In the next part in our new FAQ post series, we’re going to cover the ratio of money posts and informational posts ideal for your website.
This is a fairly common question (hence it being in this FAQ series), but one that doesn’t have an exact answer.
In fact, I think people are actually making an issue where there isn’t one, which I’ll explain below.
First off, what do we mean by ‘Info posts’ or ‘Money posts’?
Different Page Types
Within affiliate marketing, and content marketing in general, there are different types of posts. There’s the “informational” posts which are usually targeting an informational keyword, and there’s the “money posts” which target a buying keyword.
We’ll give examples below.
On top of that, info posts and money posts usually have different roles and aims. Whereas a money post is trying to get you to click an affiliate link and go buy something, or just buy something directly, an informational post might be trying to get you to join an email list, visit a money post afterwards, or just get a retargeting cookie.
There is a lot of room for overlap though. As you can see in the examples below, you can still put affiliate links and earn money from a primarily informational post, and money posts should always be informational in nature too (think of “best” posts or “review” posts).
Most importantly though, is that a solid affiliate website needs both types of content.
Content/Keyword Examples:
| Info Keywords | Money Keywords |
| – How To Build An Affiliate Website – Are Straight Razors Safe? – 10 Reasons Why You Should Consider New Jogging Shoes How To Lose Weight Fast | – Best Camping Tent – Siteground Review – Best X For Y |
Why Do We Need To Consider A Ratio?
While there’s no real rule about how many info posts your site should have, what you definitely DON’T want to do is only have money pages.
Google has no real hatred for affiliate links, but they also have little love for websites that appear “thin” and only have affiliate content. You therefore need informational content to:
1.) Flesh out your site more to reduce the percentage of affiliate-link content.
2.) Add more authority to your site
3.) Bring in more long-tail traffic
4.) Have more link building opportunities.
There are other reasons as well, but those are the main ones for most people.
I think the main issue people have is that they don’t want to spend too much money or time on articles that won’t have a huge ROI. It’s hard to really justify spending a few hundred dollars on informational content, when it’s the money content that you want to rank.
The thing is though, you need info content! So you’re not wasting money on it, it’s just part of the game. For every money post you create, you should create a few info articles to support it. This sends internal links and relevance signals to the post, plus it will ultimately send traffic to the money posts too.
By the way, Google just confirmed its latest algorithm update was relevance based, so having solid info content pointing at your money pages will help with this.
Conclusion
So hopefully I’ve made a good case for why you need info content, and have explained a bit more about how it works. The only thing I’ve not answered directly is what ratio you need…and that’s because there’s no real rule. I WILL say though that you don’t really want more than 80% of your posts to be money posts, and 70% would be better, but don’t think of this as a number you have to hit in order to succeed.
Some of my sites are more like 70% informational, and others are around the 50-50 mark. Go with what your keyword research tells you people are searching for, and make sure you have a balance.
