Overview
If you’re in the affiliate marketing business, you’re in the content creation business.
Predominantly, content refers to written material (as opposed to non-written, graphics, videos) that a website carries. It has certain expectations — of length; form and structure; language (style). A standard, but by no means prescribed, length may be, oh, anywhere from 500-2500 words. The form is narrative — that is, the written material must be presented to the audience in a structured fashion, leading from idea to idea inter-connectedly. This is called coherence. Without it, your material will become diffuse, uninteresting, unreadable even. You will lose your audience.
What To Avoid?
Bullets and numbered list, while useful as illustrative devices, are never sufficient on their own. Stuffing your posts with bullets and numbered lists on their own without explanation or elaboration is a poor strategy. Rather, consider bullets and numbered lists only as one method within the larger, more elaborately laid out presentation. Think of these devices, in other words, subordinate to the larger body of written material.
Audiences, let me emphasise, don’t go to posts to be faced with mere facts and figures. What’s the story? That’s what the audience wants — which brings me to the next section.
Expectations
The overriding question in the audience’s mind is: What’s the story? What needs to be done? Consider the first the narrative; and the second, the plot. The audience’s mind is looking for the most economical way to get at the relevant information. In fact, the audience is scanning to discover out if there’s even a story or plot in it. If they don’t find these, they will move on. That’s reader psychology for you — or, the psychology of reading itself.
When faced with a block of text (think of it as a maze), the reader seeks the most economical route to the destination. They want to find out almost immediately, what’s desirable to know, what’s achievable and how fast. As a content writer you’re vying for the reader’s attention — and attention spans in the age of instant gratification — Youtube videos, scrolling — are only getting shorter.
Unless it’s told in an interesting, easily digestible manner, it isn’t worth it — at least from the contemporary reader’s perspective raised on a steady diet of the kind already indicated.
One thing that can help is plain language — formed in simple sentences of the type Subject-Verb-(standard English syntax): This product makes the skin glow. Such sentences are called simple declaratives.
Style
The style of the posts could range from informal to formal, depending on relationship you want to establish with your audience. But regardless, it has to be professional — informative. You can be a bit chatty but not unnecessarily so.
Audience
Your audience is an asset — treat it with care. Take care to develop a relationship. Cultivate your audience. Nurture it.
What’s The Upshot?
Two conclusions can be drawn from the above: one, content creation drives affiliate marketing; two, and more importantly, content creation is writing-centred.
It stands to reason, therefore, that we need to expand our understanding of writing — if we’re to be successful in content creation. And, that being the case, I shall provide you with a much broader context than this single posts allows.
How To Broaden Your Understanding Of Writing?
Human subjectivity — what collectively we call consciousness — is still a very valuable but possibly underrated human endowment that we inherit simply by virtue of being human. To cut a long story short, one thing has emerged from our understanding of human development: humans have a rich inner existence and to express it they have invented various graphic tools (pictures; pictograms) of which writing is one. Writing we could say was inevitable, because our inner existence is abstract experienced by us as that swirl of consciousness. Humans thus needed to find a means to give it a concrete form.
Thus writing. (The other human invention of equal significance is numbers). Throughout the ages we notice a close relationship between human consciousness and writing to the extent that it might not be possible think of one without the other.
This brings us back to our present discussion from above — how to broaden our understanding of writing? — the point, however, is not just to broaden our understanding of writing but broaden it in a manner that is specific to content creation. Then this makes sense.
This is where I direct you to my other posts dealing with this subject which couldn’t possibly be fitted into this single post here:
Long-Form Content For Affiliate Marketing 1
And In The Meantime . . .
I would also like to direct you to this video where Kyle one of the co-founders of Wealthy Affiliate provides powerful insights into content creation. The best takeaways you can expect are: content creation tools; ranking; traffic. Watch here Kyle’s lesson:
If there are other topics you would like me to deal with, then please shoot me an email: soheil@affiliatepathways.com.
Cheers.