Amazon Affiliate Journey from the scratch

Hello! This is my very first post on this forum even though i've been reading around for some months. I've been working for a website design / SEO agency for 6 years but I felt a bit tired off it, so I decided to look into new job that lets me be a bit more free to work on my projects, and now Im working as Community Manager for a 100+ employees company, which seems to be way less stressful.

Now that I have more time to spend, I want to start working on my own projects rather than other person's project, so I decided to pick something "quick" that can start working on the background while I think on bigger projects.

I've picked up a very small niche pet related that has only up to 3.000 searches (data from Keyword Planner) spread in 13 different categories/keywords. These keywords are very straight so their conversion rate will probably be high. How ever, i've also researched for some related keywords that are not as high-conversion but that I will definately use to create fresh content (blog articles). The product average price is around 40$.

I will be starting with a brand new domain, a home page that shows quick access to directories and 13 different URLs, one for each category. I will work on every aspect of the site: SEO, content creation, backlinks.. so all I spent on this is 40$ on domain registration + 1 year hosting.

The website will not be a review + product website, instead it will look like a simple ecommerce with product list that will externally link to Amazon products. The structure for categories will be pretty much the following:

> H1 with main category keyword
> 15-20 Products (with IMG, product title on H3, price, buy button and prime tag if the product has it)
> Content to rank for the main keyword, based on 1.000 words article

About the competence:

Ecommerce 1: A non-nice ecommerce that also has some content for my niche, their website is pretty new and they are willing to rank for a lot of keywords, but their optimization is poor.

Another Amazon Affiliate site: I was able to find another amazon affiliate site that has found the same niche, but their SEO and overall optimization is very low, so that site wont be any hard to outrank. They are not even ranking for some of the better keywords, so I guess its just made by a lazy webmaster.

Amazon: Of course, Amazon is also ranking for some of the terms, we will see how it goes.

My thoughts: I think 3.000 searches/month should be enough to make some profit, since the keywords are very straight forward and they will have high conversion rate, but even if im wrong i think its worth it since the competence is very low, so it wont take me more than 7 days to complete the content. After that, I will just manually generate backlinks and write articles every 7-10 days. I think starting with a small project will be good, but i'm already looking at bigger things that I'll definately show and track on the forum.


Day 2)

I registered the domain, which contains the main keyword, and built up the website on it on a very quick load / responsive theme that is showing 80 score for mobile and 99 score for desktop on Page Speed Insights with no use of cache or optimization plugins. It looks hell fast.

I created 11 out of 13 urls and inserted 100 products on them, i've also wrote 1.000-1.300 words description for 4 of those urls, the rest of them are simply naked with products. Keyword density is going between 2% and 4%.

I've sent sitemap to Google so the urls start being indexed and hopefully ranking soon, im pretty sure 300 words would be more than enough for some of the keywords but anyway i'll go beyond that and dont go under 1.000 words for each category.

I was also able to find a broken external link on the best autorithy website for my niche that I'm pretty sure will do some work for me. I've already registered that domain and 301'ed towards my website.

The first problem I faced is that I did read that Amazon Affiliate API is being a bit harder for lowest conversion sites, and they are cancelling their API if there's not enough sales on the website. I dont want to risk my site to stop working if somehow Amazon decides to make my API stop working, so I just designed a good-looking box with HTML/CSS to manually embed my products. If the affiliate site works as good as I'd like, and I get certainly sure that my API will forever work, I will swap these product resumes for AAWP ones.

Within the next days I will complete the content for the rest of URLs so they are not nude with only products, and then I will start backlinking and tracking positions on main keywords.

I will keep this updated!

Good luck in your journey!

Good luck with your journey! Am at the same frequency with two Amazon Affiliate websites.

Keep us posted on your ups and downs, please! The pet niche and as affiliates too. Really interesting

Thank you guys! Nothing exciting happened within this two days but anyways i'll keep this updated.

Day 4 (2 days after registering new domain and submitting sitemap)

Google has already indexed my homepage with the custom meta title / descriptions that I did set up, but for now none of the other URLs have been indexed, only homepage. Of course it is still not ranking for any keyword.

