[FIRST JOURNEY] - Launching my Amazon Affiliate Website - FR

[Alpha-Legion]

Hi,

I'm quite new here on BHW. So let me introduce myself to begin.

Who am I ?

I'm a french man in the second half of his '20.
I've been studying marketing and digital for almost 2 years at school and been in several jobs before I consider starting an IM journey.

After seeing and following some threads here and there on BHW, I've decided to post my journey too.
For the context, I'm jobless now and all my days are focused around this new website. I get some money from the Government (Pôle Emploi) every month so I could pay the rent, the food and some oil to get where I want.

The business

After a first website that has too much technical problems (and focused on keywords that are too difficult for me now), I began a new website a couple weeks ago. So, this journey will be about an Amazon Affiliate Website in the music niche. It's a niche I know well because I play guitar since I am a kid.

I've not make the same mistake about the keywords as the first site I've been working on (ie focusing on too difficult keywords) and I target around 25 KW that has low competition and a small to medium volume (I'd say around 200 search per month).

Another mistake I've done with the first site was to put it online too fast. For this second try, the website isn't launched yet. It's still WIP at the moment. I wanna take my time to do it right.

What I've done

For now, this is the work I still need to do in order to launch my site properly :
- Buying the Domain Name
- Searching for an host
- Writing at least 10 articles with around 1000 - 1500 words each
- Create the social pages (Fb, Twitter, Pinterest, Forums)
- Create a logo
- Optimize the on page SEO and off page SEO

Here's a quick view of what I've already wrote :



My objectives

First, I just want to launch my website. I hope to reach at least 1000 unique visitors per month this year.
I don't plan to have an authority website for now. If this one works, I plan to open a new one and maybe start to diversify my assets in the future..

But it's a long way to the top (if you wanna rock'n'roll), and for now, my first goal is to reach 10 written articles with around 1500 words each.

I'll update this thread as soon as I can.

This is the way

 

[Zera Api]

First, I just want to launch my website. I hope to reach at least 1000 unique visitors per month this year.

How much earnings you aiming for in the long run ?
Good Luck

 

[mlhh2013]

Good luck on your journey

 

[noel2020]

Bon chance
a suivre

 

[Alpha-Legion]

How much earnings you aiming for in the long run ?
Good Luck

I don't have much informations about revenue with affiliation. I think my first step will be to do the 3 first sells to get a validated Amazon Account.
If I can get 250€ / month, it would be really good for a first try !

Good luck on your journey

Thank's

Bon chance
a suivre

Merci beaucoup !

 

[Chocolope]

This should be an interesting journey considering the site is in French.

I remember @arganrecords 's thread some time ago and I believe his was in the Italian market.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/a...-journey-to-1000-a-day-100-outsourced.759612/

Best of luck to you! and I already subscribed

 

[Pingcasa]

do you have any strategies about link building,
interesting journey courage

 

[Alpha-Legion]

This should be an interesting journey considering the site is in French.

I remember @arganrecords 's thread some time ago and I believe his was in the Italian market.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/a...-journey-to-1000-a-day-100-outsourced.759612/

Best of luck to you! and I already subscribed

Thank you very much Chocolope !
I'm going to read this journey, seems really interesting !

do you have any strategies about link building,
interesting journey courage

I'm not experimented at all in link building, but I guess I could find some tutos here on BHW to help me.
ATM, I don't have a strategy for link building but I know it's something I must go real deep to fully understand what it means
I saw that some sites in my niche create account on forums and reply to messages with their own site linked. I don't know if it's reliable in the long term, I guess not.
I'm going to read a lot about link building when the site will be finished and then I'd build my link strategy from here

 

[Alpha-Legion]

[Update]

The last days were quite intense !
I've work a lot on the site to get fully prepared to launch it by the beginning of February.

What I've done ?
- A better KW research : targeting only 25 small keywords wasn't a bad idea I guess. But I wanted more. After reading some threads here and there on BHW, I've discover the perfect guide for white hat SEO by t0mmy. I've learned more than I did during my SEO courses in school. His final advice blowed my mind. So, I decided to expand my keyword list from 25 to almost 130.
All of them are long tail with at least 3 words. I plan to write very specific articles to aim those very targeted keywords in the long run.
With that idea in mind, if I write (let's get crazy) around 5 articles with around 1000 words each (more or less) the first days, I could launch my site at the end of january.
All those articles will not feature any affiliate link for the moment, my objective is just to rank on low difficult keywords and boost my site.
Anyone have an idea if launching a site with affiliate links in some articles could work ?

