The Affiliate Barbell Strategy
What works now
I’m sure you’ve already heard of the barbell strategy for investing (made popular by Nassim Taleb).
Following this strategy means you invest in a combination of extremely risky assets and extremely non-risky assets.
The idea is that it allows you to capture the potential upside while limiting your potential downside, i.e you win big if you win and if you lose you don’t really lose much at all.
Something similar applies to affiliate marketing in the post-Helpful Content Update era.
If the investing barbell refers to holding a basket of high-risk and low-risk assets, the affiliate marketing barbell means integrating both white hat and black hat strategies.
They say that the true sign of intellectual genius is being able to hold two diametrically opposed ideas in your head at the same time. Well the way you can tell that someone is a marketing genius is if they’re able to integrate two very different strategies into one business and still get results.
Why the Affiliate Barbell is necessary
Grey hat techniques were the big brain SEO play from the beginning of the interwebs circa 1995 all the way up until the Helpful Content Update.
If being white hat means following the rules (both written and unwritten) and black hat means breaking all of them, then grey hat falls in the middle. You’re not being a complete goody two-shoes and you’re not rocking the boat too much either.
Think of stuff like: writing reviews for products you haven’t tried (but the reviews are still decent), using tools like Link Whisper to automatically add internal links, using SEO optimization tools when writing content, et. al.
The SEO game was pretty comfy for a while. There was a period of time where content sites were probably the easiest low-cost (nothing is free) way for a dude in his bedroom to get a solid chunk of change (six figures +++) within three years or less.
I don’t need to give you a play-by-play of what happened when Google dropped the HCU because you lived trough it and are probably still pissed about it.
To sum it up in case you’re one of the few who is blissfully unaware: Google figured out how to effectively nuke sites that follow the ‘SEO playbook’. And they dropped that nuke. Hard.