Affiliate Marketing and SEO – Where Domainers and Affiliate Marketers Converge

As you’ve heard me say over and over now – I learn a LOT from the Affiliate Convention this week and I’ll be sharing just about everything with all of you! I’ve been making money with my domain names since 2007 – it’s been a lot of work but well-worth every minute of it. As I’ve said in my book, on this blog and on Twitter – I have not become a millionaire from Domaining and I don’t drive a Ferrari. I do make thousands of dollars a month from my existing domains and what I learned this week I believe will help me make tens of thousands of dollars a month.

This is true passive income I’m talking about. I build a piece of property online, apply solid SEO principles and multiple forms of monetization and sit back and collect the revenue. As a Domainer I use the domain name to my advantage by focusing on keyword rich domains. This is where Domainers and Affiliate Marketers are starting to converge. See Affiliate Marketers aren’t in the business of selling domains, they are in the business of monetizing domains. Now many Domainers are also trying to make money with their domains as parking and Adsense revenues decline.

As a Domainer you can approach affiliate marketing with a unique angle since having keyword rich domains can be very powerful for SEO if used correctly. See many affiliate marketers are doing the same thing Domainers are doing – they just choose to live in the Affiliate Marketing world rather than the Domaining world. At the conference I heard many successful Affiliate Marketers talk about getting their sites ranked on the first page of Google and then optimizing their landing pages to get the maximum revenue from their visitors…isn’t this what many Domainers do?

If you want to monetize your domains then make sure you start looking in both the Domaining world and the Affiliate Marketing world. Put your brandable domains aside for a moment and take a look at your keyword-rich domains. Now look at which of those domains have keywords that are in a popular affiliate marketing niche – this is a great place to get started! Wait…you’re a Domainer – you don’t know what niches are popular in the affiliate world!! Don’t worry – I have the list and knowing this alone will change the way you look at your domains – here are the top five affiliate spaces right now:

  1. Retail
  2. Financial Services
  3. Education
  4. Auto
  5. Travel

Now look at your portfolio – looks a little different doesn’t it? The money is in these top five categories – how many of your domains are in these categories? Now don’t get me wrong – you can still make money outside of these spaces…but this is where Affiliate Marketers are making BIG money with their domains…so why shouldn’t you?

So how can you get started? Take a domain you have in one of these spaces and build a one-page, search engine optimized site with affiliate promotions that are DIRECTLY-related to what your visitor is looking for. You can put some Google Adsense on as well if you’d like but remember…you want to start to think about how to make money with these affiliate programs since you have direct control over which ads will display on your site and your payouts won’t disappear like they are with Google.

You might be saying…wait? One page? Don’t I need a five-page mini-site? Shouldn’t each domain become an involved project? Not at first! Test the niche – one page of content is all you need to get listed in the search engines and get an initial idea of the traffic you can get. If it takes-off, by all means build a five, ten or twenty page site, keep adding fresh content, the sky is the limit. Do this with your top five domains that you think are directly relevant to the hot affiliate marketing spaces and you might find the incredible potential your domains really have!

Once you find a domain that ranks well and starts getting some good traffic and revenue then turn to the affiliate marketing gurus for advice on how to tweak your landing page and get even more revenue from your visitors. I am constantly making small tweaks to my landing pages and it makes a HUGE difference – just read about how I doubled the revenue of a MiniSite in 30 minutes and you’ll get an idea of the real potential that’s there.

The Domaining world and Affiliate Marketing world are converging and the sooner you start to use knowledge from both industries the better! Thanks to all the wonderful affiliate marketing people who welcomed me into their world and inspired me to get more involved in this space!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton