Ultimate Journey to a long-term Amazon Affiliate site

[Vanzant]

Amazon Affiliate Journey | 2K Starting Budget

Hi BHW,

I created this journey thread to keep track of my investments into this site and to keep track of my overall progress. Above all, you guys can enjoy the experience with me.
This won't be a journey thread where I quit halfway through because I am "busy", this is an long-term affiliate site plan, which means an investment of: time, money and brain-power.

These are the main, realistic goals I set for this journey:

- 25$ a day within 6 months
- 100 articles with affiliate links within 6 months
- 200 articles without affiliate links within 6 months

The main task of this journey:

Building an big silo structured affiliate site with a budget of 2k, earnings will be put back into the site completely until the goal has been reached.

The first steps:

Acquiring a lot of tools that will come in handy:

1. - SEMRush
2. - Majestic SEO
3. - Ahrefs
4. - Keywordtool.io
5. - Moz Pro
6. - Longtail Pro
7. - Keyword revealer
8. - Indexification
9. - Register compass
10. - Article Builder
11. - Spin Rewriter
12. - Woorank
13. - Authority Labs
14. - Buzzsumo
15. - Raven Tools
16. - Grammarly
17. - Piktochart
18. - GraphicStock
19. - Videoblocks
20. - Audioblocks
21. - Picmonkey
22. - And some really unnecessary ones that I did not list

Now you're probably thinking: "Woah, that's thousands of dollars a month in tools alone!"
Luckily not, I found a group buy service that allows me to use all of these tools for only 24$ a month, absolutely a great investment! (Not affiliated with such a service but, great tip there!)

Oh, I will keep track of my fixed assets (spendings on necessary things) in the thread.

Right, now I have the tools and I have the necessary SEO knowledge, what's next in my action-plan?

I have read a guide which goes step-by-step on how to find great niches and how to do fantastic keyword research using SEMRush and Longtail Pro.

The guide can be found here. (Apparently can't place links yet, the guide is from the user "splishsplash", go look for it)

I will carefully follow the guide and pick my niche today and start building that big list of keywords.

So, the goal for today (25-12) is:

1. Pick the niche
2. Build big list of keywords

If there's time left, the next goal for today would be grouping those collected keywords.

Goals tomorrow (26-12):

1. If not done today, grouping the keywords so that I got clear columns of keywords to target.
2. Purchase a fresh domain (not going for an authority one, should I?)
3. Install the theme & customize it fully
4. Create silo structure
5. Implement silo structure
6. Get first non-affiliate posts out there using Article Builder (great tool for that!)

Goals in sight for 27-12:

Find a good writer
Order first 5 affiliate articles targeting long-tails and the most important KW's


Linkbuilding Plan:

For a backlink portfolio I'd use 20% real high quality PBN guest posts (not the shitty ones) ordered from BHW services linked towards the homepage and the most important big articles and the other 80% will consist of web 2.0's and press release links. If I'd get a press release on Google News, 100's of small news sites will pick up on it and create diversity in backlinks for me.
The silo structure would allow the link juice to flow throughout the affiliate site.

Anchor diversity will be as follows:

• Most traffic keyword 4%
• Second, third & fourth most traffic keywords 6% (altogether, not each)
  
• "click" & "here" keywords 25%
  
• Brand name 25%
• Naked URL: 40%

That's all I need to start my plan for now, I will update each and every day!

Please advice me on the first stages of my plan, are they good?

Thanks guys!

 

[davids355]

Looks good, subscribed.

Ps don't get information overload - start with less of everything and increase quality.

 

[Vanzant]

Looks good, subscribed.

Ps don't get information overload - start with less of everything and increase quality.

You're right, I am a bit into the Info Paralysis but finally decided to take action.
What do you think about my plan to silo everything from the start as I am looking to create a big site instead of a small niche site?

 

[davids355]

You're right, I am a bit into the Info Paralysis but finally decided to take action.
What do you think about my plan to silo everything from the start as I am looking to create a big site instead of a small niche site?

i would say if you have created successful niche sites in the past then big silo site is good idea. If not then go smaller - budget is not that big for big site so again better to do smaller and have more density.

 

[Vanzant]

i would say if you have created successful niche sites in the past then big silo site is good idea. If not then go smaller - budget is not that big for big site so again better to do smaller and have more density.

Hmmm, you're probably right. Smaller as in choosing a more wide & general niche such as industrial and then choosing 40+ products or small as in choosing 5-10 extremely similar products to create my affiliate site around without silo structure?

 

[jerocarson]

Hi good luck on your journey...

Can you tell me how to access to tools for $24? Please

 

[Vanzant]

Hi good luck on your journey...

Can you tell me how to access to tools for $24? Please

Sure, I'm not sure if I can PM already since I am a new member on here...

