"Originally Posted by Eyetrap
I’ve learned a lot from this forum and wanted to share part of my journey over the last four months. I’m open to any advice too.
I realize $930 is not making anyone’s panties wet, but with the limited time I have it’s an ok start. This is from about 7 wordpress sites, however mainly from 1 site that is #1 in google for its keywords, the other 6 sites bounce around in the serps like crazy. Only SEO, no PPC/PPV. I started all the sites in August through early October.
// My Amazon income for the last 4 months:
Aug $161
Sept $241
Oct $516
Nov $930 (14% conversion)
// Info about me:
- I don’t claim to be an expert or know any more than you, I’m a noob with 4 months experience learning a lot as I go. I’m simply telling you my experience
- I have a wife and 2 kids under the age of 3
- I have a full time job I can’t stand/hate with a passion (tech support)
- I’ve been getting up at 5-5:30am almost every day so I can squeeze in 45min -1hr of work before my full time job and then I get 1hr of work after my fulltime job if I’m lucky. My wife is not making it easy for me and not interested in letting me work at night.
- I’ve taken off work about 6 days over the last 4 months from my full time job to work on my sites.
// Here is what I did on my first and main money site that is #1 in google for its keywords:
I searched for a product that I needed and I happen to find a successful site with a exact match keyword domain for a physical product (productnamekeyword.com), it was in google at #1. I thought I could do the same thing and use this site as a template, so I simply found a very similar product from another company that was launching in 3-4 weeks and I purchased the exact match keyword domain for that new product (productnamekeyword.com). I then check the other successful site’s back links in yahoo site explorer (he had around 300) and posted to the same sites as many as I could over the first few weeks of launching my site. (fYI: I found a lot of them were from forum profiles)
New keywords that didn’t exist 2 months ago obviously have less competition. I was on the first page of google within 1 week and then bounced around in the top 6 for about 2-3 weeks
I posted about 2-3 blog posts per week for the first 4 weeks, each title of the posts keyword optimized and only about a paragraph with a picture or two. I simply went to google and typed in the keywords and hit the space bar and then I wrote down the top 4 keywords that auto generate before you hit enter and search, I used those for my blog post titles. I also used the blog posts that other successful similar product site had as a template.
I made a squidoo page and hub page for my product-name-keyword. My hub page has over 1,400 views and STILL bounces around from the top few spots on page 1 in google to page 2-3, I only posted around 3-5 links to these pages from my other free blog sites I created.
FYI: I’ve also seen other hub pages from other random people for products rank in the top 10 of the serps, the hub pages seem to really rank well for things, especially new keywords.
I sent about 2 articles to ezine and about two other article directories…so I didn’t do much article marketing.
I setup google alerts for my product name and basically rewrote some of the news articles as blog posts on my site.
I made 1 youtube video with animoto.com
I made around 8 blogs on blogger, wordpress.com and similar sites in a link wheel with only 1 or 2 posts and youtube video. I’ve now read lots of mixed reviews about link wheels and I’m still not sure if they help or hurt but I made a small one for this site without any issues.
I searched for blogs in my niche and made around 10 quality comments on blogs with at least pr 1 and above. I used the seo quake firefox plugin to help find high pr blogs. (For some reason I feel like these helped, but that could just be the noob in me talking)
I posted probably 20-30ish social bookmarking posts over the first few weeks only to main $ site.
Submitted my site rss feed to less than 10 rss feed sites.
I mainly focused all of my effort on this one site for the first 3 or so weeks.
NO amazon widgets, only text links in the body and of course link EVERY picture to amazon.
I focused on 2 main keywords 90% of the time with 2 others about 10-15% of the time.
I haven’t added more than 10 back links in the last month. (I should and will add more soon) and my site has been rock solid #1 for at least the last 6-8 weeks
// More info about my site:
It’s a tech product
Traffic has ranged over the last 2-3 months from 300 – 600 uniques per day (google keyword tool shows1,900 per month exact match)
Product cost on amazon is from $0.50 - $30
I sell 15-55 products per day from this site, average is around 30ish
I always get to the 7.5-8% commission rate each month, however some of the products are under the electronics category in amazon and max out at a whopping 4% commission.
I make half of the money from OTHER products people buy at amazon when they’re buying one from my site.
I rewrite about 90% of the amazon text and put in my own 2 cents.
