[Successful Journey] Scaling Amazon Affiliate from $1000/m to $10k

[nSnoopy]

I'm afraid Google will count it as duplicate content.

Some people may say it's not true, but I prefer to remove it for peace of mind.

I use product boxes, but i don't allow the whole product description to show up, i allow just 3 bullet points with a max of 255 characters; no problems here.

 

[azil13]

BookMark This

 

[edvyga]

I‘ve been silently following your journey for a while, and I‘m completely amazed by how you still find the time to regularly post lengthy updates AND run your portfolio of sites so well.

I can completely relate to the frustration that you‘re feeling with your site after the update, as my (unfortunately only) site got hit as well, although it was back in December 2020 when the Core Update went live. My site got hit by a devastating 80% reduction in traffic and still, 6 months later, has shown no signs of recovery. No manual actions, just a completely side-wide algorithmic destruction.

I did most of the Kitchen Sink Method from BuilderSociety, which is a complete revamp of a website, posted strictly information articles, etc. Nothing has helped so far. Even the new articles are barely getting indexed, and most of them cannot reach page 2 even on the easiest KWs possible.

Now, I hope you don‘t mind me asking, but what would you do with the website if you were in my position?

1. Get more backlinks for it and keep going in hopes that it might recover with the next core update?
2. Start a new site in combination with the no.1 above?
3. Or would you sell the site while it‘s still making around $300, and start a new one?

 

[Bloooop]

Update

Finished a long day of work and I'm dead tired.

Things are done today:

• Wrote two articles - 2,470 Words, 1,517 Words
• Tried fixing mobile page speed issues caused by Astra's menu. (Seems impossible to fix unless I remove it)
• Did a couple of hours of analysis of my competitor's articles that are now ranking higher than mine due to Product Reviews Update.

That 2k word article took a lot of time to write as it involved research that isn't immediately obvious through a quick google search. It took me about 4 hours to complete. I'm thinking I might need to start vetting keywords and pushing down the ones that seem like they'll take a long time.

Earnings for Yesterday:

2. Yes, most of them are Review products. I didn't realize that my CTR was bad until you point it out. I have to figure out what else can be done to fix it (besides your suggestion, of course).

I agree with you. At first, my traffic was stagnant, but once I keep adding articles, it keeps growing up. Work hard, patience, and consistency play a big role.

Obviously, my site traffic is not even close as to yours, but, there is progress and lots of things I need to learn to make my site better, etc.

I also find making money online a dream job. You can work everywhere you want to, as long as there is an internet and a laptop.

Just the other day I was thinking about how impressive it is to do what we do. A decent salary is around $3-6k a month and if you take the middle of that at around $4500 that's 54k/year.

With one website you can generate that amount on autopilot and outsource a few articles for it each week to keep it growing. If you've got two sites making that much you'll be earning $100k per year which is pretty good. Add another site or scale one of your sites to a higher monthly and you're making a very high salary that would've required years of experience and a couple of degrees with $30-200k in student loans.

So 6-8 months of dedicated effort grants you what would normally take others years to acquire. And if you live in another country like I do that amount of money is more than what my Priminister makes (not considering potential swiping of funds).

I think the occasional wreckage from Google and Amazon is worth the hassle and there's literally nothing else I'd rather do!

I‘ve been silently following your journey for a while, and I‘m completely amazed by how you still find the time to regularly post lengthy updates AND run your portfolio of sites so well.

I can completely relate to the frustration that you‘re feeling with your site after the update, as my (unfortunately only) site got hit as well, although it was back in December 2020 when the Core Update went live. My site got hit by a devastating 80% reduction in traffic and still, 6 months later, has shown no signs of recovery. No manual actions, just a completely side-wide algorithmic destruction.

I did most of the Kitchen Sink Method from BuilderSociety, which is a complete revamp of a website, posted strictly information articles, etc. Nothing has helped so far. Even the new articles are barely getting indexed, and most of them cannot reach page 2 even on the easiest KWs possible.

