Affiliate marketing is like most other businesses online – if you don’t do anything to help your business grow, it will gradually shrink,

That’s down to a combination of factors including that Google’s robots get bored if you don’t update your site often (so they call less often) but even more importantly there is more and more new content appearing, day and night.

So – unless yours is a massive site – your chance of appearing in the search results diminishes over time.

Which means the boring answer is probably the best one – to grow your affiliate marketing business, you need to create more content and put it on your site.

Of course, that content needs to be better quality as time goes on.

The days of spammy sites stuffing keywords into pages almost at random are mostly gone.

Which means unless you’ve discovered a new way to re-write content, spun articles are not an option. The software isn’t good enough to write passable articles that would stand the test of a human reader or even a computer checking them for sensibility.

You need to either create the content yourself – typing away like I do or speaking your content and getting a computer or a human to transcribe it – or you need to employ people to create the content for you using sites like iWriter.

The amount of content you create is up to you but I’d suggest that you err on the side of more rather than less. Apart from anything else, that gives the search engines more opportunity to show your pages in the long tail results – the keywords that are searched regularly but don’t show up in the keyword planner because they’re not predictable enough for Google’s advertisers to earn much money from.

If you’ve ever got frustrated with the regular results and had to type in more and more words to get what you were looking for, that’s the kind of search I’m talking about.

The precise words used will vary from person to person which is where Google’s algorithm comes into its own by selecting the best match, even if you weren’t targeting the phrase the person typed in.

Usually that comes about when your articles are longer and are written naturally in much the same way as if you were replying to an email or talking to someone in real life.

In either of those cases, you wouldn’t be thinking about keyword density or the length of your reply or all the other supposedly important details.

You’d be concentrating on making sure the other person understood what you were saying.

Your website content should be the same.

If your preferred style is video, that’s OK as well.

YouTube is massive (I know you’d probably already noticed that) and people will search out information on it in much the same way as they do in Google.

That does mean that your videos should have a decent description to help YouTube and Google understand and index them better – videos aren’t an excuse to skimp on writing, sorry.

Videos are maybe more flexible for growing your affiliate marketing business than just relying on your website – the recent changes at Facebook encourage the use of videos – but because you’re less in control of your YouTube channel than you are with your own self-hosted website, I still think you need to use your own site for at least some of your affiliate marketing.

Generally speaking it’s a good embed your videos on your website pages. YouTube give you code to help you do that easily enough and even just copying the URL from the address bar of your browser works reliably in recent versions of WordPress. And YouTube takes account of where your video is played, so that helps your “score” in their algorithm.

The other thing you should do to help grow your affiliate marketing business is attract people to your email list.

You can do that in a number of ways but the standard one (which still works reasonably well) is to offer a free gift in exchange for someone’s email list.

You send them their gift (obviously) and then you send them regular messages with your own preferred mix of information and sales pitches.

That method has worked since the start of the internet and it still works.

Sure, there’s more competition in people’s email inboxes but providing you write good content with attention grabbing (but preferably not spammy) subject lines and compelling reasons to click on the links you send out, it’s a very good way to grow your affiliate marketing business without having to rely totally on the search engines.

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