Amazon affiliate journey - Goal = £20 / day

[BallsLikePlanets]

Update

Updates are probably gonna be slow for a while like they have been. Been having some issues that i'm dealing with but i'm still continuing with this and IM in general.

I've written some more articles targetting keywords with around 300 SPM. I've also built some more blogs out with backlinks pointing at my site. Everything seems to be stuck where it is which is pretty disheartening.

Maybe the competition is harder than it seems for some reason, or maybe my site is being penalised. So I did a few things:

- I looked through my site for duplicate content and there was some obvious things that needed removing. For example the sidebar: It had 3 'best of' links with the homepage keyword written on each which was on almost every page. Guessing that wasn't good so I took the KW out and had Google re-crawl my site a few days ago.

- Went through the articles and removed all the conflicting keywords I could. Many of the keywords are almost the same but with 1 word difference so that's unavoidable. I also took the KW density of each page to under 1%.

- I added each KW to the H2 title tags instead of just the product name for more relevancy.

- Re-wrote a lot of the content to give it higher flesch reading ease score.

- Added some more words to the homepage.

Something weird:

Google isn't displaying the right page for the keyword i'm optimizing the homepage for (the one in the domain). When i search for it, a whole different page is showing that isn't optimized for the keyword at all. Wondering if this could indicate a panda penalty.

Also not sure if web 2.0s are doing much good so I might have to change my linking strategy.

 

[howardmarks]

This is a really well written journey and you seem to have a good plan for the direction you want your site to go in.
The only issue I see is your motivation which I think will pick up when you see proper income being generated.
Definitely one journey I'll be following.
Are you using WordPress and plugins to geo target customers/visitors?

 

[BallsLikePlanets]

This is a really well written journey and you seem to have a good plan for the direction you want your site to go in.
The only issue I see is your motivation which I think will pick up when you see proper income being generated.
Definitely one journey I'll be following.
Are you using WordPress and plugins to geo target customers/visitors?

Thanks man. Yeah unfortunately each winter I struggle with with some pretty intense fatigue and periods of depression. I try to push on with stuff but it's inevitable that things slow down for me overall.

I'll definitely not be giving up though and will 100% reach my goal here before moving on to a bigger one next.

Nah I'm not doing any geo targetting stuff, but my main traffic on google analytics shows as (not set) and United states so that seems to be all good.

 

[BallsLikePlanets]

Update

I found phpbuilt's on-page SEO guide which is amazing information. Definitely check it out here if you haven't already. http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...ization-guide-2015-remove-penalties-rank.html

So here's what I was doing wrong:
I was mostly only looking at the KW density of the main 4 word KW in the articles alone, ignoring the 2 and 3 word percentages and also not taking into consideration the overall KW density of the whole page (outside of the article too).

Some things I wasn't paying attention to for example:
- The wordpress template contains a heading above the H1 that contains the exact KW of each page.
- The slogan at the top left of the page contained a main KW and was on every single page.
- The drop down of categories contained exact match keywords of all the categories on every single page

Basically the on page SEO was all over the place.

Using this tool to analyse the overall page KW densities: http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/ I had a partial KW that showed up 23 times in total for the front page with a 400 word article! Jesus feckin christ.

What i've done to rectify this:
- I changed the drop down menu labels so they're no longer KWs
- I changed the slogan so it isn't a keyword anymore
- Removed some KWs from the sidebars
- I no-indexed my categories instead of trying to rank them, in order to lessen duplicate content and exact KWs
- I've taken out loads of 2 word, 3 word, and 4 word keywords across the articles to lessen the overall percentages of each page
- Removed alt tags from sidebar images
- Removed excessive KWs in article image alt tags and replaced them with page-relevant words

I did this last night, and already my front page KW issue that I had is resolved. Hopefully this will have a good influence on all of my rankings in the next few days.

 

[BallsLikePlanets]

Update

- Rankings have bumped up a few places since I sorted out my kw %

- Noticed the image filenames were exact KWs and some are on multiple different pages where the keywords shouldn't be, so I renamed and replaced them.

