Welcome back to another episode of NOCvoiz. In today’s interview, we are featuring “Nikola Roza”. He is known for his freelance content writing, SEO and Affiliate Marketing. He is going to share his insights and tips about Blogging, SEO and Affiliate Marketing.

1. To start with, tell us how you started such a successful career in the digital Industry? What made you pick this particular career? Who motivated you to choose this career path?

Thank you for inviting me to this interview. It’s an honor for sure.

I started doing internet marketing in 2015 after my mother got terminally ill and I tried to make money online to help save her life. I failed because it was too late for her (she had exactly 3 months left to live), but the insights I got during that first unsuccessful stint at internet marketing helped drive me to my new career in affiliate marketing.

2. What are the most essential things needed to implement to succeed in blogging as well as in affiliate marketing?

Planning is crucial if you want to succeed as an affiliate marketer.

You need to closely tie your blogging goals to your affiliate goals. Namely, if you want to have a successful affiliate blog, then every blog post on your site you publish must contribute to your goal of being a successful marketer.

Having said that, there are only 2 types of content you need to push on your blog.

First, there’s monetizable content (reviews and listicle posts).

For example, this Minecraft hosting listicle is a clear example of a post that’s monetized with affiliate links and that brings in high-buyer-intent traffic from Google.

Second, there’s link bait content. That is content built around an informational topic whose purpose is to get links naturally and then spread out acquired authority across the site and to choose important money pages.

For instance, my power words guide is link bait for my site and look at how many do-follow links from authoritative blogs it’s already gotten. All whitehat without any outreach needed. And that just keeps going and going.

Both of these example posts have been planned from the start and both fulfill their particular purpose for my blog.

That’s what I mean when I say you need to approach blogging with a plan.

3. What is the best way to grow and drive organic traffic on a new blog? What are some of the best ways to promote a new blog post?

The best way to grow a blog is to focus on the first principles in SEO. First principles are things that always work, and in SEO they are content and links.

If you’re able to start a blog and have a schedule of publishing content + maintaining a positive link velocity from day one, you’re going to experience rapid and sustained traffic growth over time.

However, if you can’t do both because you’re already stretched as it is and there aren’t enough hours in a day, then focus on content first.

Build out your target pages so they start to age and mature, and then focus on promoting them. That’s also acceptable and what I did when starting out, even though I wish I could’ve done both content creation and link building right from the start.

The best way to promote a blog post is one that doesn’t take too much of your time. Promoting on Twitter is perfect because it’s very easy to write multiple tweets due to their strict character limits.

You can ask your blogger friends to share the most important posts for you. It works, as long as you don’t ask too many times in a row. You don’t want to bother anyone and burn bridges unnecessarily.

4. Social media also plays an essential role in driving traffic and making sales. What is your social media strategy?

I’m very active on social media, but the thing is that 95% of it is automated. I use Missinglettr and SocialChamp to schedule hundreds of tweets for my blog and for my blogger friends, and then I let the tools do their job while I focus on other facets of growing an affiliate business, namely content creation and link building.

5. Any SEO tips for my readers to grow a new blog quickly?

Besides the tip above on focusing on both content and links, another golden nugget is to pick keywords with larger search volume.

Namely, you don’t want to be a blogger who targets long tail keywords. They’re unprofitable, take a long time to rank (longer than the gurus are telling you as now all niches are competitive), and you need hundreds of blog posts to make long tail keyword strategy work.

Instead, pick medium difficulty “body” keywords and create awesome content around them.

Because it’s a body keyword, it means that under its umbrella there are hundreds of closely related keywords your post will index under.

And when you have hundreds of keywords where you’re competing, the chances of ranking are significantly increased, especially over time as you build up your domain authority and build links directly to the page.

Remember, as SEO’s we should never be targeting one query per page, as that is a losing strategy.

Instead, we need to target whole clusters of queries so as to maximize the value we get from any post on our blog.

A good example is my Grammarly promo code guide. I target the body query “Grammarly discount” and look for how many kw’s my site is competing for. And see how traffic has picked up nicely from giving my page so many opportunities to rank and get new visitors.

6. Backlinks are super important. Can you tell us about some of your favorite methods to earn backlinks?

Out of a hundred ways to build backlinks, I actually recommend just one. That is link building through relationship building. Building relationships with other bloggers is the best way to get links naturally and consistently over time, and is a completely white hat way that will never get you penalized.

Now, how to build relationships? It’s easy. Approach every blogger and brand in your niche with the intent of adding value to their business.

Examples of adding value (that anyone can do)

• Sharing their content on social media;
• Commenting on their blog posts;
• Engaging them on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn;
• Building links to their content and then letting them know via email.

This is a long term process, but that’s ok because we’re building long term businesses.

And because when just starting a blog, you need to focus on content for the first 6 months, and during those 6 months you can build rapport with other bloggers and brands so that starting with the seventh month when you turn your focus from content to links, you start getting roundup requests and guest post invitations from bloggers whom you’ve helped in the past.

So you start taking full advantage of those and growing your link profile the white hat way.

7. What skills do you think are essential to make a full time income from affiliate marketing?

3 skills are needed if you want to succeed with affiliate marketing, and if you want to do it fast.

First, you need to be very calculating. Always have a plan and always deeply understand why you’re doing something and why you’re not doing something else.

That is the most important skill because it determines how you spend your time.

Second skill you need is outsourcing. As soon as you’re able to afford it, you need to start outsourcing work that needs to be done, but that you shouldn’t be doing personally, as that is the way to grow a blog.

And third, and this is more of a character trait than a pure skill, you need to be persistent. Affiliate success usually comes after several years of grinding yourself to a pulp, so don’t get discouraged if you started 6 months ago and still haven’t made a dime.

I’ve been there and it took me 2 years to make my first sale, and I only earned a couple of dollars from it. But it was a milestone for me, I never quit and now I’m a full time marketer and growing my income very quickly.

8. Social media changed the world of SEO dramatically. Is it the same with affiliate marketing? How do you leverage social media?

I don’t use social media for selling because I think it’s too crowded and the results will always be weak at best, no matter how much time you dedicate to it.

Instead, I use social media to build relationships with other bloggers which then over time results in links and guest posts for me which helps build my organic Google traffic.

That way, my social activity indirectly contributes to my affiliate efforts. And no time is wasted.

LINKS:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn