Steve Warrington describes how he "automated" his search engine based affiliate marketing business. This "automation" boiled down to maximizing the value of his content creators' work in a well defined system to gain search visibility.
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Steve Warrington operates a web content business that he monetizes through affiliate marketing. As described in our last segment, Steve initially stumbled into this business trying to publish an ebook on mortgage finance and realizing he could make much more money giving the content away for free and placing ads next to it. In this segment, Steve describes how he has systematized these business practices as he has opened new content areas:
- He now discovers new content, assesses the opportunity it presents, and creates content.
- Once a content area shows promising results, Steve hires outside people to manage the sites and post content. His main sources for additional personnel include:
- Steve focuses his content creation efforts toward the "long tail" of organic search:
- Organic search refers to the part of search results that are not influenced by advertising, in other words, the search results that are not labeled as sponsored links. Although it takes considerable time investment to do well in organic search results, you do not have to pay per click as you do with sponsored links.
- The long tail refers to low volume search terms where there is not a lot of competition. On the order of 60 to 70% of searches occur using these terms. It is much easier to appear high in search engine results for long-tail search terms, although more of these terms are required to generated adequate visits.
Steve refers to this process as "automating" his work. What he is really doing is taking advantage of his contributors inputs into a well defined system designed to work in the search engine ecosystem.