- I was making the mistake of targetting just one keyword per article which led to cannibalisation. I had 4 articles targetting keywords that are synonyms of each other. I've now merged them into 2 articles targetting 2 keywords each, which seems to be better. I found 2 different keywords and used the past 2 articles to target them instead.

- Added a few hundred words to the homepage to buff it up a bit.

I'm now done for the low volume KWs I can target for this niche. I've decided to be a bit more aggressive with links and i've outsourced a few. All that's left now is the link building process to decide how well my site's gonna rank.

Out of curiosity I searched for the first site I created. It's top 5 on bing and in the first 6 pages on Google for two keywords, all without ANY proper content. So i'll be writing some articles on this site while my first one is getting links built to it.

 

[howardmarks]

Hey man good to see you updating this.
Not sure if you considered it but somebody posted a good way whereby using voice recognition you can quickly bang out content.
Here is the link
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/member-downloads/812112-forget-dragon-naturally-speaking-try-google-voice-typing-its-very-smooth.html
It's good for those days when you couldn't be arsed to type.

 

[oblivion19]

Hey,

Great journey. I just wanted to chime in my 2 cents. Not that I'm accomplished or anything. But, I too am trying to venture in to the amazon side of things after getting disappointed with adsense.

Keyword research
You can't really believe the keyword data very much. I have had some bad luck with this. I have had quite a few keywords(approx:1000 US search) which ranked in first page of google but never really got any significant traffic whereas I have a couple of keywords that are around 800 searches and are getting me 50 to 100 hits to my site daily and they are ranking in top 5.

You can sort of tell which keyword is a dud or a gold nugget when it hits the top 10. A good one will start sending a number of hits when its ranking 8 to 15 and a bad one will not be sending much.

So, how low do you go? This was the most off putting thing for me. I think I've got 3 good ones out of almost 15-20 keywords. That really discouraged me.

Buying keywords

I haven't yet gone for full out buying keywords like review, cheap, discount, best etc. I initially started my site as an adsense based one. The sort of keywords that worked for me were long tail problem solving ones:

For eg: If your niche is parenting, and with a keyword like "should I give my baby X" I write an article and say No, instead give your baby Y and link it to amazon. Also, If you can give X to the baby, then my article takes the shape of "Yes, you can give your baby X, but here are some better alternatives" This sort of strategy is getting me a conversion rate of around 7%. However, my recommended products are in the range of $10 tp 30. So, I am not really making much. But, it's a start I want to build on.

Keyword competitiveness

Apart from manually checking it out, I also check with the moz tools keyword difficulty estimate and tend to stay under keyword competiveness of 35. What are you going for?

Content

A good idea is to add some general articles related to your content. Google will not like all review articles with excessive external links. Ideally, half of the articles should be general. Not only does it earn you brownie points with google, they might end up pulling in some traffic on their own. You could even turn it in to a half adsense, half amazon sort of site with half articles targetted towards keywords that are adsense based and the rest amazon. So, you have multiple streams of income.

Link Building

What kind of budget you got for link building?
A good idea would be to build links first to the homepage and category pages for a couple of months. The articles start ranking on their own and your domain authority increases. Then, you can start link building to your inner pages. It is better to be safe than sorry in this aspect coz once you have been penalized, it is difficult to get back on track.

Hopefully, some of this helped.

 

[BallsLikePlanets]

Hey man good to see you updating this.
Not sure if you considered it but somebody posted a good way whereby using voice recognition you can quickly bang out content.
Here is the link
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...-try-google-voice-typing-its-very-smooth.html
It's good for those days when you couldn't be arsed to type.

Thanks man. I've been using dragon naturally speaking sometimes and it's good shit. Good to mix things up a bit instead of typing yeah. I'll give this a try too.

Hey,

Great journey. I just wanted to chime in my 2 cents. Not that I'm accomplished or anything. But, I too am trying to venture in to the amazon side of things after getting disappointed with adsense.