Now, I hope you don‘t mind me asking, but what would you do with the website if you were in my position?

1. Get more backlinks for it and keep going in hopes that it might recover with the next core update?
2. Start a new site in combination with the no.1 above?
3. Or would you sell the site while it‘s still making around $300, and start a new one?

That's why some days I miss a few updates especially when I end up going out. But once I'm home I allocate a few minutes to checking over my progress by doing the update.

But to your main questions.

Honestly... here's what I'd do:

1. I'd do a heavy disavow most of my backlinks and vet all sites that are being linked to on the same pages that mine are found on to see if they got impacted by the update. I wouldn't buy any more links as to me that's like whipping a dead horse.
2. I'd start a new site immediately once the next core update rolls around and I see no improvement after adding new content and doing the revamping the site.
3. I'd keep the site and collect the earnings, you might never know when it'll recover.

Look:

After selling my first site I'm now a strong believer in cash flow over cash on hand. That cash flow might last you 10 years which could potentially give you $36,000 while if you sold at a 30x you'd only get $9k. So unless you really need the cash I'd keep the monthly earnings.

The most important thing is to be as diversified as possible. That involves having multiple sites, multiple revenue streams, multiple traffic sources. So in the quickest time, I'd ditch that site and start building two new ones and manually write 30 articles a month for each. And in 6 months I would or should've surpassed the earnings for the penalized site and keep growing.

However, I wouldn't completely give up on the penalized site until I know I've done absolutely everything and two core updates have rolled out. So I'd publish maybe 2 articles a month on it while working on the others. If two updates come along and nothing then I'd just give it up and collect the money till it runs dry.

But a new core update is being rolled out now maybe you'll rise again now.

 

[Bloooop]

Update

Wrote three new articles today at 1,542 words, 1798 Words, 1322 Words.

I've been doing Heart Rate training with my spin bike and I think I might not be recovering in the right way. About halfway through the day, I started feeling weird so I didn't push to write anymore and started formulating a new keyword research method.

I'm trying to work up to completing 5 articles each day. But I figure I'll run out of keywords too quickly so I'm compiling methods to find good info keywords.

So far I've got a good method but I'm still comparing it with some Info sites gurus methods.

Earnings for Yesterday:

 

[Roger Marquez]

So far I've got a good method but I'm still comparing it with some Info sites gurus methods.

Wondering about these "info site gurus" websites. Are you referring to sites like the wirecutter?

 

[JinxerCraft]

Why the ad earnings so low compared to affiliate commission? Do you block ads on certain posts?

200$+ with only 700+ visitors! Pretty impressive!

 

[ranga]

@Bloooop how are your sites doing in the latest core update?

 

[Zshan]

How many articles on the sites now?

 

[Bloooop]

Update

Missed a couple of days of updating for family time.

Wrote 7 articles over the period Friday/Sunday/Yesterday: 2,456 words, 1,452 Words, 3,752 Words, 1,788 Words, 2,085 Words, 1541 Words, 2, 874 Words.

I also started testing an editor so I can focus on writing content, we'll see how that works out.

Earnings for Yesterday:





My main site is maintaining or slightly decreasing every so often. I kinda feel that it's counterproductive to even work on it. As I feel like once google sees a site a certain way it's gonna take a very long time for them to think otherwise.

But I'm creating an SOP to give to my editor so she can go through and fix the content tone and personalization of the articles. Based on what I can see, they are looking at the way the articles are written and whether it's by "an enthusiast" or a team. In the case of a team, the requirements for testing are more strict but they seem to do fine using "WE" however the enthusiast sites all sound personal and utilize "I" and other similar pronouns to sound like a person.

I'm gonna just write about 100 articles for this site over the rest of the month and then call it quits for the site.

At a certain content output level, I feel like you could outmaneuver Google and have new sites constantly coming up in rankings. That's around 3-5 articles a day.

