing that you’ll want to do is claim your profile on Trustpilot! So many companies fail to do this, and it’s a complete waste of both content and SEO potential. Remember that the site provides you a free link to your homepage, adding to your site’s legitimacy.
Once you’ve claimed your profile, make sure that you follow their guidelines and respond to negative reviews with offers to help and clarify any bad experiences. Never offer incentives for reviews, and thank folks who leave particularly nice comments.
Then, you can use Trustpilot reviews as pseudo-testimonials. You can’t do certain things, such as quote a static rating for your company that may change over time (again, read their guidelines on review usage carefully). But you can use those beautiful quotes in all kinds of posts and articles.
If your particular industry or affiliate marketing group primarily uses a different review site than Trustpilot, use that instead. For example, Coupon Affiliates is primarily reviewed on the WordPress.org site and could leverage those reviews as proof that their system works and is loved by the larger community.
How Can Coupon Affiliates Help with Evergreen Content?
I’m glad you asked! Here are just a few ways that Coupon Affiliates can help you to distribute and promote evergreen content for your affiliate marketing group:
- The Creatives section will help you to disseminate free content to your affiliates.
- The ability to make Referral Campaigns will let you track the success of individual pieces of evergreen content.
- By using Direct Link Tracking, your affiliates don’t need to worry about using referral links. ion their evergreen content.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you have any questions about how Coupon Affiliates can be used to build a powerful affiliate program, and help leverage evergreen content on your WooCommerce site, contact them today.
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About Our Guest Poster:
Bill Ricardi is a full time ghostwriter and SEO content provider, the owner of Bill Ricardi Publishing and author of nine fantasy novels. As a stereotypical writer, he lives in Northern Ireland where he and his partner take care of a ginger cat, some wild birds, and several hundred trees.
Bill Ricardi is a former Silicon Valley sysadmin, and uTest’s 2010 Performance Tester of the Year. He was test manager for Deloitte before becoming a full time author in 2017, and is also a regular contributor to the Coupon Affiliates blog.
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