Ristvin Marketing Blog

I woke up to an email this morning from one of my readers:

“We’ve been putting together a website that will rely partly on affiliate marketing to monetize our site and partly on some of our own products.  I’ve been following your blog posts and I’m a little confused about theming a website.  I understand the theming of page content, but could you go more into detail on the website theming?” – Terry D.

Well, I was going to write this post about how to sign up to affiliate programs, get your affiliate links and banners, and how to cloak your links so that others don’t steal your commissions, but after an email like that, I thought that I should answer those questions:

How Our Themed Affiliate Website Works…

Charles Hefflin, in his “Master Plan”, See (SEO 20/20), brought the attention of the internet marketing community to a new form of structuring websites in a thematic way which he called silo sites. According to him, websites with this structure were more SEO and search engine friendly and thus ranked better.

The idea behind a themed or silo site structure when it comes to affiliate marketing sites is a fairly simple one:

You will write article pages that are themed around a main keyword or phrase.  Using theme keywords in the article will allow the content to target several low competition, highly-related phrases.

These “themed” pages will often rank well for a number of low-competition, “long-tail” phrases. Even though each phrase is usually low in demand, the combined demand of all the keyword phrases on the page adds up to significant traffic for each article page.

Your article pages will point to main pages that pre-sell your affiliate products or services. There can be one or more main pre-sell pages, depending on the niche.

Your main pages will usually target very high competition, buyer phrases because of the nature of these pages. It is difficult to get a high rank in the search engines initially for phrases targeted on the main pages but not to worry because it is the nature of the article pages that takes care of this.

What’s going to happen is that the article pages are going to funnel the traffic from the articles, to the  main pages that are pre-selling a relevant product where you have a chance of getting an affiliate sale.

In other words, if you had a main page selling Sage fly fishing rods and reels, you might have a bunch of articles relating to picking out the best fly rods and reels and information on the different types of rods and reels.  All of these link to a Sage rod and reel review or other kind of pre-sell page.

When someone reads one of your articles, which they usually find when they type in a long-tail phrase in the search engine, they are aroused by the article enough to click through to your pre-sell main page.

The diagram above is of a siloed site with three theme silo’s. Each theme is based on the pre-sell content of a main page with article pages that support it.

The homepage is relatively inactive in getting visitors to the site.  But if it does attract visitors, it provide links to the main pages and the sitemap.  The sitemap is important in that it links to all the important pages that you want Google and the search engines to find.

This is quite a departure from when I first started making websites.  Back then, the homepage was all important.  Visitors came to your homepage first and then found your back pages through your navigation menu.

Google changed all that by indexing pages separately instead of indexing the website as a whole like earlier search engines did.  It also shows how important search engines have become in getting traffic to pages that are relevant to the search terms being typed in.

The nice thing is that each page on your site is now considered a landing page.  Each page can rank separately for keywords and phrases.  This means that you can get visitors to your site with a wide variety of keyword phrases.

Two Types of Silos for Theming Your Website

If you take a look at the above diagram, you will notice that there can be a number of ways that you can link together the pages within each silo.  And, if you think about it, there are a number of ways that you could link silos together.

I’ve just showed you the one way that I like to theme a website for affiliate marketing to gain the biggest advantage to getting a sale.  But, there are other ways.  This leads us to the two main types of silo sites:  Those using virtual silos and those that use directory silos.

What’s the difference?  The virtual silo design creates the siloed theme simply by the way pages are linked together.  While the directory silo design places all the pages of each silo into separate directories on the host’s server.

When I first read the “Master Plan” and found out about siloed sites, I saw that it looked like they were using a fancy page link pattern to create the theming of each silo.  So, that’s what I did.

Over time, though, I began to create my themed silos through the directory design.  It had the advantage of keeping a related pages together in one directory and as websites grow, this makes it easier to keep it all organized.  Plus, I noticed that the directory name could be the main theme and this made pages within it rank higher in Google.

Theming your website is to get you more visitors through higher search engine rankings.  I think that the directory model does this more efficiently.  At least that’s my experience…

So, I hope that I’ve answered the question and limited the confusion on this important subject.  See ya next post….

Tags: affiliate marketing, pre-sell page, siloed website, Themed niche website, theming a website

Related Posts on Ristvin Marketing Blog

• May 5, 2010 -- Build and Structure a Niche Affiliate Website…
• December 13, 2009 -- Pre-Sell Affiliate Landing Pages:
• April 9, 2010 -- List Building… When You’re Promoting Another Merchant’s Product as an Affiliate
• March 7, 2010 -- Making Money With ClickBank
• February 6, 2010 -- Worse Than a Google Slap – Colorado HB 1193