- Writing articles : With the KW research I made, I had a clear path to follow. All the articles will be optimized to rank on one very specific keyword. So, I started to write and write a lot. To see what type of article I could made, that sounds like I want. I found it now, and I already have written two articles only (the research took me more time than I expected).
So here are the WP Word Count atm :


- Creating meta titles and meta descriptions : This was a big work too. I took all the pages and searched for Google Ads with the keyword the pages are aiming for. After looking at those metas, I wrote mine. At least, all the next articles and all the pages I have created are now optimized.


What I plan to do next week ?
I want to write as much articles as I can. Let's take some advance on publishing.

This is the way

 

[Alpha-Legion]

EDIT #3

My last update was almost 5 days ago. Let's see how it goes.

I've work less harder than the first weeks. And there's two reasons why :

- The first is that I've noticed that my work seems really hard. I've wrote some articles before trying to do this for my own website, but hell, I didn't remember it was so hard. I've questionned myself why I found it so hard compared to the other times. For this new website, I only write on Wordpress. And it's suuuuuuuuuuuuch a time waster guys. Wordpress should only be the last part of my work. If you want some example, here it is. I wrote 3 articles this week. They're not big articles (almost 1300 words each). The first two took me almost a day and a half to complete each one.
The last one, I've just wrote it on Google Doc and copy paste the raw text on Wordpress. It took me less than an hour and a half to write it, write the metas, create an image...
Now, I will only work like this. I'll have more energy and more time to focus on other things on the site (like link building in the future...).

- The second reason is that I was really tired and had to concentrate on other things this week. The way I've worked those last few weeks were really intense. If you add family meetings and birthdays, all my week-ends were dedicate to friends and family. It took me a lot of energy.
--> Let's work smart from now.

So, here's what I've done this week :

- Wrote 3 articles (around 1300 words each)


- Re-wrote some part of the first articles
- I've used the KGR Method to organize my content planning. Now, I see wich keywords I want to focus on to get "easy" ranking on Google (I still don't know what to expect, we'll see how it goes in the next weeks).
- Create my HomePage : still not sure about how I need to turn this one. I've saw some really good Amazon Affiliates websites that are so ugly but seems to work (ie converts). Do I need to put a comparative table in it ? Or should I go new age and juste building the homepage like I want (Categories, latest articles, my story, pics and social media...) ? I don't know.

What I plan to do next week ?
Keep on writing. Before launching my site, I want to have at least 13 - 15 finished articles. So I could concentrate on getting trafic and continue to write at a good pace.
I'm going to buy the domain name and to host it. I've found good price and a websites that provides a free SSL for the first domain.
Not gonna launch I think, except if I have all the articles I need.

 

[SEOscrapy]

Bon courage mon ami

 

[lazouille]

Good luck, I will follow!

 

[Alpha-Legion]

Bon courage mon ami

Merci SEOscrapy !
Plus j'avance et plus je me rends compte que je suis en train de construire un vrai blog et pas forcément un site de niche

Good luck, I will follow!

Thank's Lazouille !

 

[Alpha-Legion]

UPDATE #4

Hi everyone
One week passed, let's go for the recap !
This week was cool. I've work less than the other week but managed to write more and consistently.

It's the real beginning of the journey because I've launched my site too !
I was really excited to launch it and now it's done. Even if it's only the beginning of the work, I feel it like an achievement. It's the first time I'm launching something really serious all by myself. I'm really excited to see how things will evolve in the next months.
So here's my checklist.

Done :

- Write some more articles (I exceeded the 25K words !)
- Launched the site
- Plugged Google Analytics, GSC and other extensions
- Managed to get a free premium WP theme
- Added a publishing calendar along with KGR to spot the best keywords to aim for in the next weeks

Here's the Word Count for this week :


If you take a close look at the table, you'll see that my published words number dropped a bit. And that's totally normal. I was writing and publishing my articles when they were ready. Just to know how much were fully ready for the launch. I've hit the 10k words early this Monday. I've focused on putting all the articles in draft mode to have a "content security margin" for the next weeks.
And then, I've called my cousin (an engineer who helped me launch all my sites on the web) to help me with hosting and for the launch.
Tuesday, the site was live.
After some minors internal linking problems, I've continue to write articles.

At least, I've wrote 5 more articles this week. They're not fully ready, it miss some SEO to optimize the content and the social shares to prepare before.

But now comes the real issues.
I get serious indexations issues, cause I guess I'm in the sandbox. I've opened a thread on BHW to get answers and opinions on it.
Just to talk a bit of the issue, when I first checked the GSC, I've found that 6 of my URL's were issues. When I've looked further to see what the problem was, Google told me that it was because it founds a "noindex" in the <meta name= robots> tag.