Keyword research
You can't really believe the keyword data very much. I have had some bad luck with this. I have had quite a few keywords(approx:1000 US search) which ranked in first page of google but never really got any significant traffic whereas I have a couple of keywords that are around 800 searches and are getting me 50 to 100 hits to my site daily and they are ranking in top 5.

You can sort of tell which keyword is a dud or a gold nugget when it hits the top 10. A good one will start sending a number of hits when its ranking 8 to 15 and a bad one will not be sending much.

So, how low do you go? This was the most off putting thing for me. I think I've got 3 good ones out of almost 15-20 keywords. That really discouraged me.

Keyword competitiveness

Apart from manually checking it out, I also check with the moz tools keyword difficulty estimate and tend to stay under keyword competiveness of 35. What are you going for?

Content

A good idea is to add some general articles related to your content. Google will not like all review articles with excessive external links. Ideally, half of the articles should be general. Not only does it earn you brownie points with google, they might end up pulling in some traffic on their own. You could even turn it in to a half adsense, half amazon sort of site with half articles targetted towards keywords that are adsense based and the rest amazon. So, you have multiple streams of income.


Hopefully, some of this helped.

Cheers!

About the keywords not feeding in traffic from the first page. Wouldn't this be normal still? How often do you look past the top 5 search results when actually searching for something? For me it's hardly ever. In my eyes ranking no. 9 is basically as good as ranking no. 30 or whatever if the other sites on page 1 are all relevant, so I personally wouldn't be discouraged until I got them ranking top 5.

My KWs range typically from 90 - 500 SPM. But I have a few 500 - 1000 ones too, although these aren't ranking well yet.

Thanks for the Moz competitiveness tool man. Looks handy, I'll have a look at this.

I have one nearly 1000 word article and another nearly 1000 words on the homepage which aren't review articles but the rest are. Sounds like a good idea adding a few filler articles, I'll see if there's anything else I can come up with to fill it out a bit more. Thanks for the post.

 

[oblivion19]

Just a note on the moz competiveness tool. It is a paid one. They have a free one month trial though which you can utilize..
Regarding the traffic on front page. The keywords that I got in top 3 that are getting me good traffic sent me some traffic when in top 10. They were sending in like 10-20 hits per day when they were ranking 10-15. Thats when I knew that these keywords would get good traffic when in top 3.

Also, your theory isnt too bad either. Maybe I'll keep pushing them and see what I get. cheers.

 

[BallsLikePlanets]

Update


- Finally making sales again. Sold a $200 item and a lesser related item.

- Second site is all properly set up and i've been writing longer articles for it. Much much faster and smoother this time round because of overcoming issues for the previous site.

With these two up and running i'll just be building links after a few more articles and will be waiting to see what happens. In the meantime i'll be moving onto another method and hopefully these two sites will be enough to reach my initial goal.

I'll now update whenever I make a sale and hopefully you'll be able to see it improve with time.

 

[FIREBOSS]

Hi mate

May i please know which theme/themes are u using?
I stuck on theme now

Thanks

 

[BallsLikePlanets]

Hi mate

May i please know which theme/themes are u using?
I stuck on theme now

Thanks

Hi, just search for magazine on wordpress under themes, any of them should be good.

 

[BallsLikePlanets]

UPDATE

- Rankings improving, hit page 1 and page 2 for some KWS.
- Clicks improving for both sites FINALLY. Actually getting a half-decent amount now and just made another sale for $5. Conversions should start increasing too from what i've read in the huge amazon thread around this time last year.

Link: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...-amazon-affiliates-journey-stable-income.html


Now that i'm targetting a low competition keyword for CPA I can see that many of the keywords here are actually medium comp. Not the best for my first site, but i've learned a fuck load anyway.

Quick protip: Double check all of your links are actually pointed towards a page and are not broken. Two of my pages had broken links and when I fixed them they both went up a page inthe SERPS instantly.