I discovered that downloading Amazon Product images and uploading them again on the affiliate site is breaking the rules, and thats what I did for more than 100 products, so now I have to change them all which is not a problem at all, but I was using a lot of semantic variants for keywords on image file names.

Good luck bro, your plan seems very clean. Im pretty sure you will succeed!

Day 5) We got 8 out of 16 urls indexed. We're not ranking for any keyword (literally not showing on any query)

Day 6) 16 out of 16 urls are indexed. We're still not ranking for any keyword.

Day 7) We still are not raking for any keyword. Now starting to generate new content related in blog. 2 new 800 word entrys are now live, and we'll keep this trend for every week. None of the blog content is going to be original, i'm currently grabbing high quality content from different languages and manually translating it (not spinning or any other kind of technique).

I will write again when we start ranking for our very first keyword, so we can keep on track how long google takes to let new domains rank.

Thanks everyone!

Best of luck for this journey

Day 9) We are now starting to rank for keywords. Most of the pages are showing up for their main keyword somewhere between positions 50-90, they are low competition keywords so I think we got good chances here. Im gonna start working on some medium strenght backlinks and as the ranks start getting closer to positions 30, i'll go with better backlinks. I'll keep this updated!

well planned journey. best of luck .

Day 13) We are ranking somewhere between positions 30-50 now for some keywords, and 50-80 for the main ones.

On the very first stage of the website, I created an URL with a very longtail keyword that has literally 0 competition, just in order to see if Google would let me rank for that even if my domain was new. Day 10 and 11 i was #1 for that keyword, then after that Google pushed me down to #15 and stabilized me there -remind that there is literally no competition at all for that keyword, no titles/urls or content at all that matches it other than mine-. To me, that proves the fact that Google does not want new domains to rank high on their very early ages, and if that is happening on the weird keyword, it is happening on all other keywords.

Now we are chilling with 1 scheduled 1000words post each week for the next 2 months that I wrote myself, i've also manually built the first 10 backlinks and as soon they start get indexed, i'll pay for some guest posting and get good content backlinks.

Since this wheel is already spinning, i'm starting to work on a much bigger site -actually just studying keywords and viability-, if it finally goes on i'll surely start a new journey for it.

I'll keep this updated!

Since ranks look stable, and we are here to test stuff, I just 301 redirect a recently expired domain with some good backlinks. This expired domain has nothing to do with my niche, but still, lets find out how it impacts on the website.

The expired domain has 50 referring domains, most of them over +50 DR (ahrefs), this includes a lot of high autorithy websites with content links, some .edu and also a .gov follow link.

I will update with any up or down trends on the rankings after this 301

Interested to see what this unrelated 301 does so I'm following. Good luck OP, and thanks for the detailed frequently updates

Good going... Do you have any backlinks yet?

itsmytime said:

Good going... Do you have any backlinks yet?

Click to expand...

Yes, I did build 11 backlinks on 70-90 DR (ahrefs) domains, such as jssor, gumroad, mojomarketplace and a few more. All those can be found on this forum. None of those has been indexed though. Will attempt to force their indexation in a couple of weeks if nothing is going on.

We are now ranking on position 20 for our best keyword, and dancing between 30-40 for our second best keyword. We definitely climbed around 15-20 positions for all the site keywords, 14 days after the 301 redirection happened. No more backlinks have been built, and on-site content didnt change at all except for some posts being published.

This project (including domain) is now 23 days old. Untill now, I did invest around 20 hours of work and 20$ (two domains registration).

This niche is very underworked, my main competitor (the only one i'd say) has a number on its brand and domain, lets say "motorbikes70", since we both have the keyword (motorbikes, as an example) on our domain, I did change some text and headings on my homepage to make it look like "70 best products for your motorbike". This example is not as good as the real one, but I'm pretty sure I will rank second for his brand name with some custom anchor text on a few external links, and hopefully steal some traffic from his loyal users.