The Money Tree: Applying Permaculture Principles to Affiliate Marketing

Permaculture is a sustainability movement that started some 40 years ago in Australia first meaning permanent agriculture then it transformed into permanent culture. It advocates sustainable methods of agriculture and living. Permaculture has 12 core principles that guide any permaculture design. When designing a permaculture farm or permaculture life, those 12 principles can be used as a reference to guide such design. I thought it would be an interesting idea to see how one can apply those 12 principles, or at least some of them, to the process of designing a newly established affiliate marketing website. Here we go!

Principle 1: Observe and Interact

The first step to establishing a newly launched affiliate marketing website is to observe how products are being demanded and bought online, to check and see which are in more demand, to observe the competition, who is ranking high on Google, what keywords are being targeted with vigor, which websites are doing good and which are performing poorly.

It is not enough to observe, but you should interact and actually do something by creating web pages that aim at performing well in search engines and attracting potential clients. By interacting, you provide yourself with another opportunity for observing, as you start observing the impact of your own actions. Such experimentation is a great way to learn. It is the essence of design thinking in contrast to just entering an endless loop of planning and researching without taking any action or prototyping. 

Principle 2: Catch and Store Energy

The word energy here is not confined to electricity or fossil fuel or even energy in the form of carbon stored in the trunks of trees after being created through the photosynthesis process that takes place inside the cells of green leaves as they see the sun, but the word can be used in its broader sense of anything of value that can be used and spent later on when in need. In case of affiliate marketing energy could be traffic coming to a website that can be 'stored' and monetized on later on.

One way of looking at this principle of catching and storing energy would be to create a mailing list from the traffic that comes to your website. By managing to have part of such traffic sign up for your newsletter or leave their email addresses in return for something of value you offer them (such as a free ebook for instance), you are actually storing such energy, here energy being the traffic and the storage takes place in recording and growing your database of email addresses of prospective clients. You can later monetize on such stored energy in various ways including sending them newsletters which contain affiliate links or other products you sell directly.

Principle 3: Obtain a Yield

It is no good idea to get tons of traffic for your website without being able to actually sell anything through the site (or to monetize on ads). If people visit your site but you fail to have them click on the affiliate links and buy any products through such links then you are doomed. All the hard work you have been doing is useless. It is of high importance when going for affiliate marketing to use the right metrics and actually aim for sales done through your site and not just target a great amount of worthless traffic. Convert the traffic into sales or else do not bother spending any of your effort on the website. You must aim at obtaining a yield and actually succeed in doing so.

Principle 4: Apply Self-organization and Accept Feedback

When you observe and interact, you get to succeed and fail as you start experimenting. It is essential to be open minded and accept the feedback you are getting whenever you fail. Do not keep trying the same methods if they keep repeatedly failing. Try to learn from such failure to achieve the results you've been aiming for. A specific technique you've been using to rank a web page in your website high in SERPs that does not work should make you think about the reason why it is not working or why it has stopped working now when it used to work for other pages in the past. Maybe it's a black hat technique and you insist on believing that it's gray.

Another way to use such principle is when directing most of your efforts in producing superior content of high value to people while doing less effort on building back links. This is not to say that taking the time and effort to build back links is not necessary or useful, but it is just to say that concentrating more on building great content can actually get people to link to you more easily and even without you asking them as in when bees are attracted to nectar. This strategy is a form of self-organization as it gets things moving by themselves without requiring constant effort from you.

By accepting feedback on your own efforts and by harnessing the power of self-organization your affiliate marketing efforts can result in real sustainable growth along time.

Principle 5: Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services

Creating evergreen content can be considered a way of valuing and using renewable resources. Instead of having to sweat running after trends, which can still be done but as a complementary strategy, one can just focus on selecting evergreen topics and creating great evergreen content that would last for years and years to come.

Hiring content writers as your website expands can also be considered a form of renewable energy and services. Yes you do pay them, they are not a free service, but you can always find plenty of them and they are always available, they will not dry up at any time, this contrasts with doing everything by yourself, as your time and energy do after all have limits. In order to scale up, you must start hiring others. This said, it is best to start at the beginning by creating the content yourself and only hire others when you need to expand.

So here you see how a single principle, in our case using renewable resources, can be used in different ways. Perhaps you can think of some other ways in which this or the rest of the 12 permaculture principles can be used in affiliate marketing.

Principle 6: Produce No Waste

The concept of producing no waste means to always reuse your waste, create a system in which every 'waste' is being used to the benefit of that system, every waste should become a useful input to some other part of the system. That way no waste is produced from the whole system. One way of looking at this principle would be to use and monetize on ads on your website. This diversification of monetization channels helps you reduce the waste, for some of the traffic that comes to your website would click on the affiliate links, others would click on the ads and still others would opt-in willingly into giving you their email addresses which you can later on monetize on. You can use additional monetization methods to further diversity your mix and further reduce the 'waste' of the traffic in the process.

Principle 7: Design from Patterns to Details

When launching a new affiliate website, it is best to start by picking up a general niche rather than just aiming to market a specific product. After researching and selecting a suitable niche, you can then start picking specific products in such niche to target. This approach saves you time and energy and provides plenty of room for expansion in the future by adding more products within such niche you have selected. When selecting a name for your website try to select something related to your niche and do not confine yourself to a single product or an extremely narrow set of products.

