The Mega Guide Method: How I Got 22,480 Search Engine Visitors in 86 Days

mega-guide-methodDriving sales via your website is hard work.

That’s especially true for affiliate webmasters, who earn commissions by referring traffic to merchants. If that traffic doesn’t convert, you can’t pay your Web hosting bill.

And it’s not enough to publish lots of keyword focused content.

I wish it were that easy, but it’s not.

Not anymore.

If you really want to see high conversions and lots of traffic, you have to target the kind of hyper-focused keyword phrases that buyers use when they’re performing searches.

You want 200 visitors a day, 1% of whom convert into sales. You don’t want (or need) 2000 visitors a day who don’t convert at all.

Then you have to create the kind of content that will rank well in the search engines.

In this post, I’m going to show you a method I used to create high quality content that attracts lots of visitors and results in daily sales.

The Mega Guide Method: (Content Marketing for Affiliate Webmasters)

On December 28, 2014, I published a blog post on an entertainment blog that had 267 posts but only averaged 33 visits per day.

After executing “The Mega Guide Method”, the traffic on that site shot up from an average of 33 visits per day to an average of 882 visits per day.

traffic

In the 3 months since I made that post, it’s generated 22,480 new visitors to my blog. And I didn’t have to build any new links to get that traffic, either.

More importantly, this post, unlike most of the other posts on the blog, actually converts and drives revenue.

Yesterday, that one post drove 5 conversions.

sales

You can do the same thing if you follow the same steps I followed.

The 3 Steps to Using “The Mega Guide Method” to Get High Converting Traffic

There are only 3 basic steps to The Mega Guide Method:

Step 1 – Identify a high converting keyword phrase.

Step 2 – Write an incredibly detailed buying guide. 

Step 3 – Include a pros and cons section.

Here’s why this method is so effective.

Even though there are millions of Web pages on the Internet, most of them suck–especially the ones which affiliate marketers create.

Let’s face it. Most affiliate webmasters want to see money, and they don’t care much about content.

You know who does care about content, though?

The visitors to your website.

You know who else cares?

The search engines.

Bing and Google don’t want to rank “thin affiliate pages”.

In fact, Google seems so confident that their algorithm filters out thin affiliate content so well that they removed that chapter from their quality raters’ guide.

That means the days of writing a 250 word glowing review of a product and seeing it rank and draw traffic are over.

Your new goal is to write the most lengthy, detailed guide possible.

Step 1 – Identify a High Converting Keyword Phrase

Your keyword phrase is the starting point for this process. You’re looking for a phrase that demonstrates that the searcher is close to making a buying decision.

Choose phrases that include words like:

  • Buy
  • Coupon
  • Discount
  • Deal
  • Download
  • Join
  • Price
  • Rebate
  • Sale
  • Shipping
  • Sign up

Actual examples of keyword phrases that include these words include:

  • “Sign Up for eBay”
  • “American Girl Coupons”
  • “New York Marriott Hotel Discounts”
  • “Deals on HP Laptops”
  • “Download CCleaner”

Someone searching for the phrase “sign up for eBay” is ready to bid on an auction.

Someone searching for “American Girl coupons” is ready to buy a doll.

Someone searching for “New York Marriott hotel discounts” is ready to book a room.

Your goal is to include a product (a specific product, and preferably a brand name) and a high converting modifier.

Where can you find such keyword phrases?

Brainstorming is one possibility, but you can also use keyword research tools on the Internet.

One of my favorites is Ubersuggest, which draws its results from Google’s suggested phrases–which are derived from actual searches that their users perform.

You type in a phrase, and Ubersuggest brings up a list of keyword phrases that people have actually searched for.

Here’s an example of a results page where I typed in “discounts on” as my seed phrase:

ubersuggest

Once you get some ideas, you can add brand names to those ideas to make them even more targeted. For example, “discounts on hotels” is a tough phrase to rank for and might not convert well.

But add the brand name and the destination to the phrase “New York City Marriott discounts”, and you’ve hit the jackpot.

You can learn more about keyword phrases with commercial intent here.

Step 2 – Write an Incredibly Detailed Buying Guide

My role model for how to write an incredibly detailed buying guide is The Wirecutter. Their goal is to pick the single best product in a category and write the most thorough and well-researched guide on that subject available.

