[Amazon] Getting Serious About IM

Welcome to my journey to a world not dictated by a 9-5 job. I?m 25 years old with a work background in IT. I don?t mind the work, but I don?t like having my fate run by bosses who are out of touch with what it is like to actually be in the field. While this journey goes I am in the process of studying for another certification and looking for a day job, because I?m not making as many juicy IM e-dollarinos as I?d like to at the moment!

I?ve promoted Clickbank products via Facebook in the past with some success, but I didn?t enjoy ?spamming?, and it?s hard to promote products of questionable quality. It dried up after a month and I didn?t care to pursue it further.
I?ve created Amazon affiliate sites for a while with some hilariously bad attempts (at least 3 or 4?) in the past. Only late in 2015 did I start to make some ground with this method and I think I have the ?blueprint? to making more sites that make some money.

I currently have two Amazon sites up at the moment, the second one only being a month old. I?ve already been contacted by a company who wants me to feature their product which is certainly interesting! However, I dicked up the SEO on the first site and it?s kind of in a tailspin at the moment. Learn from me and be patient, kids. Current income from it is $XX a month (Hopefully that continues this month, although traffic is down)

My current goal is to put up an Amazon site each month of relatively small size (20 ? 40 pages). I?ve ordered keywords for a third site and as soon as I get them I will be setting it up.

I?ve also begun using Amazon with Pinterest and it?s very early in the game (a little over 500 followers), but I see promise with it and will be potentially scaling that up soon with multiple accounts. Steadily gaining around 50 followers a day.

That?s the general game plan! I?m doing this journey for some extra motivation and after a little nudging from someone Here?s what you can expect to find here: daily updates each evening except Sunday for what I?m working on, sales (which come a day after with Amazon), expenses, and general thoughts. The goal is that a year from now I will be making enough money to not require a day job. I?ll answer your questions as well!

I know what it takes to make some money, it?s only a matter of putting in the work and not giving up to take it further.

First site made a sale yesterday! Juicy $4. Stay tuned.

Wish you the best of luck. One word of advice though, if you can somehow find a niche that has a large pool of buyers, focus on driving paid and social traffic to it for conversions. Stuff like electronics may seem like crappy pocket change, but it sells if you do honest research on creating viral content for the user. If you then just simply match the content with items related to it from Amazon, you will get sales as you engage viewers. The only other way to ensure money from a site would be to offer deals and discounts, but you are in no position for something like that since you are an affiliate of Amazon.

Best of luck on your new journey OP

Wish you the best of luck on your journey

JokerSEO said:

Best of luck on your new journey OP

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tokkiramen said:

Wish you the best of luck on your journey

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Appreciate it guys

soulcollector said:

Wish you the best of luck. One word of advice though, if you can somehow find a niche that has a large pool of buyers, focus on driving paid and social traffic to it for conversions. Stuff like electronics may seem like crappy pocket change, but it sells if you do honest research on creating viral content for the user. If you then just simply match the content with items related to it from Amazon, you will get sales as you engage viewers. The only other way to ensure money from a site would be to offer deals and discounts, but you are in no position for something like that since you are an affiliate of Amazon.

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Thanks! I agree, social has a ton of power behind it. Especially for Amazon. I've been doing some research on Pinterest in particular and already changed my approach. It's all about quality and appealing to your niche.

Hey, interesting post.

1. What type of keywords do you look for?
2. What is your method for growth on Pinterest?

Good luck with your journey! I'll make sure to follow along!

Best of Luck with your journey. Keep us updated with every new thing you learn through out your journey. Will follow you

Good luck OP! I'm sure you will be able to hit much higher earnings if you keep educating yourself, experimenting and working hard not giving up until you get it!

Glad to see you getting serious about this effort. I'm also engaging in an active effort to develop this type of asset. Good luck, and keep us posted on your journey.

Good luck with your journey

Good luck OP. What method are you using to create piniterest accounts and drive traffic to the website?

I got the similar plan as well, amazon + seo, amazon + pinterest, twitter and instagram, just don't give up mate.

Good luck with your journey! Toughest thing to do is staying focused and being consistent, so best of luck with that. You've already made some bucks with what you're doing, so by now at least you should know you have what it takes to bank.

Divination said:

Hey, interesting post.

1. What type of keywords do you look for?
2. What is your method for growth on Pinterest?

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1. I'm not the world's best at SEO, so anything low competition is fair game. Generally 2000 monthly searches and a little lower is a great spot for me. Specifically buying keywords like "best + kw" "kw + reviews" "top + kw" "cheap + kw", and long tail variations of those.