I'm going to try PM'ing you, if that doesn't work out I'll shoot you my email address

On further checking I've seen that I can't PM you yet, shoot me your email address in a PM to me and I'll tell you how to get that

 

[davids355]

Hmmm, you're probably right. Smaller as in choosing a more wide & general niche such as industrial and then choosing 40+ products or small as in choosing 5-10 extremely similar products to create my affiliate site around without silo structure?

It's just from my experiences I think I have a similar mindset to you (maybe); I always want to do big things so I have had similar ideas in the past and my site plan gets bigger and bigger but when I have put those sites into action I found that the bigger the site the harder it is, more expensive it is and longer it takes.

Your 2k might be s good budget for a micro niche type of site (or perhaps something a bit bigger), but to build a massive site siloed into different areas might need more like 20k so you risk running out of money way before you start earning and then losing inspiration.

If you go a bit smaller you can make something much higher quality that will hopefully do better quicker.

And yes, second one - choose a small sub-niche and get some closely related products. Then focus on them - lot of high quality and well researched content for each one.

Unless of course you are just using some automation and listing products and very little content - then it would be a numbers game so the more products the better.

 

[Vanzant]

It's just from my experiences I think I have a similar mindset to you (maybe); I always want to do big things so I have had similar ideas in the past and my site plan gets bigger and bigger but when I have put those sites into action I found that the bigger the site the harder it is, more expensive it is and longer it takes.

Your 2k might be s good budget for a micro niche type of site (or perhaps something a bit bigger), but to build a massive site siloed into different areas might need more like 20k so you risk running out of money way before you start earning and then losing inspiration.

If you go a bit smaller you can make something much higher quality that will hopefully do better quicker.

And yes, second one - choose a small sub-niche and get some closely related products. Then focus on them - lot of high quality and well researched content for each one.

Unless of course you are just using some automation and listing products and very little content - then it would be a numbers game so the more products the better.

Great advice! Thanks for that.
I will follow through on it, as this is my first affiliate site it is smart to think of a smaller sub-niche site then to think of a huge silo structured site, you're right.

Should I still silo my site if I target 10 related products?

 

[Vanzant]

QUICK UPDATE:

I got an flash-idea just like in those cartoons (you know, with the lightbulb on top of the head).

The idea was, I know someone that writes very nice articles and that person already helps me here and there with client SEO articles I need sometimes.
I asked her if she can write 5 articles a day for me later on and she agreed to do it. She does it for free as she's basically a partner in my client SEO ventures.

Great! 1 free, quality writer.

 

[KishoSRB]

Seems like a solid plan.Good luck!

 

[Vanzant]

Seems like a solid plan.Good luck!

Thanks

 

[Cray]

Sounds like a good plan. I'll follow along.

 

[Vanzant]

UPDATE:

Made a good choice for the niche that I will target, it's a subniche and it's absolutely amazing from the research I've seen.
Been doing research for the past 3-4 hours on this niche and it seems perfect. Manually checked the SERPs as well.

I exported a huge list of keywords and made it nice and clean to include volume, traffic % of my biggest competitor affiliate site and which URL the competitor affiliate site is pointing every keyword towards. (So I can learn from his site, I can easily outrank him though since he barely has any quality backlinks and he does not have enough content).

So in summary today:

• Chosen my niche
• Made good keyword list

What I am looking to do for the next 5 hours tonight:

• Purchase my domain and have it named related to the sub-niche
• Create a content plan on my whiteboard for the site (Will take a picture when I'm done)
• Choose a theme
• Customize the theme

Statistics:

UV's: 0
Fixed assets (investments): 24$
Earnings: 0$

(bit irrelevant as the site isn't even up yet)

Going well so far!

 

[Vanzant]

Does anyone know where I can purchase a domain name with bitcoins?
If it's not possible I'd have to exchange first

Never mind, Namecheap accepts BTC

 

[Vanzant]

Small Update:

Now got the domain name + hosting with a coupon code on NameCheap (Great discount!)
Cost me about 19$.

So it now becomes:

UV's: 0
Fixed assets (investments): 42$
Earnings: 0$

 

[Vanzant]

Update on the niche:

Upon checking further on the competition I saw that the main competitor on the KW's was hiding links from SEMRush (Or they just didn't get indexed by SEMRush)
Using Ahrefs I saw that the site actually has some more backlinks but most of them are non contextual and no-follow but from high DA sites... It's gonna be a bit more hard to rank than I thought it initially was but hey, I'm up for it.

Now going to set up the site structure.

 

[s y n t a x ™]

Keep up mate.. I'm following..

 

[Vanzant]

Keep up mate.. I'm following..

I will, niche is gonna be a bit harder than initially expected but it is very doable
It's gonna be very nice.

 

[s y n t a x ™]

I will, niche is gonna be a bit harder than initially expected but it is very doable
It's gonna be very nice.

I know you can do it. Just keep the good vibes in.