My Amazon Earnings and some tips

Hi, this is my first post on here, but I've been reading info on here for quite some time. Anyways I've been promoting products for a couple of years and I'll like to share some tips that may help people just starting out or even the experienced.

Also I've started a new project with amazon affiliate program, I've stopped using the program last year but I decided to experiment with it. So I'll be posting my experience.

I started the project the 2nd of Nov. Here are my clicks and conversion stats


Here are my earnings so far


And my stats from hostgator



My top 3 products are
Kindle
Masterbuilt indoor turkey fryer
Sennheiser headphones

I have no problem telling what products I promote

None of my visitors are from google or any social network. I've found a new way to promote my website that no one knows about. Once I polish and perfect this method I will share it with you guys, but right now I will post my experience and advice.

Here are some tips for you guys:

1. They say content is king, well if that is true then structure is GOD. A well structured website with mediocre content will make more money than a crappy website with the best content on the web. Look at major stores or supermarkets, there is a reason why produce and dairy products are at different ends of the store, there's a reason why the buy now and user review on amazon are separated by similar products, what other people bought and so forth. And that reason is the consumer are more likely to buy something other than what they came for. Your website is no different.

Here's a general list of what a well structured website has:

• No more than three colors on your website, the cleaner your website looks the better, (Google and YouTube are great example of clean examples)
• No fancy background, white is the best (All the popular websites use white)
• No distractions
• The content is the first thing the visitor notice
• Limited ads, no more than 2 if its a adsense page and none if its an affiliate page, and on the right side of the page
• Content and affiliate link blend together, no widgets or banners!

2. Keep your content short and sweet. The average visitor spends less than 60 seconds on a page, if your content looks like it's going to take 2-4 mins to read most people will either hit the back button or skim through, overlooking your affiliate link. The best way to get visitors to read your content is to make a list.

Here's an example of how I would write an review about a camera:
(bold)= affiliate link

(product A) locked me outside my home!

Okay the title was an exaggeration, but it's so hard to stop taking pictures and go back home especially since with the huge amount of memory I get from (product B). I have to admit I was a little skeptical at first, but after reading people experience (here), I decided to buy it. I know a lot of people will say (product C) can do the same things, but it I find (product A) to be better for amateurs. Well here's 5 reasons why (product A) hid my keys.

1. great blah blah blah

2. I was able to find a great strap (here) that helps me significantly.

3. blah blah

4. blah blah

5. Price was also an issue but I found a great place (here)

well there are my reasons, if you are interested in buying one, I highly recommend it. But don't take my word for it, make sure this is the right camera for you.

Click here for more information about product A

And that is a very basic way of how I would right a review about a product, I don't even own a camera by the way . Also notice how my content is structured. I advertise more than just one product, I blended my affiliate links, and my content is a short experience. This structure has produced a huge amount of orders, not clicks, orders.

I will post my earnings tomorrow, I'm guessing there going to be low because I took them down to work on them, also I will post an example either tomorrow or Friday.

 

Well I use the same methods. To get good clicking and selling rate both site structure and content are important. Specially when you sell Amazon product.

 

Thanks for the comments, sorry for not posting my stats earlier, but here they are. My visitors are down because I'm still working on my sites, but they should pick up today and continue to increase.

Here are my click and conversion stats. I believe these are people who clicked before I took the sites down.


My earnings for the 17th


And my stats from hostgator. This is from when I uploaded my first site on the 2nd of Nov to Today




Unfortunately I wasn't able to make an example site yesterday, but I will provide some more tips.

1. This tip is more for beginners. The biggest problem affiliates face is promoting a product. Besides competition, one of the main reason it is hard is that affiliates don't know which products to promote. Most affiliates mistake when finding products to promote is they look on the bestsellers list on Amazon or eBay Pulse. Unless you have a huge following on your website, the chances of getting visitors to your site is really slim for popular items. The best product to promote are the ones that have a small following. For example I found a product (KitchenAid Professional 600 Series 6-Quart Stand Mixer) that I was going to promote and this product gets 210 searches a month, but there is only 21,800 websites that show on google. With 21,800 results, it is very easy to place top 3 and even number 1 result compared to the new call of duty game that has 111,000,000 results. I know 210 searches don't seem a lot, but if your website can get half of the searches and 10% of them order from your affiliate link, that's 10-11 products sold per month! If you can repeat that with 9 other products, that's easily 100+ orders per month. The moral of this tip is, don't promote to millions of people with one product,keep promoting multiple products with a small following and eventually it will add up to millions of people .


