’m an affiliate. But the companies I’ve built over the last 20 years have always gone well beyond affiliate marketing. We’ve built communities, created the gold standard for online poker player rankings, published sharp-edged journalism that I’m extremely proud of, and plenty more. But the vast majority of the dollars I’ve earned over that time – the money that pays for my house, my kids’ school, and everything in between – has been earned as an affiliate. And that makes me an affiliate by trade. Something else that all my past and current businesses have in common is that every one of them was built around a single, broad topic and has been disciplined enough to stay on that topic the majority of the time. This is no accident. The affiliate business is, and has been, highly search-centric. And in order to rank well in search – whether it’s search engines, large language models or just the way people search within their own minds for information – your brand needs to stand for something specific. And you won’t pull that off by writing about everything under the sun, certainly not if you’re in the business of publishing content. That’s what this article is about – running a content publishing business, and building topical authority. Maybe this sounds like a novice concept, and maybe it is one. Of course, if you run a site about poker, you should mainly write about poker. If you’re running a site called Casino Reports, it should mainly report on casinos. This is simple enough. But that’s where the simplicity ends, because if you want to publish a topical website over a long period of time – long enough to be ranking for competitive search terms and generating positive revenue for your business – you’ve got to think of a LOT of things to write about, all the while building, maintaining and growing your audience. In other words, it’s not enough to simply publish. You can publish all day long and never become relevant in search. You have to publish stuff people actually want to read. People have limited time and limited attention spans, especially in the mobile era we are all completely inundated with content. Producing something worthy of an audience — something people actively choose over all the other options competing for their attention — is difficult. Everything Around (Not Under) The Sun A publishing business has to be entertaining and useful to its audience, and it must consistently provide value. If every article is about the same thing, your audience will burn out fast, and so will you. It also needs to be thorough. If you want humans and search engines alike to look at your site as an authority on a topic, you must cover it from as many angles as possible. This is hard enough as it is, but consider this: most people don’t even know what all those angles are. The affiliate business is, and has been, highly searchcentric. And in order to rank well in search – whether it’s search engines, large language models or just the way people search within their own minds for information – your brand needs to stand for something specific. 27 GPWAtimes.org
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