This week’s Ask an SEO Question question is:
“I’ve been running an affiliate site for 2 years, but I’ve reached a plateau. What advanced data analysis techniques can help me identify new growth opportunities that I might be missing?”“
This is one of my favorite questions that comes up at conferences and in the affiliate marketing programs we manage. Most of the time the affiliate submits their site or niche, and I can give direct examples and opportunities. But for this we want to keep everything anonymous, so I will share the processes and ideas so that you and everyone reading can implement them, regardless of industry, content type, etc. that you produce.
Breaking the plateaus
There are a few plateaus that affiliates face more than others, including:
- Traffic stagnation.
- New products and services to recommend.
- Fixed income lines.
- Topics to discuss.
These are the most common with this question, so I’ll focus on them. If anyone reading this has encountered another and is looking for ways to overcome them, send the question via my author bio page here. If I worked on it, I’ll do my best to answer it in a future column.
Traffic stagnation
If you have a website and traffic has stagnated because you dominate all the top queries and topics, look for help outside of your own writing and knowledge base. Instead of hiring writers to help you create more content based on what’s on your platform, try attracting new visitors from other platforms (websites, podcasts, apps, etc.) or inviting people to create unique content for you by introducing them and asking them to promote it.
To find new topics, ideas, and questions, adding a forum or community can help drive new traffic and ideas to your website or community. Some search engines like Google tend to reward this authentic user-generated contentbut this comes with a decent amount of manual work with monitoring and quality control. The benefit here is that you create a community that creates content for you.
Pro tip: Add a prompt on the main pages of the website, such as “unanswered question, click here to ask the community”, where it is sent to the forum, or have it go to an answer box where you collect it and create a new guide. Likewise, Search Engine Journal has a “Submit Questions” section for me and other “Ask A” columnists.
The UGC can start showing up in Google as well as LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, and you can start generating new traffic and a new user base. All of this can be monetized. But maybe you don’t want the hassle and risks of a UGC platform; there are more options.
Take your best guides and articles and start turning them into videos. A a long-form video can be useful with YouTube and generate traffic; it can be uploaded to Skool if you create a course. Skool and other platforms allow you to charge access fees, and each chapter of the video can become a long-form video or a short film that works for YouTube, TikTok and probably Instagram. With the exception of short films, affiliate links can be used on all of these platforms. The advantage of videos is that many platforms like YouTube can generate constant streams of traffic compared to IG or TikTok where it only lasts a few days to a week.
Now start adding text versions to social media platforms in any way that suits you. LinkedIn allows long forms and encourages users to ask questions, complete surveys, and then you can link to your website. Bluesky and X are short-form but allow quick and easy links to your website or pages, although traffic comes in short bursts. Pinterest is short, but image-rich, and a well-made, attention-grabbing Pin can drive consistent traffic for a year and sometimes more.
Some partners decide to launch into podcasting. Each topic on your website can become a theme or session, or be combined into a very strong topic that becomes a course that you can monetize. Find others with complementary knowledge and/or who have audiences and invite them to participate. You will help increase everyone’s traffic and share your expertise. Sometimes your guest can also spark new content ideas for you.
New products and services and correction of revenue lines
When you run out of products and services to promote or reach the highest AOVs available, revenue begins to stagnate. While you can’t control what happens in the merchant or lead generation website’s funnel, you can control how you make money. This is an affiliate article, so I won’t be talking about increasing EPCs and CPMs or getting page views to increase advertising media, but rather using affiliate links and offers.
Here’s where to start looking.
Survey your audience or use your analytics for demographics
Knowing the demographics of your audience, including their age, urban/rural/suburban characteristics, tastes and interests, and everything in between, can make you a lot of money. If the majority of them happen to have dogs and are urban, but you run a cooking site, add pet-friendly recipes or dog toys that give them exercise and stimulate them when they can’t be outside more regularly to burn off energy.
If the same demographics are local, such as a group of parents in New England, create snow day resources where you review family-friendly table games for snow days, lists of local restaurants in the area that offer free meals for kids or family deals, and affordable family vacations for snowbirds.
If your audience resides largely in rural areas, think about ingredients that are hard to find in rural areas due to the small size of grocery stores, then share online resources to access them. This is low-hanging fruit because recipe sites will focus on tools and products, but they can also monetize ingredients.
Find out what else interests them
Once you know who your audience is and what their demographic breakdown is, survey them to find out their interests. If you can’t get them to take surveys, even with incentives like gift cards or drawing prizes (assuming it’s legal where you and your audience live), find free research materials and use your marketing skills to find hobbies, stores, and associations that have similar audiences.
Maybe your audience is 50-year-old suburbanites who like to watch birds. You’ve already run out of sports clothes and hiking gear, just like bird books and binoculars. It may turn out that they are also interested in photography, so you can sell cameras, photo storage solutions, ways to print the photos and sell them, editing software, and guides to using the camera and setting up different types of shots.
It could also be that they like to travel. Create guides friendly places to visit for people in their 50s and 60s, including the types of birds they might see at each spot along the route and what to pack depending on the season, as the weather can change. You can now use affiliate links for hotels and airline tickets, travel supplies, camera bags for different climates, and e-books or physical books with trail maps, travel guides, and birding books to check off the ones they see.
You should be careful to add too much content that isn’t the main topic of your channel, so you don’t accidentally downgrade your platforms for SEO. or alienate your core reader base. When you go off topic too often, you drive away current and new subscribers while confusing the algorithms. This is easy to fix with tech SEO using metarobots or robots.txt and having an editorial calendar, but that’s a different topic.
You now have new products and services to promote, new traders to work withwhich leads to more affiliate sales, thereby increasing your income. Buying guides, comparison tables, lists, etc.
New topics to discuss
Above, I mentioned podcast guests, UGC, and some ways that can spark new topic ideas when you’re running out of topics to talk about. So here are some other ways I break writer’s block with the programs I work on for myself, for clients and affiliates of our programs.
- AlsoAsked.com: You plug in a topic like “running shoes” and it generates a ton of potential questions about them. From there, I go to Google or an LLM and type it in, then see what comes up. To go further, I can ask: “What are some questions similar to this?” or “What are the questions that are complementary but different from this one?” as a second query to see what I’m missing.
- Ranking Trackers: Take the URL of a blog or forum and plug it into a rank tracking tool. It will provide a list of keywords, questions and phrases for which it appears.
- Comments: Read comments on YouTube videos from channels directly related to your business. These are things people want to know and can be a way to get new traffic while eliminating writer’s block.
- AI and LLM: Ask AI for a list of ideas related but not yet covered on your platform, then have it checked a second time. Not everything he recommends will be relevant, but it might give you some ideas.
There are almost always solutions to avoid affiliate stagnation, whether it’s traffic, revenue, topics or products and services to promote. You may need to expand your offerings to other types of products and services that match the same demographics or look to other platforms and competitors for content inspiration. Hope this helps and thanks for asking.
More resources:
Featured image: Paul Poetry/Search Engine Journal