2. This is a step most affiliate make and that's why most don't succeed in making money. Know what type affiliate you want to be before anything, because they're so many types affiliates, you need to know what works best for you. Decide if you want to be a affiliate who has one site that you keep building or make a site for each product. Know where you want to promote and how, whether that be on google, facebook, twitter, youtube, or any other sites and before you promote learn as much as you can, spend a day or even a week researching. Trust me, knowledge returns 100x more than what you invest in it, you wouldn't jump in deep water if you didn't know how to swim, but unfortunately many affiliates drown. Now this can be applied to anything, to be successful in anything you have to have the right mindset. What I mean by that is, to be a successful affiliate you have to be a successful affiliate. A successful affiliate will learn what they have to learn, do what they have to do, and never take short cuts. Always have in your head that you're doing all this work not because your someone who is trying to be a successful affiliate, but you are one and the work is what you do like breathing. The biggest obstacle is not the work, but to have the patience to keep doing it to see the reward.

 

Ya it would be great if u cud share the site url.

 

I second that.
if you can share the niche your are on, and said no worries about the competitor why not sharing your website too here.

 

I have just added Amazon Affiliate program in my blog. But till now NO earning i hv got from any of my visitors. I think its useful for those websites who are selling and promoting any products. Not for news or review websites of gadgets and tech like mine.

 

Just to add to this sweet post, if you use wordpress download the SEO plugin to help your on page SEO

 

What I find interesting is that you and I both are showing up and down periods, like every 3 or 4 days with higher sales and conversion rate.

I thought it might be a weekend thing, but I haven't been able to pin it down. Any thoughts?

 

Nice man! Thanks for sharing the great tips.
It's perfect if you can let me know what sites you have and which niches your site belong to.

 

I definitely see sales cycles over a week. There are some days that are markedly lower than others, with no exact pattern. Here in the UK some niches get less sales when the sun is shining - as people are going outside to make the most of it!

 

I like the no 1 tip, i just wondering if I promote a specific product, should I use the brand name in the domain for my site?

 

Using the brand name is tricky due to copyright. I have done it without problem, but others have been pursued by lawyers for the domain and earnings. It depends on the brand I think... but you are always at risk if you use a trademark in your domain name.

 

Hi,
Thanks for the posting you have given some very good advice.
I have been running an Amazon affiliate site for a while and one of the problems I faced is that of using a crappy hosting company.

My hosting company has lost me money with down-time (over 21 days in one year) and poor performance continues to affect my rankings as search engine bots will not hang around waiting for slow hosts.

I recommend that you do not skimp on hosting if you are serious about online marketing.

Other than those hosting issues, I must have surly the worst conversation rate of any affiliate.

Have any other affiliates out there experienced high click through to Affiliate programs like Amazon and yet suffering such minuscule sales like this?

 

Thank god my conversion rate is not that low. It's still around 1% overall though ^^;;

 

I usually make 1 website for 1 product. automaticly.. I must buy 1 domain for 1 product.
There are criteria of the product:
- price more than $100. I usuall find product that have price more than $300
- the product must have lots of amazon description. form that desc, I can combine from other source and make it as brand new article that I put on website
- popular product. how to know that the product is popular? just using google keyword tool.

 

It will be great if you can show us the example site. Waiting for that.

 

good post - thanks for sharing I just started promoting a few products and have made about $10 in 1 day. I also suggest promoting products that are being sold for more than $25.

I have a few good hot products that I am marketing now - hopefully they will generate a decent income.

 

Sorry I've been busy and battling the flu, so I haven't been been posting my stats lately, hopefully that will change.

Here are my stats for the past few days:

the number of clicks have increased dramatically, but my conversion rate decreased



Here's my earnings



My traffic has increased as well. My goal is to average 5000 visits per day.


My goal is to make $30,000 per quarter and I believe I have the tools to get there.

I've been testing with using youtube videos as part of my content. One of things that has helped increase my conversion rate is embedding my affiliate link into the video using linkedtube. I am not affiliated with linkedtube, but it is a great free tool that I think everyone should experiment with. Unfortunately, I haven't been a member long enough to provide a link of an example of what it looks like, but linkedtube does show an example, so I suggest you guys give it a try.

 

Great man! This really looks good..My current goal is to reach $500 or more every day. I'm really close to it, and then you just set to $1000 and work etc. To think, 700$ is the average (550€) payment in our country..Damn you internet, you rock!

Btw, is it always like this or it's due to December?

 

Quite curious....you said your visitors are not from SEO, PPC, or Social....then you make some suggestions how to properly SEO some product sites...hmm...LOL

Ok, your visitors then maybe from....e-mail (is it allowed by amazon ?), PPV (highly doubt if it's allowed), and media buys which are extremely hard to make successful at least nowhere near seo conversions. So...will you tell traffic source ?