Ask HN: Is affiliate marketing mainly about SEO

[krelian]

I worked at a company that did affiliate marketing about a year ago. I quit because I was burned out but I was also in disagreement about the focus the company had which was more about SEO than building an innovative product. I did a lot of research at the time and it seemed that for most websites (that was in the insurance industry so there is a ton of competition) the most important goal was appearing on Google first, the actual content of the website is of secondary importance. The reality was that for the end user clicking on result number 5 and result number 50 didn't matter much because the main difference between them was their SEO budget or strategy.

I have contemplated coming back into this field now with an attitude of "if I build something good, they will come" but I am faced with the doubt that I might have gotten it all wrong.

So my question is, in your experience is it possible to build a profitable affiliate marketing business without the pressure that you'll have to dump money on SEO or be left behind?

[gesman]

Be that SEO or creating valuable content - creativity goes long way. Create something unique - and your post might as well go viral and you'll get tons of backlinks and traffic and hence ranking from Google. Having said that - and being in SEO field myself - if you build tons of backlinks to not-that-great page - you'll get ranked higher than others who are trying to content their way to the top. It's like creative fistfighter will likely lose to creative machine gun owner :) I've created 1 page website and attracted about 50,000 backlinks to it targeting highly competitive computer security keywords in about 80,000,000 pages competition. That got me to #1 page, while IBM, RSA and similars had to use Adwords to be seen. It was fun for me to do it. I guess the bottom line - do what you love - and you'll succeed no matter what.