Originally published on our Medium blog
The affiliate website model is dying out. Google is cutting out all middlemen — because they are the fattest middleman of them all.
If you are still creating affiliate/niche/review websites the old-school way, you are several steps behind. Even if you’re getting traffic, losing it to another Google update is only a matter of time.
The “old-school” way is scraping a bunch of product-related keywords and producing a set of thin, nearly-duplicate posts that describe all product variations hoping to get purchase-ready traffic. Something like
- “best pink bikes for girls”
- “cheapest bikes for boys”
- “best mountain bikes for beginners”
etc. etc. You know this type of sites. Stop making them. Don’t be keyword-centric, forget the golden ratio, pillars, clusters, and whatever else you’ve been sold upon.
Instead, create magazines that target specific audiences.
Your primary goal needs to be a fun read for your target market.
The topics need to be diverse, but stuff your target market is interested in.
If we stick with the kids cycling website examples, we’d want to focus on
- physical activities similar and alternatives to cycling
- safety tips, warmups for biking, injury prevention
- trails in different areas
- exercises and physiology of cycling
- supplements and nutrition
- culture references, movies, shows, and so on
Understanding mags
Here’s what most don’t realize — most of the largest and highest-traffic websites on the Internet are still affiliate sites.
They just went the magazine route and played the long game instead of trying to grab the low hanging fruit keywords.
As a result of that, they have gathered authority in their niche AND THEN started raking traffic for product-related keywords.
Here’s one of the best examples I keep coming back to.
MindBodyGreen is a women’s lifestyle mag. Health, nutrition, exercise, fun — whatever their target market of childless working women in their 20s and 30s is interested in.
They publish all sorts of content their target market would be interested in, and have built up great authority in the field.
According to Ahrefs, MBG is getting the majority of their traffic for extremely diverse topics, mostly numerology, sex, horoscope, dreams, and other often unexpected topics:
These are the “gateway” topics MBG is using to harvest their audience clicks.
From time to time they produce product-related articles like these:
This Sleek Red Light Wand Gives My Skin An Instant Glow
Bring The Farmers Market To Your Door With These Organic Meal Delivery Services
Want A More Potent Dose Of CBD? These 4 Gummy Formulas Have You Covered
…and so on.
And you can be sure MBG is doing much, much better with these reviews organically than your average generic “bestcbdgummyreviews.info” affiliate website.
How do you get started creating a mag?
In a nutshell, you need to be audience-centric in your planning.
Define an audience
Understand what they’re interested in. You won’t nail it from the first time, but that’s OK. You need a broad and diverse set of interests to get started.
Build a content plan
A list of diverse, audience-focused, fresh, and readable topics is the #1 edge you can get over your competition that just scrapes keywords lists.
And no, your writers shouldn’t be doing that.
Audit and adapt
Implement and adjust your content plan based on Google clicks and impressions you’re getting, because that’s the only proper way to understand what your audience really wants. I can assure you MindBodyGreen editors were not planning to write about twin flame numbers years ago — but the topics were lucrative enough to capitalize on them.
For everything that’s holy, do not us AI tools for content planning. You need to come up with fun, readable, thought provoking topics that fit your audience’s interests, not rehash something that’s been written dozens of time.
If you need help with any aspect of turning your basic affiliate site into a mag, or you want to launch one from the ground up — we’ve designed our content planning services specifically for that.