How a small niche site for Amazon earns more than $ 3000

The goods turnover on Amazon exceeds $ 200 billion a year, and part of this tidbit pie goes to webmasters working with a site affiliate system. Sites interacting with the Amazon affiliate program can earn thousands of dollars per month, and the following case confirms this.

Spencer House, an SEO blogger who launched more than 200 sites, created a website for the Amazon affiliate program in 2015 and reached $ 3,000 in less than a year. The author recently decided to share his case, but its results remain relevant even after four years. In addition, judging by the comments of the author, the site is still alive to this day. So, let’s begin.

Site income

First, the income screen for August from the main tracker (there is also an additional tracker):

In fact, Spencer received more revenue from the site, since traffic from it went to the pages of his own products on Amazon.

What is the revenue of the site (example for August 2016):

• $ 2,872.51 from Amazon Associates;
• $ 515.13 from Google Adsense;
• $ 43.20 from Commission Junction (now CJ Affiliate).

Total: $ 3,430 for August. The lion’s share came from sales of the American Amazon, and revenue from Canadian and British units totaled $ 90.

Google Adsense Revenue:

Stages of the creation and development of the site:

1. February 2015 – domain name purchased.
2. May 2015 – Three articles published. Spencer decided to find about 10 keywords for targeting and publishing articles.
3. August 2015 – 25 articles published. Spencer sees potential in this niche based on sales of his own Amazon FBA product. He picked up 100 keywords for which he will publish next articles.
4. September 2015 – 11 articles published. By the end of September, he had only 48 articles on his site.
5. October 2015 – 16 articles published.
6. November 2015 – 37 articles published.
7. December 2015 – 19 articles published. From September to December 2015, Spencer received several links to the site using guest posts. The Tailwind app was used to succeed on Pinterest. He also held few giveaways, resulting in several more links.
8. January and February 2016 – 0 articles were published.
9. March 2016 – 3 articles published.
10. April 2016 – 1 article published.
11. May – July 2016 – again 0 articles were published.
12. August 2016 – 10 articles published. The site reached over $ 3,000 in affiliate revenue (about 7,000 clicks on affiliate links).

How did Spencer manage to get ahead with such a relatively small amount of content and achieve such a decent income? He used simple but effective steps – a mixture of standard SEO methods with his own observations.
Spencer carried out the following work with keys:

• Found low-competitive words with less than 1000 queries.
• Used long key phrases, consisting mostly of three or more words.
• Chose keys containing certain words that worked well with Amazon products, such as “review,” “best,” “against,” “up to $ 100,” and others. For example, if the article have to sell folding chairs, then the “folding chair review” or “best folding chairs”, etc., titles were used.
• Watched the weak sites, which by low-frequency keys fell into the top Google. Then he used the same words and also hit the top.

Link mass

It is interesting that according to Spencer, his site does not have such a fat link mass. He did not carry out special work on building it up, and it grew naturally due to quality content. A year later, when the site reached an income of $ 3,000, the number of backlinks did not exceed 100!

Half of these links were obtained without any effort, and the second half was obtained using a simple strategy:

• Catalogs . Spencer preferred quality over quantity – the site was added to just a few directories, such as JoeAnt.
• Guest posts . Classics of the genre – several blog posts by familiar webmasters were left.
• Tailwind app . It was used to plan posts on Pinterest. Spencer created a group, joined some other groups – everywhere he posted the corresponding images that were pinned by other users and this led to Pinterest links.
• Giveaways . As already mentioned, Spencer giveaway some of his own goods, not for the sake of links, but in order to receive email subscribers. However, several users still posted links to sites with contests.
• Links from bloggers . The Tomoson platform was used to contact influencers to review products offered on the site. So, in addition to traffic and sales, he received additional links.

Optimization

At the beginning of 2016, Spencer saw that the site has good potential, so he decided to work on optimizing the average income per visitor. He did this in two ways: optimized the placement of Google Adsense banners and created more Amazon product comparison tables.

Spencer noticed that the revenue per click on Google Adsense was quite high compared to his other sites, so he put several ad units in a more prominent place at the top of the articles and added banners elsewhere.

He also noticed a significant increase in profit for Amazon Associates when he added more comparison tables to some of the older articles. On hand was the fact that in the theme that Spencer used, the functionality of comparison tables was built-in.

The addition of these tables has led to an increase in the number of clicks on affiliate links on Amazon and an increase in sales. These types of tables, according to the webmaster, provide users with great value, because it allows you to visually compare the merits of products with each other. If it will be easier for users to buy goods, they will buy more.

These two steps that Spencer has taken since March 2016 have indeed begun to increase revenue per visitor.

Outcome

Spencer is an experienced webmaster and seo specialist, with this site, he did not use any gray promotion schemes. To summarize, reviews of non-top Amazon products by low-frequency keys and their comparisons with each other and, of course, useful content (as if trite as it sounds) revealing the properties of the product played a role in the successful monetization of the site.