The site is laid out like a grid online store (a rough example: bustedtees.com) with blog posts at the bottom
// Tools I’ve used
Google keyword tool – exact match searches
Market samurai < Must have imo
The best article spinner (didn’t use this on my #1 site above, just purchased 1 month ago)
// Wordpress plugins I use on all the sites
All in One SEO Pack
Fast Secure Contact Form
Google XML Sitemaps
Visitor Maps and Who's Online
easy privacy policy
WP No Category Base
// How to find products/niches
I use amazon best sellers list and look at the top sellers with the most reviews that are 4+ stars and have at least 1000 exact monthly searches.
Watch tech blogs for breaking product news
Search google for something I want/need
// My other 6 sites + my mistakes
These are more generic long term keyword sites (example: “car seats”) rather than a short lived product specific site.
3 are laid out in a grid store, 3 are like a regular blog with a basic free template.
These 6 sites (each a separate niche) I started in sept/oct have been getting kicked square in the nuts by google, they will get to their top position in google which range from 1 to 5 for a couple/four days and then get kicked down to pages 5-10+ for about a week. I’m guessing they might be labeled “thin affiliate sites”. I’ve been trying to figure out what my noob ass has done differently and here are a few things that I think might be the issue:
- I posted amazon affiliate links as soon as the sites started on all 6. My example site above in #1 didn’t have any affiliate links until about 3-4 weeks after it launched.
- All but one has less original content then the #1 site in my example above.
- They all have less amount of back links, especially high pr back links.
- I only targeted 1 keyword with my anchor text to the home page.
- My backlinking was not as consistent because I was working on too many sites with the little time I have
- 3 were interlinked in the footer…I removed these a few weeks ago
// An experiment with blog-blueprint.com and a Christmas toy site
I tested out blog-blueprint.com for 1 month in late September. I found a hot Christmas toy I thought would be a big seller (I was right), Christmastoynamehq.com I setup a simple blog and posted some unique content about the toy that was probably about 10 posts with 1 to 2 paragraphs with lots of great pictures. I did around 20 social bookmarkings, setup 8 or so free blogger type sites in a link wheel, made about 4 youtube videos, a squidoo and hubpage (both made it to the top1-2 pages of serps) around 15 forum profiles and pounded it with short articles from blog-blueprint.com.
My site was on the the front page of google within 10-14 days and slowly rose to #4-5 for about 10 days in early October and I wanted to crush my competition so I continued with blog-blueprint.com….and then in mid October my site dropped and didn’t show up at all in the serps. I thought to myself oh ha ha, that ole google dance got me, oh geez it will be back up in just a few days, that’s what all the pros say. I kept building links with blog blueprint until late October and hitting it with a handful of social bookmarks and forum profiles…it’s now December 5th…my site popup up at the #2 position for 2 days on November 15 &16 for the main keyword and lots of related keywords and has not been back seen since. I made $95 from the site in those two days (165ish visitors each day). I guess I tripped a “google filter”.
Sure I’ve cried a little, but I learned a lot from this because I’ve been watching my competition….the top 10 in google all used article marketing and blasted out shoty articles to all the directories. Some of them had the articles written for them because I saw their ads on elance.com.
FYI: The #1 result for this keyword is currently and has been since September…a freaking hubpages.com/toyname, this page has not moved 1 spot since September. (They used lots of videos and articles as backlinks to the hubpage)
// Outsourcing
I need to find some back linkers…
// Some sites I’ve learned from
- Smartpassiveincome.com
- Affiliateblogonline.com < They earned…$19,000 in November 2010!!! :O from amazon!
- Warriorforum.com
- Flippa.com – Analyzing successful sites with profit
- viperchill.com
- I purchased Chris Guthrei’s course (nicheprofitcourse.com)a couple months ago which gave me several great tips and answered a lot of questions I was not sure about, it also helped me to see someone that has had more success than me. He’s a nice guy and helpful who made over $65k with Amazon last year.
// Summary
This was far longer than I planned on writing and I hope a few fellow noobs got something out of it. The biggest challenge for me was just doing something, I’ve wanted to make money online for years and I hardly did anything about it. I made excuses about not having anytime. I finally snapped in August, put down the vagisil and started DOING something. I hate getting up at 5am, but it’s the only time I have to work, it’s time to man up. I’m done working in a cube at a deadend job with a 0-3% raise and a $100 bonus biannually. "
Source: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/297502-930-amazon-affiliate-income-nov-after-starting-4-months-ago-here-what-i-ve-done.html
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