I am a newbie to AM (but not to web ventures) and am aiming to earn $100/day from AM within 3-4 months. I really need to get there, as I am currently unemployed. I am hoping some more experienced marketers can chime in on what may or may not be the best approach for quickly getting into the game. Is the below strategy workable?
The Strategy
My first plan is to use major Parasites (YouTube, Wordpress.org, Facebook, etc.) to market affiliate offers. This strategy is discussed a lot on forums like BHW and successful marketers on those forums swear by it.
The strategy involves putting up an article (or video) on a Parasite page that subtly pushes a product or service, while being informative. The article will initially link to an authority site (e.g. webMD) via a 301 redirect from a domain I control. Since these Parasites have high PR, they can take a pounding of backlinks and supposedly rank just from those links and a few social signals. So one could set GSA SER (or other software) to create tens of thousands of links pointing directly to the Parasite page. If you did that with a brand new domain, Google would likely put your website in the sandbox, since it is unusual for a new site to suddenly have thousands of links. But Google knows that pages on Parasites can routinely go viral, so they are not so quick to penalize such pages. Instead, such pages are likely to rapidly rise up the SERPs.
Once the page hits page 1 of the SERPs, I switch the 301 authority link (webMD) to an affiliate offer landing page - and voila! Thousand of visitors per day hitting the offer page (in theory at least).
The benefits of this strategy is that one is leveraging the domain authority of the Parasite and there is no need to create a major website on your own. Just put up one 700 word article on a Parasite. The barrier to entry is therefore very low from all angles, which is appealing to a newbie like myself.
But my big question is:
Does this strategy even work these days, or is the plan outdated? When I search Google for typical terms (weight loss, male vitality, etc., etc.) that should yield affiliate pages I see exactly ZERO parasite pages appearing on page 1 of the SERPs. So did Google already get wise to this strategy and kill it off in the last few months? The posts on BHW pushing this strategy are 6 months old, which isn't that long ago. On the other hand, I realize a lot can change in 6 months and maybe already has. If so, is SEO dead and is paid traffic the only way to go?
it can be done but not as easy as you describe for big keywords, maybe for hyper niched long tails but that's about it
plus you have to have a production line on the go as they,ll be dumped out of Google on a very regular basis.