Hey there,

In this week’s edition:

• Sam wraps up the advanced link building course in the final lesson.

• Bill shows how to find a niche for affiliate marketing.

• Michal has two posts: one on his 13 favorite digital marketing tools and the other on creating a content plan.

• Jenny shows you how to run a technical SEO audit. 

As always, click through to read each post. Or if you’re busy, read the tl;dr below each link.

New on the blog 🎉

How to Easily Find a Niche for Affiliate Marketing in 2022

To find a good niche, you first have to know what you’re looking for. Ideally, a good affiliate niche has these:

• Your own interest

• High-paying affiliates

• Low competition

• Enough interest to make it profitable

With that in mind, here’s how to find good affiliate marketing niches passively:

• Install Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar so you can have all the data you need right on the Google search results page.

• Pay attention as you Google things. Make it a habit of looking at this data any time you perform a Google search. Your goal is to look for keywords that have websites with low Domain Rating (DR) scores ranking on page #1.

• Take those low-DR websites and plug them into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Go to the Organic keywords report to see all the keywords that specific page is ranking for on Google.

13 Top Digital Marketing Tools (Incl. Tips on Using Them)

Michal Pecánek

The 13 tools are:

1. Ahrefs

2. Hunter

3. Mailchimp

4. SparkToro

5. Brand24

6. Smartlook

7. Visualping

8. Google

9. Google Forms

10. Google Analytics

11. Google Search Console

12. Google Sheets

13. Google Data Studio

How to Complete a Technical SEO Audit in 8 Steps

Jenny Abouobaia

Here’s how to perform a technical SEO audit:

1. Crawl your website with Ahrefs’ Site Audit

2. Spot crawlability and indexation issues

3. Check technical on-page elements: page titles and title tags, meta descriptions, canonical tags, hreflang tags, and structured data

4. Identify image issues

5. Analyze internal links

6. Check external links

7. Check site speed and performance

8. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly

How to Create a Content Plan in 5 Easy Steps

Michal Pecánek

Content planning is the process of deciding what you’ll publish and when. Here’s how to do it:

1. Plan for each content distribution channel separately

2. Create and maintain a list of topics to cover

3. Add important content metrics

4. Prioritize the list based on these metrics

5. Put it into a content calendar

New on YouTube 📺

Advanced Link Building Course by Ahrefs

The final lesson of the course has been released! See a link building team’s workflow in action in lesson 5.3. 

Want to watch the course in full? Check out the playlist with all the videos from Module 1 till the end. 

What we’re reading 🤓

The SEO Skills Maturity Matrix

View the SEO Skills matrix created by Tom Critchlow to learn how to advance your SEO career.

The State of Link Building Report 2022

Article

The annual State of Link Building report is out! In all, 270 SEOs in agencies, in-house roles, and freelancing shared their thoughts on link building. Read the report and see if there’s anything new that catches your eye. 

Why 100% Indexing Isn’t Possible, and Why That’s OK

Article

For most large websites and decent-sized medium websites, achieving 100% indexing is only going to get harder, as Google has to process all existing and new content on the web.

Till next time ;)
Cheers,