Thulf
Regular Member
- Sep 26, 2017
- 285
- 238
Thulf's Amazon Affiliate Niche Site Journey
- Thread starter Thulf
- Start date
Holzr
Elite Member
- Sep 4, 2016
- 2,236
- 2,666
Great progress so far!
One of my new sites for the year is in a fairly seasonal niche, going to be interesting seeing how seasonal it is. Luckily I managed to pick up an expired domain at auction at a great price. The niche is pretty much all year round so working hard to get it ranking to cover the off season.
One of my new sites for the year is in a fairly seasonal niche, going to be interesting seeing how seasonal it is. Luckily I managed to pick up an expired domain at auction at a great price. The niche is pretty much all year round so working hard to get it ranking to cover the off season.
Thomas Shelby
Power Member
- Jan 3, 2013
- 635
- 366
Great journey and congrats!
Following this thread.
Following this thread.
Thomas Shelby
Power Member
- Jan 3, 2013
- 635
- 366
I forgot to ask, do you silo your site?
Thanks
Thanks
LgnG
Junior Member
- Oct 16, 2019
- 130
- 49
Hi thulf,
I did the same thing as you looking for ways to make money online. I signed up for the survey sites too, transcribe, mech turk, etc. I saw a couple sites about how to start an adult site, one guy was making 3500 per month the other 10000. Soon after I found this site and now I'm looking at starting an amazon affiliate site. I'm looking at buying one of the done for you sites, I don't know which one to go with though. It looks like your doing well, great job.
I did the same thing as you looking for ways to make money online. I signed up for the survey sites too, transcribe, mech turk, etc. I saw a couple sites about how to start an adult site, one guy was making 3500 per month the other 10000. Soon after I found this site and now I'm looking at starting an amazon affiliate site. I'm looking at buying one of the done for you sites, I don't know which one to go with though. It looks like your doing well, great job.
MountainGuy
Power Member
- Jul 9, 2019
- 608
- 421
Thulf
Regular Member
- Sep 26, 2017
- 285
- 238
Update Time!
(May, 2020 - summer has begun)
(1 main site making majority of the affiliate sales - more on this down there somewhere)
(May, 2020 - summer has begun)
(1 main site making majority of the affiliate sales - more on this down there somewhere)
Expenses:
keyword package: $20 (namhq89, 2018)
Domain: $90 (March, 2018 - March, 2022)
VPS: $119 ($3,60 per month, some is paid in advance)
Outsourced content: $570,32
Social signal test: $56
Total: $855,32
Earnings:
Amazon Affiliate program: $10.000+
keyword package: $20 (namhq89, 2018)
Domain: $90 (March, 2018 - March, 2022)
VPS: $119 ($3,60 per month, some is paid in advance)
Outsourced content: $570,32
Social signal test: $56
Total: $855,32
Earnings:
Amazon Affiliate program: $10.000+
I'll have to break everything apart to avoid any confusion.There's a lot to unpack and it's basically a wall of text.
About the keyword package:
When it comes to the keyword package from the seller here on BHW way back in 2018, the keywords were actually somewhat decent back then. Now when I've bought the package in the hopes of starting a new site, the quality has not really been the same. Perhaps it's a perceived deterioration, but that's the way I personally feel. He still provides a niche idea and it's up to you to plan out your content around few of the suitable keywords in that package. Back then I felt like I got a lot more suitable keywords than what I've gotten as of late.
About the keyword package:
When it comes to the keyword package from the seller here on BHW way back in 2018, the keywords were actually somewhat decent back then. Now when I've bought the package in the hopes of starting a new site, the quality has not really been the same. Perhaps it's a perceived deterioration, but that's the way I personally feel. He still provides a niche idea and it's up to you to plan out your content around few of the suitable keywords in that package. Back then I felt like I got a lot more suitable keywords than what I've gotten as of late.
About the domain:
It was purchased from GoDaddy. Maybe back then they were a little more normal, but if I had to buy a domain again I wouldn't buy it from GoDaddy. It's expensive there and support is behind a paywall + they've got multiple traps to suck more money out of you.
About the VPS:
The VPS is provided by Vultr and it's managed by ServerPilot free plan. It's a ticking time bomb because I don't know anything about server management. I'm lucky I didn't fuck anything up running all those necessary scripts when settings things up by following all sorts of tutorials. I wouldn't do it again. Shared hosting is fine.