If you wanna know more of it, here's the link to the thread : https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/trouble-getting-indexed-on-google.1302622/
Hope it's not a real issue with the site cause I really don't know how I can fix it. Even after searching for help. Let's wait and continue to work and we'll see.

Anyway, here's the first GSC stats :



One impression is mine. I don't know where the other come from. With only one article indexed atm, I guess my keyword strategy should work. Hitting the top 20 position after 2 days isn't a bad start I think. Time will tell.

Plan for next week

- Write as much as I can in the morning (I started to apply for some jobs during the afternoon)
- Start to integrate some forums and Fb groups and building links

This is the way !

 

[Alpha-Legion]

UPDATE #5

Let's take a look at what happened last week.

- Content writing : I've been pretty lazy this week with content writing. And that's not a good thing.
After I've reached the 25k words mark, I've just hit the 30k words count. Almost 3500 words in one week. Bad news...

The good news is that a lot of articles went online during those last 10 days. Almost one article a day. But now, I don't have much articles left to publish, I need to finish some and to write some others to keep the pace. I'm gonna do my best this week.



While I was surfing BHW, I've discovered a very good topic that explain On Page SEO. It sure helped me, but this will add some more time to write good articles on the blog.
I try to write 50/50 for informative article and money article. By the way, money articles still don't have Amazon Affiliates Link cause I don't know if it impact the ranking.. I've searched but didn't found nothing on the web that tells if yes or no it could destroy all the efforts I put on my website. So, for the moment, I've didn't add the affiliates links.

- Integrate some forums and FB groups :
Didn't manage to search for that. I have to check that this week. In the other hand, I've established a presence on social signals (Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest) that share my articles once they're online. Don't know if it will helps because I don't have any likes on any on those pages and then, I don't have shares too.
Gonna try to share the links on some forums or FB groups comments.

Thoughts
After a week, the work start to be more difficult. I start to think that my niche isn't as easy as I used to think it was.
The problem is that I guess I'm still in the sandbox. The site is really new to Google, so it must take time to get out of it. I've watched some videos and read some articles and all of them are ok to say that I need to publish high quality content daily to get out quick of this sandbox.
When I look at the GSC, that discourages me a bit :



The impressions curve grow that way because saturday night, I've been with my two best friends and I've talked a bit of this project. We've checked some positions and made some research on the site (this is the reason why I have two clicks) but I don't understand how is it possible to have that much impressions with only a few searches. I barely made three of four searches, and my friends made almost the same. So it explain a bit of that impression curves but not the whole thing. I think the console don't have enough data to provides good metrics.

I really don't know if I'm on the good way. I want to see this site works. But it's really hard to work without knowing if it's gonna work the way you want. That's the second thing I'm asking too much questions about in my mind. When I look at the report under the clicks and impressions metrics, I saw the requests that the users have searched for and when my site appeared. I have some keywords that appears but, I don't understand why the keywords I aim don't stand out on this table. According to GSC, I aim some keywords that I've never wrote in any of my articles. I really don't understand why.

And that scares me a bit.


Appart from that, I've managed to reduce the number of errors on the site.


Today, the site is error free and that's some good news !
If I head to Ahrefs, here's what it looks like :




Plan for this week :

- Write : again and again. I need to publish at least 3 totally new articles this week. That's my goal.
- Keep up the social shares with my accounts
- Answering some questions on forums with links that points to my site : to start building presence on the web
- Still continue to improve SEO

I'm struggling, but I wanna continue to try.
See ya'

 

[mike67000]

1000 visiteurs par mois c'est possible il faut juste être focus et surtout maintenir le rythme, bon courage

 

[Alpha-Legion]

UPDATE #6

Long time no post here.
Let's catch up on lost time.

What I've done so far ?
Honestly, not that much...

During that period of time, I was expecting to skyrocket the number of articles and to write easily almost 500 words each day to aim at low competition keywords in my niche.
Nah.
It didn't worked that way.

But here's what I've discovered, I'd say almost two days after my last post :

1/ First, I guess my keyword research wasn't that good. I didn't understood what I was aiming for. The niche might be well chosen, but the keywords are the problem. I don't know if there is a buying intention with the keywords I've choose. That's the point.
Even if on Amazon, there's a tons of reviews on the product, I don't know if I aim for the good keywords. Time will tell.

2/ I'm really bad at writing for people ! I've wrote some articles before this journey and s**t ! I honestly hope nobody's reading that haha
I aim too much for the Google robots and not enough for the user. I needed to understand that to push further.
I was aiming for an amount of words and good keywords ratio in my sentences. I was totally wrong.
I figured out that most of the articles I've wrote were informative article and that my site hadn't the good structure (you know, the good old "Product review" category).

