Below I will go through how I went about developing a strategy for ranking for the term “30 Days of Discipline Review” with my website strivingforfreedom.com
I decided that I would try and rank for the term “30 Days of Discipline Review” because although the search volume is relatively low, I knew that I would be able to compete with my site.
The search term is also extremely targeted for people who are looking for whether or not the product is worth it or not. This usually means they want you to reassure them of what they already think. After they hear that, they are extremely likely to buy the product through your link.
In order to review the product, I bought the product and went through the course for the whole month and recorded my progress in a weekly blog post. I also had an accompanying youtube video for each of the days. My thought process was that I wanted to fill each of the pages with as much detailed analysis as possible and multiple forms of multimedia would boost authority.
After the month was over, I went about writing a long blog post reviewing the product and linking internally to my weekly blog posts.
I looked to other sites to see what was working for them. I noticed that authoritative blog posts that were long and detailed, that included accompanying youtube videos were ranking well for the authors.
After writing the blog post, I made sure that my on site seo included my keyword in the title tag, meta description, and the h1 tag.
After writing the blog post, making sure my on page seo was correct, and embedding the accompanying youtube video, I made it onto the 2nd page of google results for “30 Days of Discipline Review”.
At this point I explored some options for building links. I had two low hanging fruit that I went with. One was a reddit link, another was a link from the author of the book on his twitter.
With reddit, I went to a sub reddit on discipline called /getdisciplined and attempted to write a post that looked as least spammy as possible. With reddit, if your post gets a specific number of upvotes, the link becomes a dofollow link. With the authority of reddit being so high, I thought it was a worthwhile effort to try and get my post upvoted.
I did this by trying to come off as some random guy trying out an ebook and posting my progress. This worked out well because it was actually true. This can backfire on reddit easily because users are wary of people just trying to promote their products. My post on reddit at one point had up to 36 upvotes.
This resulted in a dofollow link with the exact anchor text of the keyword I was trying to rank for, and a significant increase in traffic to my page from people looking to get more disciplined in their life.
Unfortunately the page eventually went down to 4 upvotes over time, which resulted in less visibility and the dofollow link.
I was able to get in contact with the author of the the book and he tweeted out a link to my page after he saw it. Getting a link on Twitter from the author gave me some targeted traffic from his readers who may have been on the fence about buying the book.
Although a link from twitter is a nofollow link, it did provide a small bump in rankings due to social sharing signals that google takes in to account. How much of a bump this was, it’s hard to say.
After getting a few links I noticed that my review was on the first page of Google and climbing.
Finally after a few weeks, I was able to rank first for “30 Days of Discipline Review”.
As a side benefit, I started ranking for the keyword “30 Days of Discipline” as well. At last check, I was ranking 5th for this term.
This resulted in a huge increase in affiliate sales for me.
All in all, a successful seo campaign to increase affiliate sales for my site.