In real life, you leave fingerprints; on the internet, you leave footprints. One’s for detectives, the other’s for data collectors.
The idea
An affiliate link is a URL that contains a unique affiliate ID or username. It is used by affiliates to promote products or services and earn a commission for each sale or action generated through their referral.
For example, the Amazon affiliate link looks like this: https://amzn.to/abcdefg. As you can see, the footprint here is amzn.to.
It means that when you see a URL containing amzn.to in it, you’ll immediately know that the URL is an affiliate link.
How about following this footprint to discover websites with low authority but high traffic?
The requirements
This method requires:
- Ahrefs
The official Ahrefs subscription is very expensive, thus I always use this cheap Ahrefs group buy for doing keyword research. You may want to give it a try.
The instruction
To make it easy to understand, we will use a specific example: Networx.
Networx.com has an affiliate program. Similar to most other affiliate programs, Networx’s affiliate link contains a footprint, which is se= (meaning that Networx’s affiliate link always contains se= within it).
So, if a website is an affiliate of Networx, that website must have an affiliate link pointing to networx.com, so that link is clearly a backlink, and of course, that backlink will contain se= in the URL structure.
First, open Ahrefs, then click on Site Explorer tab.
Put in the domain networx.com. Set it up as the picture below:
Second, click on the Referring domains tab on your left side, then set the filter as below:
- DR: Up to 15 (because you want to target only low authority niche sites)
- Domain traffic: From 10 (because niche sites with zero traffic are not worth targeting)
- Ref. page URL: se= (this is the footprint of the Networx affiliate link)
- Ref. page platform: Blogs (affiliate websites always use blog platform such as WordPress)
After that, click on Show results.
With the setup as described, Ahrefs will return to you a list of low authority domains (DR less than 15) have backlinks pointing to the Networx page and the backlinks contain the footprint se=, which means you will have a list of Networx’s affiliate websites.
Third, click the Export button to export this domain list.
Ahrefs dialog box should appear, choose the option as the image below and click Export:
Finally, you have a CSV file containing domains that:
- are affiliates of Networx, because of the se= footprint
- are low authority, because you have set the “DR: Up to 15″ filter, you can change this number, if there are too many domains, you may want to tighten this DR to 10, or if there are few domains, you could increase this DR to 20.
- have traffic, because of the “Domain traffic: From 10″ filter
Something like this:
Ok, even such low authority websites still receive organic traffic from Google, which implies that the keywords they are ranking for are of low competition.
Now that you know what to do next? You input each domain from the exported file into Ahrefs. Look at the left side panel of Ahrefs and click on the Organic keywords tab. That’s your gold mine! Save those keywords for yourself! How about buying a strong expired domain, writing outstanding articles, doing excellent on-page SEO, purchasing backlinks, outranking all the competitors, and making a hefty sum of money?
Or simply be a Fiverr merchant and sell keywords for like $10 each?
The choice is your!
P/s: don’t limit yourself to Networx alone; there are numerous affiliate programs out there, each with its unique footprints. I can only guide you up to this point. Explore the rest on your own.
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