With that level of content production, you could build a new site every month or so and reduce the likelihood of being impacted as severely by Google's whims.

If I didn't spend 2-3 months building up my second site I'd be down to scraps at this point. So more sites for the win!

Wondering about these "info site gurus" websites. Are you referring to sites like the wirecutter?

I was referring to YouTubers that push purely content sites.

Why the ad earnings so low compared to affiliate commission? Do you block ads on certain posts?

200$+ with only 700+ visitors! Pretty impressive!

Amazon earnings are for all sites in my portfolio. Ad earnings are for my main site that got impacted during product reviews update and hasn't seen any recovery.

@Bloooop how are your sites doing in the latest core update?

I'm not sure if it's good or bad or if I'm still seeing declines from Product Reviews Update. Either way, I've made no positive gains it seems. And the little I improved earlier might've been reversed.

How many articles on the sites now?

Total portfolio? About 450.

 

[LuckyCharm007]

It’s crazy to see how much Amazon have lowered their comissions. Not even 4 years ago, you would’ve gotten at least 2x that money in commissions for the sales you bring in. The only reasons I’ve sold all of my Amazon sites and got out of the niche.

Such a shame

 

[JinxerCraft]

Amazon earnings are for all sites in my portfolio. Ad earnings are for my main site that got impacted during product reviews update and hasn't seen any recovery.

AFAIK, mediavine accepts sites with low traffic if you have one site approved. Not sure if it's 10k or 25k sessions. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[eral123]

AFAIK, mediavine accepts sites with low traffic if you have one site approved. Not sure if it's 10k or 25k sessions. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I think I read somewhere that they removed that. If that's true then it's good news for me. Can someone who tried this let us know?

 

[ecomsim]

Very impressive Bloooop. Thank you for sharing your journey with us.

 

[Bloooop]

Update

For the next few updates, my thread will be dedicated to all the fallen soldiers of the April Products Reviews Update.

I know lots of you got impacted by the update. So it's quite surprising that no one is talking about it.
It's just like when you die there's a huge crowd talking about you but after a while, everyone moves on leaving the mourners.

I would've loved to be a part of the crowd that moves on but sadly I'm not.

With that said, I believe in resurrections and never giving up especially when you go from almost $10k to $1k. (On a side note, it's funny how long it takes to get to $10k but how quickly you can go from $10k to $1k)

But I think there's good news for people that can stick it out a bit longer. And unlike penalties from core updates, there's a good chance of recovering from this update after a couple of months IF you do the right things.

Recovering from the Update

So over the past 2 months after I wrapped my head around the fact that I got hit since I've never gotten hit before "doing everything right," I started heavily researching the competition.

And also looking at reviews that I think are great. Here's a good example of one that I think is an almost perfect review: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/best-inflatable-kiddie-pool/

I also started listening to youtube product reviews and other video reviews of the products and how the reviewer "sounds" and the type of points they mentioned throughout the review.

I even dug into the deep end of Google SERPs (past page 8), Reddit forums, SEO forums, Facebook groups, and videos. To go even further, I check out all the competing sites that seemingly took a hit from the update in my niche or other niches.

To sum it up, I spent a great deal of time researching how exactly I could recover from this shitty update!

And guess what I found...?

...
..
.

Nothing.

I bet you didn't expect that.

But I already gave the answer away beforehand when I said no one is really talking about it. So by now, you’re probably wondering…

Where am I going with this rant?

Nowhere to be honest. I just want you to realize how to start writing your new product reviews.

Look:

I know it might not be obvious right off the bat but I literally wrote this update in the kind of format that Google is now looking for when ranking their reviews.

To spell it out for you, they want you to:

• Express expert knowledge about products where appropriate?

Now I know a lot of you might automatically assume EAT this, EAT that but y'all EAT gurus can eat s***. Google still can't accurately analyze the EAT of an author and magically give that article a higher ranking.

