Recently-ish (actually the last few years) I’ve been concentrating my affiliate sites on stupidly long tail keywords.

Not the 3 or 4 or 5 word phrases most people say to target.

Much longer…

5, 6, 7 or more words (the title of this article is quite short at just 7 words)

Often questions but always phrases that show up in the Google suggestions or something very close.

I’m then splashing out $3.30 for a 500 word article on iWriter. Which, surprisingly, don’t need much editing so long as my instructions are good (the main one is “Please don’t write in the third person (“one” etc.)”

Post, including an affiliate link or two. Add in a free royalty free image from Pixabay. Rinse and repeat.

Like everything nowadays, these take a couple of months to show up in the search results but because there’s near enough no competition (Quora or Yahoo Answers maybe) they’ll show up with no external promotion.

If you use the Contextual Related Posts plugin you’ll get some people investigating one or two other pages. But, more importantly, Google will see the internal links and nudge you up the ranks.

There are lots of advantages and very few disadvantages:

• Easy to rank – basically publish & forget
• Easy to get articles written – because there’s no competition worth speaking of, 500 words works OK (try that with a shorter “long tail” keyword and watch the digitial tumbleweed)
• Cheap – at $3.30 per article, you could publish 10 a month (one every 3 days) for $33. Or one a day for just over 100 bucks a month. Or you could write them yourself – 500 words doesn’t take long
• One sale *ever* likely puts you in profit unless you’re just promoting Amazon products. My lowest affiliate sales pay $5.23, higher ones $22 upwards so even if I don’t get a sale from every article it doesn’t matter
• People are keen to get an answer at this level – they’ve tried and failed on the shorter “long tail” keywords
• No marketers bother with this level so there’s almost no competition. Only a madman would create a 3,000 word article for these phrases – there’s not enough traffic to justify that
• You’ll likely only get one or two views a day once they settle in the search results but some might surprise you with 6 or 7 views a day. But even one or two views a day is 30+ views per month which is 11 cents per click for the first month, zero thereafter

If you’ve got a site that’s just sitting there, looking bored, no traffic worth speaking of, then try this for a few months (you’ll need to be persistent as Google don’t index you instantly). This time next year you’ll be wearing a broad grin and patting yourself on the back that you’ve done it.

That’s it.

But if you need more help with affiliate marketing, check out my complete how-to program here.