So I've made this clear and now, the site is all good on that point.

3/ Building an Amazon affiliate site is a lot of work. I know that you're laughing behind your screen, but yes. I thought I knew what it means, but hell nope. To skyrocket the results I got (after almost 1 month and a half), I would have needed to work much smarter (or harder) than I've done.

After figuring those thoughts, I felt like an idiot.
Who am I to think I could make money online like that ?
I didn't work enough and I got the results I've deserved.


But I'm not here to complain again and again.
I'm here to progress.

So here's the pain points :

- 38k words and 30k published : still not enough to make good SEO
- no backlinks : gotta improve this part
- no sale yet : that's the result, but the money is one of my first motivation for this site, so I better improve that too

What I need to do ?

1/ Write, write, write until I fuckin' die : I need to write and publish more product reviews to have an exhaustive site. The comparative guide is already written and there's at least 4 informative article on the main product I want to sell.

2/ Push all the informative articles on social medias : I have created a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a Pinterest one. I've post some articles on here but nobody follow the account so I don't know if it's worth doing that. In doubt, I'm gonna continue to push informative articles on these 3.

3/ Push the informative articles on Facebook groups, forums and Reddit : it will expose my site but it can bring some traffic. I'm totally new to Reddit, I don't even know if there's a french part on it. I'll see. The aim with that objective is to get some trafic once the site will have at least 50k words.

4/ Get backlinks : My site is almost two months old, I guess it's not too early to start the netlinking part.
I've saw some good stuff on backlinks here and there that I've tested on my personal website but the backlinks aren't indexed yet.
Don't know why they're not indexed yet and why Ahref or SemRush don't show them even if they are live on the sites I've posted them. Anyone got a clue ?
I'm gonna wait some weeks and see if there's a result for my personal site, if yes, I'm gonna go all-in with that techniques for my Amazon Affiliate website.
For those who might ask, I don't have much money to put in this project. So, I'll aim for white hat free technique of getting backlinks.
If it works, I'll give you the tips I found !


The main objective is to get trafic ! At the end of this month, I would be glad if my website hits the 1K impressions and 100 clics (I know, I know...)

I love that so here's the stats of the website on GSC :



Let's push this journey to the moon !

 

[Alpha-Legion]

UPDATE #7

Hi guys, what's up ?
Two weeks since my last update, and some things have been done !
Let's see that !

1/ Articles : I wrote at a cool pace those last two weeks. If you count the fact that in France (and mostly in Paris), we've been lockdown one more time, we escaped with my girlfriend out of the department so I couldn't work some days because we were drivin. Anyway, I've almost reached 40K published words on the site.
My goal was to publish the most I can and I'm pretty much satisfied.
I'll continue at this pace at almost 1 article per day with around 1000 words each.
By the way, I was targeting bigger keywords with those articles and I guess it helped me to reach 600 impressions.

Below are the site words count's :


2/ Push all the informative articles on social media : On this point, I've continue to publish daily but still no engagement with people. It didn't generate any visit as I've connect GA to my site lately this week.

3/ Push informative articles on Facebook Groups and Reddit : One day after my last message, I've asked to join a lot (I'd say almost 30) groups related to my niche. I've answered some groups member's questions and it generate some visits on the site and some clicks on affiliates links too. But it didn't lead to any sales. Didn't make that way on forums yet but profiles are created in some forums.

4/ Getting backlinks : Still in wait to get the backlinks I've done with Google Stacking method and the podcast one. Ahrefs didn't seem to see that I have backlinks here and there on internet.



Anyway, here are the stats for the last month :


We see that I've get more clicks and the impressions doubled in 13 days.
My "middle position" get closer to the top week after week. That's some good news.

Don't know if I'm going to reach the 1k impressions before the end of the month, but I'm pretty sure that I won't get 100 clicks before.

One other good news : I've made my first f***ing sale !


It's not much (around 2€) but I'm happy with it. I know that it don't mean anything, anyway, it gives me hope and the desire to push further this site.

Now, I know that it's possible.
If you look at the stats, you see two peaks on 03/16 and 03/17 : it coincides with when I've post informative articles on Facebook groups and received some comments of people.

What are my goals now ?
My goals remains the same : continue writing and publishing good quality SEO focused content to get trafic, get known a bit on social media to get some 2.0's shares and getting backlinks to improve my rankings.

See you at the end of the month !

 

[notNewB]

UPDATE #7

One other good news : I've made my first f***ing sale !

Sincere congrats with the first sale man. Keep up the hard work.

 

[KaneBETA]

Congratulations on your journey ! keep it up