One other way to look at the pattern-to-details design approach is to think first about general principles behind superior content before religiously following some SEO technique you've read about on a forum or ebook. For instance, starting by aiming at writing content that is of high value to the visitor is a good principle to follow, rather than starting by aiming at making a specific ratio of repetitions of a keyword you've selected! What the best ratios are might change with time as search engines get to learn on their own how to perform better but the value of writing great content that is useful to the visitor will never change. So always start first by thinking of the eternal principles then and only then can you go into the details which can change according to the situation.

Principle 8: Integrate Rather Than Segregate

This is a common practice in SEO, to use internal links extensively in order to better rank in SERPs and also keep visitors on your website longer. The web pages on your website should be integrated with one another through links. They can also be integrated through a hierarchical navigation system, grouping related content together under the same menu. Using labels in case of blogs can be another example of integrating your content together. Selecting a specific theme for your website (by theme I mean a general topic, not to be confused with theme as in graphical user interface for a website), would help keep its organic unity and coherence, which is good for search engines and also for people visiting your site making them know what to expect.

Principle 9: Use Small and Slow Solutions

When planning to launch a new affiliate website or any website for that matter and seeking to get a good deal of 'free' traffic from search engines by harnessing the power of SEO it is no good long term strategy to use black hat techniques to try and rank up high in SERPs within a short period of time. Search engines are getting smarter by the day as they use machine learning and AI to crush down on spammers and surface content that is of high value to users. Going the long way of white hat methods can take time and effort yet it can allow you to reap evergreen renewable rewards in the future as your websites starts maturing and gaining the attention, traffic, appreciation, recognition and value it deserves which you can sustainably create a passive or near-passive income from.

A steady stream of high quality blog posts can go a long way in ranking high in SERPs, bringing in traffic and building a following even if the blog posts are short (small) and the search engine ranking takes time to reach. Using small and slow solutions is a permaculture principle that fits so well with an long-term sustainable forward-looking affiliate marketing approach.

Principles 10: Use and Value Diversity

It's no good idea to put all your eggs in one basket. It is best to target a diverse set of products in your affiliate marketing website. This will help you learn more about which perform better and it will help you ride the waves and keep afloat when one or more of the products falls in favor.

Diversity can be considered not only when picking up products to market but also when creating content around such products. It would be a good idea to use both text and images, perhaps video reviews too if possible. Moreover, some of the web pages you create can be informational while others can be commercial. In the informational pages you attract traffic from search engines by writing high value content that gains trust and credibility both in the eyes of visitors as well as search engines. The commercial pages are those providing product reviews or comparisons and where the actual affiliate links are placed.

Diversity in product selection, type of content on a web page and type of web pages can go a long way in making your website more resilient.

Principle 11: Use Edges and Value the Marginal

This has always been my favorite permaculture principle ever. As applied to affiliate marketing the marginal and the edges can be considered long tail keywords. When attempting to launch a new affiliate marketing website it is no good idea to aim for the sky and head for high-volume high-value keywords that are in cutthroat high competition. A keyword that receives 1M searches might be interesting, but have a look first at the top 10 web pages that appear in SERPs and check their domain authority and their page authority. Check them out one by one to see how strong their content is and the quantity and quality of their back links. Check out how many years have their websites been there. Do you really find it realistic that a new website you are planning to create can compete with them on such highly competitive keyword? How much time and effort would it take from you to be able to beat them? Wouldn't it be better to fish for less competitive keywords that you can easily rank for at the first 3 results on Google?

I am not saying that it is never a good idea to be bold and target high-volume high-value keywords, but only after your website has been around for years and has managed to earn the trust of people and search engines alike. Starting by attacking the giants would get you no where. The right strategy would be to do the exact opposite: look for reasonably good keywords that have reasonable search volume yet have low competition. If you find a good keyword, related to the product you are targeting, for which relatively weak web pages show up in SERPs then there is a good chance that by putting some effort in content creation and link building you will be able to beat them over time.

Value the marginal and use the edges by targeting long tail keywords that are not fiercely competitive yet still of good value in terms of traffic volume and user intent.

Principle 12: Creatively Use and Respond to Change

When a product you have been promoting on your website and getting great revenue from is suddenly pulled out of the market after you have done so much effort in creating content and building backlinks to it don't fret about it, just calm down, learn from what has happened and move on. You might have learned from such harsh experience that it's best to diversify so if one product falls the others would keep you afloat. You might have learned that it was not a good idea to invest so heavily in hiring expensive content creators to create video reviews of products you think will keep making lots of money in the future, it might have been better to create the content but try and cut down on expenses. You might have learned that a specific type of products or a particular industry or group of producers are not the best source for sustainable products. You might have learnt those and a number of other lessons from such experience. All such knowledge you have gained from analyzing the drop that took place can help you do even better in the future. By responding to change creatively you are not only overcoming the current setback but paving the road to an even brighter future.

I wrote this article on three intervals. It was a bit exhausting to write. Yet I believe I've benefited from writing it as it helped consolidate my newly gained knowledge about affiliate marketing and refresh my previous knowledge of search engine optimization. I did enjoy exploring the application of the 12 permaculture principles, which I have long cherished, on a seemingly unrelated field as affiliate marketing. Perhaps sustainability can find its place in every aspect of our life after all, the financial being no exception.

Comments