Even if they can, I don't think this is the reason why my site and maybe yours lost rankings. From what I've seen, they appear to be looking at how you establish your expertise on a given keyword topic.

If you go back to the beginning of this post, that's exactly what I've been doing. Writing about my expert knowledge that I gained through months of research and how I gained it.

I don't remember where I saw it exactly but they say they want “content written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well.”
The key part here is enthusiasts and what better way to be recognized as an enthusiast than by talking about how passionate you are about the subject/keyword.

One thing other thing I noticed that stood out is that the Tone of the article matters.

• Always think about how would an enthusiast review this product. What words would they commonly used when discussing features of a product.

The second point you want to pay attention to is this:

• Identify key decision-making factors for the product’s category and how the product performs in those areas? For example, a car review might determine that fuel economy, safety, and handling are key decision-making factors and rate performance in those areas.

Write your reviews around the key features that you determine are important. Use headings to make it clear what features you are talking about or separate the features by paragraphs.

Next in order of importance is this:

• Show what the product is like physically, or how it is used, with unique content beyond what’s provided by the manufacturer?

If you only have affiliate images that are generic (Using AAWP, or ripped product images) then you need to fix this.

The last point that you shouldn't ignore is this:

• Describe key choices in how a product has been designed and their effect on the users beyond what the manufacturer says?

There are many ways to do this but I'll leave it up to your imagination.

Most of the other guidelines they give, I feel like most of us should have covered. So I won't mention them.

So now you may be saying "Yeah, I already know all this but does it work?"



I started working on that page around the 10th after I noticed it declining. After publishing the change the article tanked, so I figured I shouldn't have touched it after all #10 for a "Best XYZ" keyword is better than #80. So I reverted to the previous version and it came back after a few days.

Later on, I still felt like the changes I made should've brought me back to #3 where I was before the update so I went back to the updated content. And the article tanked so I gave up on it completely and started researching more.

About a week ago, I finally put together a structure, tone, and format to update the reviews and made changes to another article. That article went from #11 to #6 and fluctuated between #5-#7.

So I figured if I tweaked this article that fell to the 80s I might get it back up. So said, so done and within a week it jumped back up to #9.

Now I'm not saying, I've perfected it or that the same method will work on all the pages of the site but at least it shows that recovery is possible.

Some hope is better than no hope. At least now there's a direction to work towards.

From my test results, I want to point out a few things to sum it up:

• The changes that you make may take more than a month and up to 3 months to start showing.
• Not all changes will work the same way depending on many factors.
  • So you have to analyze the SERPs for your keyword and make your article better than most if not all the current pages.
• My site is still bleeding keywords on ahrefs, so I still won't say you DEFINITELY will recover in a short time.
  • My site may just go through a phase where I have to establish trust with Google before they give me back all my keywords.
• Don't try to be an expert in your tone and instead become an enthusiast.
• Don't make your review like a pure affiliate window page.
  • Remove a few affiliate links and add more information.
  • Greatly increase the number of images to be more than your competitors (I don't believe they are checking if a photo you share is the actual image. At most they scan for duplicate images and look at alt tags)

The last piece of advice I want to give in this first post for recovery is that you should start developing a backup plan(website) just in case you can't recover. And don't focus all your attention on recovery for months on end.

Luckily, I had a bit of foresight and started working on my second site. Otherwise, I'd be incredibly down right now.

To everyone that took a hit especially the higher earners at least $4k-$15k/month, I feel your pain. It hurts to make $20/day. Feels like making peanuts but don't quit.

Here's some motivation to keep pushing and diversify your portfolio of sites:






I used to believe in 1 site to success. Now I believe in multiple sites to a point in the $$$$-$$,$$$ range then flip as soon as you get a chance.

Hope you all get something from this. And I'll start mass implementation on the things I found to recover the site until the end of the month. Once that's done, I'll finish up the info content for this site then move on from it.

It’s crazy to see how much Amazon have lowered their comissions. Not even 4 years ago, you would’ve gotten at least 2x that money in commissions for the sales you bring in. The only reasons I’ve sold all of my Amazon sites and got out of the niche.

