I can't remember the last SEO article I read that didn't make a giant song and dance about the need to be engaged socially to stay ranked well in the future.
Worst of all, I believe them.
I've long been an advocate of 'building your own traffic source', and escaping the need to pay money to advertise on other people's sites. If you can build the asset yourself, you can monetize it however you wish. You'll have full creative control over the banners and affiliate placements. And there's no pressure for your EPC to defy your CPC.
The problem with building websites specifically designed to trap affiliate traffic is that the way Google is moving, there's now a much greater pressure to engage socially and add a face to your content.
For example, I recently went through about 15 Wordpress installations changing the default username from 'admin' to something remotely resembling an actual person, and then giving them their own Google Plus profile (tumbleweedalicious).
The SEO industry is convinced that we should go further and build brands that integrate with Twitter and Facebook, not just as token gestures, but as viable sources of traffic.
So my question is simply: How the shiz do you deal with it? What's your strategy?
I'm currently training up a VA to take over my Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com/) of various affiliate brands and websites. She's going to be tasked with managing and growing the Twitters and Facebooks of my affiliate brands, and creating the illusion that I actually give a shit about each of the communities.
I've tried to keep the accounts and fan pages updated by myself in the past but the sheer weight of engaging socially across so many platforms is a real headache - especially in niches where you don't have much in common with the demographic. And that seems to be most of mine!
I'd be interested to hear from those of you playing the long-game and building affiliate brands. How do you manage the need to be more social and engaged with the community? Do you hire a VA, or suck it up and make the effort yourself? Or do you avoid it altogether and hope to game Google with strong backlinking and content structure?
I sense a lot of affiliates take that latter option, but I'm not sure if it's going to survive in the long run.
From what I understand from my SEO friends (the ones that are actually making money and being successful), being socially active is what the big 3 want to see. Not only that, but it doesn't help creating a community as well for your sites. The problem I've had is maintaining all of the social "pages". It is frustrating! The weight is heavier than a trailer park whale at McDonalds. I would have an excel spread sheet listed with all the twitter accounts and their logins. The Facebook pages were all tied to my personal account. But, since I've recently deleted err... deactivated my account there, not only have I freed myself from their shackles, all of my pages linked to them are now standing still. Now I'm in the process of starting a new account to redo those pages. Shoulda done that before. Like a brand profile or something.
Honestly, what's going to happen is hiring a VA or a team of people to manage all of this is looking like a necessity. Goog wants you to be socially involved. I believe that is definitely true in the long run and it's what I keep hearing from my SEO branding buddies. It's working for them. But that's not to say backlink shenanigans aren't going going to get you the same results.
It depends a LOT on the niches you're in. The niche must have mass appeal and must be something people are willing to share. For instance, people will share they won a lot at an online casino in some cases. People will definitely not share they signed up for a bangyourneighbour website (at least unlikely they will) while a women will certainly share her fight for weight loss has been supported by product X or Y.
Social can be mixed with SEO, but don't mix it up in total. While social is definitely beneficial for rankings in SEO, it's far from being the standalone receipt for a top ranking. An idea you could do is create landers on a domain you run a portal / blog about related products as well so you could catch some cross sales while still giving people some content and therefore incentives to share your site.