The AmazonAssociate Experiment, Is It Earning?

Hello, I launched a new online branch/company I put a lot of effort into. After working with Phpbb, RSS Feeds, I finally studied and had most luck with WordPress. Here is what I have come up with.

It is called http://Furor.co!,
everyday I provide links to the highest rated & most bought products on amazon which are 25% to 100% off. I do this manually and spend time and care coming up with products with a deal that I myself can appreciate.

Today was my first day, after struggling to launch the site for hours yesterday. I am still critiquing it and ironing out obvious wrinkles. I am just a fellow person, no professional designer.

I felt it was important to finally get onto Wordpress as its known for indexing incredibly well and I saw a chance to use beautiful designs Iv never had access to with other programs.

I will continue to update the site, let it rank and I will report back here how it goes. I don't expect to generate new sales to quickly, however with the awesome share tools built in I may. If anyone experienced in Wordpress has a add-on or widget they highly recomend, please do share your knowledge.

So this is it, The AmazonAssociate Experiment! Feel free to get involved.

Al

 

I had a site that was kind of like that, got an auto-blog type thing to try and sell amazon mp3 items, and after a lot of posts, couldn't get conversions. Now I just blog personally, go to ezine and update articles, and have a niche site http://scaryfilm.blogspot.com all of which don't convert much of anything.

 

Cool blog man, if you want to link exchange let me know. I just worked some bugs out of my template.

 

Today I added seven hot deals to the website which are featured on the homepage. I am making use of the share buttons I incorporated into the site. So far today I have 60 unique visitors. I am please with this. I look forward to the site indexing soon.

http://Furor.co

 

I added over twenty new items today.

Good news: The site is starting to show up on Google. I got a couple Google hits on the "sandisk cruzer fit cz33 32gb usb flash drive" item page. Still no sales at this point, still hoping the traffic will grow. I havnet really promoted the site today and it is at 25 unique visitors. I hope it gets close to the daily average of 60 or more within the next 5-6 hours before midnight. People are also starting to spend more time on the site according to my site statistics. A good qaurter of the visitors are sticking around long enough to explore the page.

Any ideas how to drive additional traffic and to help it pick up? Im interested in long term traffic, not hour lasting hype. But anything does help.

Alan

 

Love the site. I am building a photography site to sell DSLR cameras from Amazon. How are you driving traffic to the site now? I have had some autoblog sites in the past but just could't get them to convert. I hope my new site has better luck and I do wish you much success. Oh and welcome to WordPress.

 

Thank you so much Ferrellmac. To get traffic at the current time I use the share bar on the bottom of each product page. I use each one for each product i post. It seems to be working really well. Id love to check out your site and or even link exchange once its up and running with a little traffic. For all I know it is already.



Today major changes to the site & stats (today all stats are way up!):

• Developed two new logos for the site as well as a modo and incorporated them into the site. Looks very professional now, I love it!
• Traffic is continuing to grow much more rapidly then expected. Today I already have 91 unique visits at 3pm when I got 96 uniques total yesterday. I also see growth in return followers. Every day at least 10 people are checking back to the site. I am excited to see my content has them coming back for more.
• I added a full page of products (12) new products to the site.
• I dont see a lot of hits coming direct from google and other search engines yet. I am really anticipating this and very excited. I really think itll come hard when it does. I used Wordpress just for this reason. The site is only 4 days old at this point.
• I sold one remote control Lamborghini this morning through the site.

 

Today I am exhausted. Between my day job, a interview I had at another place and picking my car up from the shop out of town.. well i felt pretty tired when I finally got to sit down to do some web design..

But I do have some great updates to report..

• Todays reports show I sold two items. Both around $30. So this is my second day in a row making sales and i am only five (5) days in. This pleased me.
• Web traffic is staying steady. With 118 uniques yesterday and 73 unique visitors so far today. The time is 7:11pm so that number should climb closer to 100.
• Yesterday I set a record for returning visitors with 16. Today so far I am at 11.

That's all for now, I will check in with you again tomorrow. Let me know if you have any questions on my progress.

-Al

 

My experience with Amazon associate is not good. They pay very less commission rate. I was promoting Kindle Fire and after a month hardly earned $50 . If you are looking for a good affiliate product then HelpOnClick is best which pays you 20% commission on every sale.

 

Thanks for the info. My site is not even close to being finished but the address is http://buydslrcamera.com. I am working on several amazon sites at the same time and trying to keep up my blogs too. Give me a few days and I will PM you and we can link exchange. When I get it up and running I will just put your link in my list. Good luck to you. Looking forward to talking in the near future.

 

Hey its ferrellmac again. I was looking over the site again and I have one suggestion. You may already know this but you can make the site a little more SEO friendly by making one change in the settings menu. go to setting>permalinks>click on custom structure and type in /%postname%/ then save. That will add the post name into the product link instead of the page number. If you already know this forgive me. If not give it a try.

Ferrellmac

 

Nice work with your website. I like your results.

I got to agree with ferrellmac, your site needs on-page SEO work. It is also good to add the following pages: about, contact, terms and conditions, disclaimer etc.

You can also start collecting emails of your visitors by offering to send them updates about new items with great discount.

By the way what did you do to promote your site?