Such a shame

IKR, it sucks but it is what it is. Amazon was always a starting point for people like myself that always have difficulty getting into programs and the more premier affiliate networks. But since it was so easy everyone hyped it up and it became the new thing and people stopped treating it for what it is 'a stepping stone'. A few more steps "selling at least 2-3 more sites and I'm out too to go after more secure income.

AFAIK, mediavine accepts sites with low traffic if you have one site approved. Not sure if it's 10k or 25k sessions. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not sure either. But I probably won't do another affiliate + ads site for quite a while. At least not until I'm sure it isn't a part of my problems.

Very impressive Bloooop. Thank you for sharing your journey with us.

Sure, glad to share with everyone the struggles of "making it" so everyone can see the ups and downs and the time it takes behind the scene to either put in the work or spend a bunch of money like some others that won't say it.

 

[ranga]

About a week ago, I finally put together a structure, tone, and format to update the reviews and made changes to another article. That article went from #11 to #6 and fluctuated between #5-#7.

I think the article went up in the google core update, so maybe its not something you did or maybe I am wrong. Sometimes I see that a site get down in core or algo update and then pops back in next update without doing anything.

If you can share some key point about the changes you did will help the people who got hit.

One trick you can do is create 3-4 additional content around the main article and interlink and link back to main article to increase topical relevance.

 

[Bloooop]

Update

Started off working a little late today on the site.

Initially, I planned to just go through and recover the pages that are stuck in the red that used to be top 3. But I quickly scrapped that idea to focus on the pages that make the most money.

To do that I focused on the top earning products in amazon then find the articles corresponding to those products. Then I checked the position and the competition in the serps to see what's missing on the article.

Once I did that I realized that the top pages changed completely.

Prior to the update, most of the articles that were ranking had an average word count of around 1740 words. My article had 1765 words and I had the top spot for all variants of the keyword.

Now the top pages average between 3800 words to 4600 words. There are a few outliers with low word count and I still have to run it through surferseo by keywords to see the optimization levels.

So far I rewrote the product reviews for this keyword and ended with an article that is 3,702 words. And it literally took me all day (not sure if the rewards will be worth the time vs writing 3 brand new articles).

Tomorrow I might just do minor tweaks to the tones of the articles instead of a complete rewrite as a test to see which of the tweaks I've put together work best.

Earnings for Yesterday:

I think the article went up in the google core update, so maybe its not something you did or maybe I am wrong. Sometimes I see that a site get down in core or algo update and then pops back in next update without doing anything.

If you can share some key point about the changes you did will help the people who got hit.

One trick you can do is create 3-4 additional content around the main article and interlink and link back to main article to increase topical relevance.

Ehh.. I highly doubt it had anything to do with the core update. From what I can tell, my site might've been negatively affected by the core update. Before the core update, I actually started gaining new keywords and right now I'm bleeding keywords.

To the point that I think the site might just be tanking. If not for the fact that traffic has been staying stable I'd probably give up on it.



Furthermore, if I got a bump due to the update it would've shown on multiple keywords over the days. Of all my articles only that one and another two that I tweaked saw a boost.

But as with anything SEO, there's no way to know for sure other than to keep testing. So I'll keep implementing and see what works and what doesn't.

I also shared exactly what worked for me in yesterday's update. And the supporting article trick is something I've always done. But in this case, that won't help at all since the relevance isn't really what they are looking at. Rather its the way the review is written.

 

[dlyhai]

What backlinks do you do?

 

[Bing]

Bloooop

Man, with these money be better if you gone away from USA to Europe example. 300$/day in US is a good money, but in Europe you will live like a king.

 

[Roger Marquez]

Bloooop

Man, with these money be better if you gone away from USA to Europe example. 300$/day in US is a good money, but in Europe you will live like a king.

And in most South American countries you can even buy your own island if you want