About the outsourced content:
This one's rough ...All the content is purchased from BHW. There's only 1 piece of content I was happy about, but it cost $140 and was a placeholder pillar article. The rest of the content is mostly $2,50 per 500 words type of content which was not good for my needs. Most of it I've had to throw away and not use at all, some of it I uploaded with some editing, but it was content that didn't really matter. And the rest of the cheap content that I used I basically had to rewrite from scratch. About the only good thing that came with cheap content was the fact that they motivated me to write the content in the form of fixing them from the ground up as I didn't want my money to go to waste entirely. I kept on buying cheap content from various sellers in the hopes of finding a decent enough writer. Occasionally there was good writing, but that was an anomaly and probably just happened to have a decent writer from the seller's pool of writers. I can't ever leave a negative real review on those threads because the content is cheap and one just has to expect lower quality content and that's it.
About the social signal package:
Everywhere I looked, "SEO experts" always tell you to build backlinks or don't bother building a site. The next best thing (just a figure of speech) that wasn't a backlink was social signals, but I didn't really want to buy that either. I figured I'd try out some cheap little package of social signals to spread the word, so to speak. Chances are this had more of a negative than a positive effect because when I got a few samples they were pure spam. I don't remember if I left them be or asked them to be removed, but I probably didn't bother as I knew social signals were supposed to be harmless no-follow links.
About the total expenses:
This number, $855,32, is accurate as of June, 2020. However, the distribution between different expenses can be off here and there, but not be too much.
About the Amazon Affiliate earnings:
Since late 2019 I've launched a few Amazon Affiliate niche sites for testing purposes. Since OneLink doesn't allow tracking sites with their own unique tracking IDs, all the earnings are ultimately reported from under 1 tracking ID. However, those test sites don't make nearly as much as the main affiliate niche site, the first one, this one.
2017 summer - started the site
2018 summer - started the big-boy pillar money articles
2019 summer - site done in my book, time to finally collect the money
Content strategy:
Since I don't build any backlinks, content is all I have going for me. The premise is simple: info posts, review posts, pillar money posts. Info posts make me no money, but they're the most important part of the content plan. Instead of "backlinks", I rely on "interlinks". Every piece of content is basically connected in a meaningful way so that one piece of content is not just one piece of content but an extension of all the rest of the content and vice versa. Without info posts I can't pull that off, so that's why they're the most important part of the content plan. It's like real content rather than filler content that you see everywhere else (get tips from Income School). Reviews are simply just thorough reviews of a product, but there's a tiny catch (I use a template for similar products and change very little comparatively). Even if I've never seen the product in real life, I usually do so much research I get to know more about the product than I would if I had used it myself for a year or 2. Researching stuff is fun and it's like learning new things and different countries where they're made in and different compositions of different materials and... you get the point. And then there are pillar articles. These posts are something like "best niche product" - there are all sorts of these pillar posts, one more competitive than the other and I usually start with one that's profitable enough while at the same time not too competitive so that I would rank high enough and not waste my time and effort. Over time doing things like this you get a 6th sense in the niche and just by looking at the market situation can predict who & what ranks where & how more or less. And that's it. It's very simple, but takes a lot of pondering and checking behind every little rock for more tangible info nobody else (competitor) bothers to look for.
SEO:
NO BACKLINKS! Raw power of content that's optimized. Not just optimized for the algorithm but also for the reader. I've tried to aim for that sweet spot between a human and the AI (whatever that means to you, kind of subjective thing).
Some more:
Theme, logo, favicon, colors, pictures, content structure, formatting, robot.txt, [insert anything else along those lines here] are all as basic as you can imagine. Nothing fancy. Nothing fancy at all. Ugly even. It just needed to be very concise and purposeful for both the human and the robotic visitor. That means no sidebar (it's a needless distraction for the reader while he's reading the content I want them to read and follow through with, even if they skip a bunch), no paid themes (costs to an absolute minimum), no nulled themes (ah, yes, next I'll put a camera in my bedroom and live stream the view online 24/7), color scheme matching the overall vibe of the site/niche (e.g grass greenish, sky blueish, whatever, something distinguishable, brand-like'ish), favicon and logo put together in paint because it's cheap and you can make something decent if you try; formatting and all that based on how you would like to read through something or how some1 imaginable from target audience would want to read it and what they would want to find and where and how and when and why and... Just common sense at this point. Topics too, common sense topics and everything common sense/ due diligence now. It's basically a do-what-makes-sense-based-on-information-available strategy.
soa0611
Elite Member
- Apr 20, 2015
- 2,790
- 2,539
enjoyed reading this. bravo.
it seems you have a pretty high priced average item, like 300-400$
Thulf
Regular Member
- Sep 26, 2017
- 285
- 238
Yeh... And right now with this pandemic, sellers have increased their prices while at the same time running out of stock all the time. It's pretty hectic right now.