 

Day 6:

Thank you..
I really appreciate your advice with setting the site up for SEO. I have now put in a custom structure by adding "/%postname%/" as you advised. I can really see how this will help as it looks like it will put the title words right into future posts. Excellent! Thank you so much. No doubt your wisdom will result in multiple future sales Ferrellmac. I updated it as you told me and posted a new item to test it, sure enoguh it made the desired changes to the new post. I was going to to see if I could change the format to the old posts by editing them, to my surprize WP had already auto changed the urs. Thanks so much! ps- your site http://buydslrcamera.com looks like it is off to a great site. Take your time and pm me when your ready for a link exchange.

Great info from you as well Wizequy, thanks for the response. I want to make interactive blocks on the site under each product. Because I know user interaction and submissions increase rankings. I just don't know how yet. This is my first site with WordPress. Any suggestions for this? Maybe a specific plugin? Also, how can I collect user emails if they choose to opt in? Thanks!

Daily Stats:
Yesterday was a very successful day again for the site.

• The site got two sales equaling $130. Biggest sales day yet.
• Traffic was 82 uniques yesterday in total. Down a little but still a nice flow.
• Most of my sales are products not even featured on my site, such as the tablet i sold yesterday. Thats why I think its important to have all sorts of products on your site, not just one categorie. Just my rookie thoguhts.
• Today unique traffic is only up to 32 at 5:11pm, Im not sure why its such a slow day. But I wont let it get me down.

As for promotion, I just have been using the share bar I added onto each product page. That is about it. Very excited for my sit to index. I hear it takes 4-6 good weeks though.

Updates Part 2 Day 6:

• I added a clean favicon to the website, makes the site feel more professional.
• I used the share buttons on the site to catch up on traffic for the day. Up t 70+ uniques for the day and its 7:26pm
• Made adjustments to improve SEO as suggested in prior posts by DP users (Thank You!).
• Added a few more items.
• The amount of time spent on my site increased from 22% to about 30% for visitors staying on the site for a 5-20 mins.

Statistics Charts & Graph:


I am really enjoying watching the site grow. It's going pretty smoothly.

-Alan Craker

 

wow, this thing is building, not bad

 

The website is just now starting to see daily website traffic from Google and surely has much room to grow. This inspires me to keep prompt on the task of adding new products and deals everyday. Because the more product I add, the more search terms will bring in traffic. Below you can see a chart of keywords and search rankings to the website for the last 48 hours. Pretty exciting growth since coming from zero to about five a day.

 

Hi LemonTide

I like your site and it's certainly better looking that anything I have. From my experience getting highly targeted traffic is the key and will turn the conversions in to real money and this has made a huge difference to me over the past few months. I don't use Amazon stores, but instead create free individual blogs via Wordpress and carry out research on technology products that are relatively new and have low competition using the free Google keyword tool. This approach has made a big difference and now have several blogs on page one of Google and earn between £300 - £400 a month from the UK program alone . The traffic you're getting from these indexed blogs is highly targeted, as people are searching for a specific item through Google and literally have a debit card in their hands ready to buy.

Best of luck with your project and I like the statistics your producing and your attention to detail.

Mark

 

Hello shmeeko69, thank you so much for all the nice things you had to say. I really appreciate it. You also had some great advice as far as your method of researching new technology products and offering them for sale. Im glad to hear it is getting you some great rankings and makign you some real cash every month. You are one of the more successful people I've had the pleasure of speaking to who is using Amazon.

Just like you I do my research before posting my products, however my method is a little different. I go out and research which items are selling well and at the greatest discount. I post them items. It is exciting to hear that those Google results are where the money is.. and that the user is sitting there with credit card in hand ready to use.

With this in mind, I rethought my entire checkout process. Is it easy enough for a user to checkout once they find the deal on my site? I dont think it is. eight years of customer experience primarily for RueLala has shown me people in general are surprisingly dense. So it is very high priority to me to streamline the process for them and make a purchase as easy as possible. I since have started incorporating the Carousel Amazon widget into each new and future post. I think this increases the visual appeal of my website as well as helps the customers at checkout. Yet I am updating my format a little more to be sure I keep a image checkout link and text checkout link available so the users can see the checkout options on all devices, including those without flash.

Checkout the new look:

View Actual Page

Update 2:
I like how the new layout looks with the carousel, right now I am manually going back and adding it to 178 previous item posts. I have a separate browser open just for that. But when you see something that is going to increase sales and improve your e-commerce store.. I do it.

 

Hi LemonTide

Thanks for your kind words. I always say it's a numbers game and it doesn't really matter what methodology you use, if it suits you and you get highly targeted traffic then you're doing something right. Some folk seem to think that you need to use outstanding techniques to get good affiliate sales, but I can tell you that it just isn't true. My blogs are all quite basic but straight to the point and give people the kind of information that they're looking for and can click directly to the product they require. The affiliate business like many others involves trial and error and when you use a technique that works stick to it.

Mark

 

I love the design you chose. I am also hoping to jump into a similar project and so I look forward to your updates on this project. You have done very well so far, and ti will keep going up from there. Make sure to also Tweet every new post you make, and share it on Facebook as well. Also try submitting your posts to Reddit for a little extra traffic.

 

Have you seen this Amazon Affiliate instant link tool by 3zaps. It gives you a short url and a qr code that links through to amazon. There's no link pasting or html. I think its for mobile but it works on blogs, facebook and youtube. I've just used a QR code on my facebook and it works. To start you need a 3zaps account, you're Amazon Affiliate ID and product ASIN.