Instead of publishing a single post every day, they publish infrequently–6 to 12 times per month.

They put in between 50 and 150 hours researching and writing each of their guides.

And their posts are incredibly lengthy. For example, their post about which paper shredder to buy is over 7500 words long.

How much money does their site make?

$50,000 a month, and it’s doubling every quarter.

That’s not a lot of money for Wall Street investors, but for individual affiliate webmasters, that’s a big chunk of money.

And there’s no big magical mystery behind how they do it.

They just publish incredibly detailed buying guides.

Do you need to spend 150 hours of research and write 7500 words in order to make “The Mega Guide Method” work?

Nah.

The guys at The Wirecutter have a lot of money, and they target broader keyword phrases than I recommend for “The Mega Guide Method”.

You want to focus on a brand name product. This narrows down your topic in such a way that you can create an incredibly detailed buying guide in 2500 or 3000 words. Maybe even less.

But you don’t want lots of words in the post just to have lots of words in the post.

You want to write something substantive–something that’s going to help the reader of that post make a buying decision.

You can find guidance about the kind of content that Google considers high-quality in the list of questions they published after their Panda update.

They included a number of adjectives that describe both the content that they like and that describe the content that they don’t like.

Here is the list of adjectives I wanted to be able to use to describe my Mega Guide:

  • Authoritative
  • Carefully-Written
  • Complete
  • Comprehensive
  • Deep
  • Detailed
  • Error-Free
  • Expert
  • Insightful
  • Interesting
  • Long
  • Original
  • Specific
  • Substantial
  • Trustworthy
  • Unique
  • Well-Edited
  • Well-Organized
  • Well-Researched

In the post I wrote in December, I include the following information:

  • A story about a friend of mine who asked my advice about buying a specific product.
  • An overview of what the product was.
  • A list of places where you could buy that product.
  • My opinion about the best place to buy that product.
  • The pros and cons of the product itself.

I included the story about my friend asking advice because research studies have shown that storytelling is one of the ingredients that causes people to share content on the Web.

It also made the post more interesting to the reader.

The overview of the product provides more details about the product aimed at everyone. I wanted people who knew absolutely nothing about this product to come away from reading my post knowing exactly what it is and how it could be used.

Listing reputable places where you can buy a product is good for multiple reasons.

For one thing, if you’re an affiliate with multiple merchants, it enables you to drive traffic to more than one of them.

Also, you can appeal to customers who like different stores. If a product is available at Amazon, Target, and/or Walmart, you want brand-loyal customers of each store to be able to buy the product via your affiliate link.

Having an opinion about the best place to buy is an important service to offer your reader. It also enables you to promote the merchants that you like the best.

I cover the “pros and cons” piece of the content in the next section.

Step 3 – Include a Pros and Cons Section

When I described the last step, I mentioned Google’s list of Panda questions.

The most important of these questions was this one:

Does the article describe both sides of a story?

When you’re talking about a buying guide, “both sides” of the story are the reasons why you should buy AND the reasons why you shouldn’t buy.

Including this information in your post increases your credibility.

If you’re willing to discuss the drawbacks of the product you’re pitching, then you seem like an expert or an authority instead of a car salesman.

Your article becomes a helpful resource instead of a sales letter (or “advertorial”).

That’s the kind of content readers want to read, and it’s the kind of content that Google wants to rank.

So why not give it to them?

I was explaining this to a friend of mine last week. He complains that his site doesn’t get enough Google traffic and that the traffic he does get doesn’t convert as well as he’d like.

So I read one of his pages, and I told him he should add a pros and cons section.

He told me that he didn’t see any drawbacks to this product.

I told him he wasn’t thinking hard enough.

No product is perfect for everyone.

You can easily create a list of who is the right buyer for your product and who’s the wrong buyer for your product.

For example, I love the movie Pulp Fiction. I think it’s practically flawless.

But it’s not a good movie to watch with young children.

EVERY product has pros and cons.

It’s YOUR job to be analytical and thoughtful and present them to your audience so that they can make an educated buying decision.

Now It’s Your Turn

Do you think The Mega Guide Method might work for you?

Sure, it takes more effort than just hammering out between 1 and 3 short blog posts per day, 5 days per week.

In fact, it takes A LOT more effort.

But you’ll find that the results are worth it.

You’ll see more traffic, more conversions, and bigger profits.

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