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JinxerCraft
Power Member
- Mar 18, 2017
- 797
- 421
Thanks for updating!
On Your Main Site,
For pillar articles, how much are you paying for thousands of words?
Are you earning 8.5K from the main site alone? What're the monthly pageviews are you getting on this site?
What is your advice on outsourcing content from BHW? Do you have any recommendations?
On Your Main Site,
For pillar articles, how much are you paying for thousands of words?
Are you earning 8.5K from the main site alone? What're the monthly pageviews are you getting on this site?
What is your advice on outsourcing content from BHW? Do you have any recommendations?
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Thulf
Regular Member
- Sep 26, 2017
- 285
- 238
When it comes to pillar articles, I write them myself. The one I outsourced was a placeholder and cost roughly $140 for 6000 words.Thanks for updating!
On Your Main Site,
For pillar articles, how much are you paying for thousands of words?
What is your advice on outsourcing content from BHW? Do you have any recommendations?
No recommendations when it comes to outsourcing content from here, really. Out of that $570, roughly $400 has been basically thrown into the wind from a cliff. Though, as I said, getting low quality content motivated me to actually write the content as I felt the urge to fix them which meant basically writing a lot of them from scratch (though sometimes I didn't write anything at all and the money did go to waste). You get what you pay for. I kept ordering because I clung to the hope that maybe, just maybe one of them happens to be just a normal writer and I get decent content for comfortably cheap price (a couple of them were like that, but that's a lucky chance of getting a decent writer from the pool of writers these sellers have employed to work under them - analogous to gambling almost).
I used a template where the writers had to simply fill it with the corresponding info by doing research because I knew the quality was too low otherwise. Since the info on a lot of the products is basically the same, I just needed new ways of conveying that same info, but some writers still managed to give false info there and make other mistakes on top of that. It's like grading a schoolkid's essay. You just get the feeling that it's easier to write the thing from scratch yourself. And that's how it motivated me to write the content.
I don't know how many times I've said this now from all these different angles... ^^
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JinxerCraft
Power Member
- Mar 18, 2017
- 797
- 421
Thanks for your insight!
I recently bought keyword service from namhq too but the keywords seem to be a little bit competitive without any backlink budget at all.
Since you're not spending money on links, what are things in SERP do you check to decide if you should go or not?
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Thulf
Regular Member
- Sep 26, 2017
- 285
- 238
The idea is to play the long game, so to speak, and map out your content plan regardless if there's enough search volume or if there are competitors in the way. That's the reason I start with info posts that aren't even in the keyword package. I basically build an actual wholesome site that covers almost everything about the niche which act as supporting content for the keywords I want to rank for (money keywords).Thanks for your insight!
I recently bought keyword service from namhq too but the keywords seem to be a little bit competitive without any backlink budget at all.
Since you're not spending money on links, what are things in SERP do you check to decide if you should go or not?
If you create content this way, even if you initially can't rank for keywords like "best niche product", you still get traffic for its variations. But that's where the content HAD to cover everything about the niche beforehand for Google to rank you in various other areas and not just the singular "best niche product"... It's hard to explain, but it seems like common sense to me.
If I wanted to rank for e.g "best bicycle for something", it would be natural that I explore that "something" in my other content before I even think of creating the "best" type of content. Analogously, think outside the box and in a much wider wholesome scale. And that's how I make content rank. Simple.
Thulf
Regular Member
- Sep 26, 2017
- 285
- 238
I bought the social signals thinking I was gonna start warming things up for building backlinks... But I realized that good backlinks I can't just really buy without spending what my site is worth, so I dropped the idea. The social signals were costly and they were absolute shit. You can basically look at this social signal package purchase as an accident, a mistake, a mishap, an ankle twist. ^^
But I have to point out that you're welcome to buy all the backlinks and social signals you can find because if I didn't say that then there are a lot of ppl who are gonna get angery.
Thulf
Regular Member
- Sep 26, 2017
- 285
- 238
My commission rate in sports/outdoors/etc category dropped from around 4.5% and 5% to 3%.
JinxerCraft
Power Member
- Mar 18, 2017
- 797
- 421
How do you use images? Do you use sitestripe or re-uploading the images?
I see popular sites are reuploading images without any issue. Sitestripe really slows down the page loading time.
I see popular sites are reuploading images without any issue. Sitestripe really slows down the page loading time.
Thulf
Regular Member
- Sep 26, 2017
- 285
- 238
I try not to use any 3rd party program for images, so simply just re-uploading, yeah. It's really a thin line to walk on though, but I believe having your own pictures somehow work better for SEO because when it's pulled from somewhere else it almost like links back to the source and Google might see that it's not your picture.