eTrafficJams has a brief but interesting article that lists some situations where you would want to outsource your entire search engine optimization (SEO) campaign and compares it with situations where you might just want to get an SEO copywriter. If you are in the very common situation of being a primarily pay-per-click (PPC) affiliate and you are looking for those big SEO bucks, you are going to want to give the article a read.

The article itself got me thinking about the shifts I have seen in our successful affiliate’s approach to affiliate marketing in the last couple of years. It seems to me that affiliates, once happy creating low-quality, easy to build sites that often got pulled from the search engines, are now looking towards creating website that are sustainable. I think a large part of that site sustainability comes down to the quality of a site’s design and content.

And I guess that would be one thing I would add to the eTrafficJams article - that hiring a skilled SEO copywriter, or designer for that matter, may also help pay dividends in your PPC campaigns and should help your sites overall sustainability. Good landing page copy can work for both SEO and PPC if done well - and having your pages rank well in both the natural and sponsored results can be very lucrative. Building out a quality site also help increase you chances of surviving some kind of “affiliate site” backlash that might come from search engines that are overwhelmed and fed up with “junk” affiliate sites.

Now if you have ever spoken with me, you might know that I am a big proponent of hiring or contracting with talented copywriters and designers to help develop a great website that works for both PPC and SEO. Heck, here at InsureMe we have a copywriter team that produces landing pages that not only convert well for our PPC campaigns, but rank well in the natural results. It’s the best of both worlds.

Of course as a company of sixty-some-odd employees, we can afford to bring on people full time - which is a luxury that most affiliates don’t have. But as I have told many affiliates in the past, there are plenty of freelance writers and designers that are looking for work, and when given clear guidelines, can create awesome content or web pages for your site. If you are looking for talent, look no further than your local college - see if you can get in touch with the journalism or design professors and see if they have some students that would be interested in doing some freelance work. You can usually work a deal to pay them on a per-article or per design basis - and a lot of times you don’t have to pay too much for great writing or design.

From an industry prospective, I think that eventually it will be essential to have a content rich, professional looking website to take part in either the sponsored or natural rankings. You have seen proof of that on the SEO side for the last few years as Google has tweaked and re-tweaked its algorithm to promote high-quality sites to the top of their rankings. And I think that Google’s spidering of PPC landing pages to calculate the AdWords quality score is a sign of things to come across the PPC market. Search engines know that quality results are what is going to keep them in business and competitive for the long term, and I find it hard to believe allowing poorly written and designed websites too be included in any of their search results will benefit them in the long run (at least for competitive keywords).

So I guess my point is this - if you haven’t really started building a quality site - and you are still cranking out low-quality, throwaway sites - you might want to hop on the sustainable site bandwagon now. I have seen a big shift in attitude of some very big affiliates. They are all reevaluating their businesses and trying to find a way to make something of substance and something that is sustainable. I think this is the way of the future for affiliates, and the sooner you embrace it, the better your chances of future success.

What do you think? Am I jumping the gun here or is there something to this sustainability thing? Let me know!

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