Your alarm goes off at 6 AM. You gulp down breakfast and rush out the door. Then you spend the next hour sitting in traffic, barely managing to make it to work on time. 

Once there, your day consists of endless, mind-numbing reports, meetings, and phone calls. Then you spend another hour in the car trying to get home.

Even worse, it’s the same thing… day after day. When does it end?

Have you thought about getting into affiliate marketing? When done properly, it can be a lucrative side gig, a full-time income, or even a long-term passive income solution for entrepreneurs who want to escape the daily grind.

In fact, Statista reports that brands will be spending about 8.2 billion dollars on affiliate marketing by 2022. That’s an increase of more than 3 billion dollars since 2017. Clearly, now is a great time to tap into the potential of this growing industry.

Learning affiliate marketing basics and implementing them today will put you in a prime position to take advantage of this expected growth. Here’s what you need to know to get started.

Remember when SEO was just about the keywords?  In 2020, search engine optimisation has changed beyond all recognition with businesses not just hiring one in-house expert but, sometimes, entire teams.  

Although keywords and phrases are still relevant in the SEO world, these days the focus has switched to Search Intent which is Google’s way of figuring out what the searcher is after; for example, to simply buy a product or, to compare a number of similar products through the search engine. This means that content which doesn’t match with search intent, simply won’t ascend Google’s ranks.  

Other changes within SEO include the move to video and voice searching and, the practice of cutting or morphing zombie pages in order to streamline SEO and improve ranking.  There are no end of new and forward thinking SEO methods popping up all the time; so much so that it often becomes a little like a digital marketing ‘whack a mole’ game.  

In fact, marketers are often so focussed on getting on board with the latest SEO trends that they neglect one really important factor – link building and, the ways in which their links can prove to be an open door for hackers.

The term “zombie pages” is not some clever acronym or some quirky name given to something that doesn’t work. Zombie pages are a bit of a threat for every website, and their name describes their function – or lack thereof – perfectly.

But what are they, exactly?

Photo by Vanilla Bear Films

Getting featured by giant news media like CNN or the New York Times as an expert source can promise great exposure, ranking boost, and increased traffic to your website. 

But how can you make sure that a Guardian or Forbes reporter chooses your response out of the hundreds of other pitches they receive daily? Why would these big players care to quote YOU as an expert, especially when you’re just starting out? 

That’s where HARO comes into the picture. 

Journalists and bloggers are also always looking for reliable sources of information to cite in their upcoming stories and articles. Their inboxes may be full of messages from aspiring experts, but that’s not what they’re looking for! 

HARO lets reporters post their queries on their platform so that you can respond to them as an expert source and establish your authority. This way, journalists don’t have to look high and low for credible sources, and you don’t have to spend resources on outreach to get quoted by renowned websites. A win-win, isn’t it! 

But not every response gets picked by HARO. You may have to send many pitches before you get a placement. So, many people wonder if HARO’s worth the effort, and is there anything they can do to make sure they’re selected. 

But first, here’s how you can get started with HARO. 

Mankind is no stranger to myths. From Greek mythology to the stories our parents told us as bedtime stories, we’ve grown up around myths and these tall tales.

Work stories don’t make ideal bedtime stories (How I Ranked Joe’s Plumbing Business isn’t the same as Hercules), that doesn’t mean the SEO industry is lacking in myths. SEO myths have been around for as long as SEO has and the worst part is plenty of experts still believe them.

Since the industry is ever-changing, it can (admittedly) be difficult to keep up with fact or fiction but sometimes that fiction takes hold and doesn’t let go.

Today, I’m going to run over some of the biggest SEO myths that are still out there and why you should stop believing them.