2. Pinterest is very similar to any social network, but to get the most out of it you need to do everything: follow/unfollow, pin/repin GOOD quality pins, like, and comment. The difference is doing all of these things with quality in mind, not quantity.

Jesse Custer said:

Good luck OP. What method are you using to create piniterest accounts and drive traffic to the website?

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Right now, I?m only running one account that I?ve created manually. If and when I scale up I will do the same, just one account per proxy IP. Traffic is driven by using my site as the source pin / URL in description for some of the pins I make.

First update

Site 1:
Still recovering from the SEO hit it took and traffic is low, but still coming in so that?s good. Also got indexed for a new keyword I?m after so maybe it?s not as bad as I thought. I made some social bookmarks to web 2.0s for it as well.

Site 2:
Last night I decided to test out making some social bookmarks to a page I thought should have been indexed by now. (Already had sent one to it a while back when it was new) and look what I found this morning:


(173 is the position, 390 for the monthly searches)

It got indexed (or moved up significantly)! That was really nice to find. Weird that it didn't come in the top 100 like some of my other keywords. Today I continued making social bookmarks, but to the web 2.0s I made for the site instead. I don?t expect them to do a ton as they don?t have a ton of power, but it should help them get indexed and provide some link juice to the site. Also wrote another web 2.0 for the site.

Pinterest:
Not much to report here, followers are at coming in at a consistent rate of around 50 a day. I do a little manual work to keep my boards clean, but I bot the tedious parts.

Earnings:
No sales yesterday, but my second site got some clicks which is a good sign.

SEO related work doesn't make for the most exciting content, but I'll keep posting it to keep myself accountable here I?m itching to receive the keywords for my third site so I can get started on it! When Pinterest starts generating more clicks I will probably start making another site for it as well in the near future.

Not going to quote everyone except questions, but I really appreciate you guys supporting me on this journey.

Update time!

Site 1:

Optimized an old article that I changed the keyword on with about 100 extra words and changed the formatting on to not look so...crap. It's already ranking for the keyword, sent a few blog comments to it.



This still hurts to look at. Traffic is still doing poorly because my highest keywords were the ones that took the hit, but is recovering. Going to keep SEO efforts minimal (similar to site 2), and work on web 2.0s.

Site 2:

Got some good news, the press release and distribution (Only cost $30, great service) was completed today so that should be a nice bump for SEO. I also created several profiles on high PR sites, submitted a PDF of an article I want to boost to high PR sites as well. Also threw in some blog comments, I love them for link diversity and they actually help a little bit.

Wrote another 700 word product review. I've gotten lazy about content creation because it's somewhat 'complete', but this site has a ton of room for expansion so there's no excuse to not target more keywords.

...also, just heard back from that company! They're going to send me a physical product to review which is awesome, I'll be able to write a huge article as well as hopefully get a backlink from their company website.

Two keywords totally disappeared out of my SERP tracker, so the Google dance is in full effect. That's always a good sign.

Pinterest:

Same as usual. I might not even mention it as there's little fluctuation in what happens with it. I guess there could be worse things though, I won't complain about a steady ~50 followers a day. Traffic to my site is increasing ever so slightly, but not enough to influence the CTR.

Earnings:

$0 - I don't expect these to change for a little while (maybe a couple of weeks!) since site 1 was the established money maker and it took a significant hit. A couple of clicks from site 2 similar to yesterday though, it has signs of life!

Didja miss me? Update time!

Site 1:

• Sent social bookmarks and blog comments to web 2.0s
• E-mailed a company with products I'd like to review, they have their own affiliate program and the competition for their KWs is low.
• Basic on-page SEO optimization I should have done a long time ago (h1 headers)

Site 2:

• Uploaded PDF to another site
• Wrote 500 word product review
• Blog comments to web 2.0s
• Similar on-page SEO as site 1

Finally received my keywords ($25) for site 3, but I have mixed feelings about them. The KW is good, but there are a couple of Amazon sites that are a little more broad ranking in the top 10 as well. I'm thinking I will purchase the domain and take a different approach from my other sites which have multiple categories, and really focus on this KW which will only be one product category. Going to write a hell of a pillar article (At least 2000 words) and hope it ranks!

Earnings:

~$2! Site 2 made two sales off of three clicks which is pretty awesome. I don't care if they're small items, it's cash flow in the right direction!

Yesterday's stats were kind of a tap on the nuts, traffic was down across ALL of my sites and I even lost Pinterest followers somehow - apparently that's possible. Disappointing to say the least. However, SERPs are showing small positive movement.

I hammered out my 2000 word pillar article for site 3 last night (took FOREVER), and spent today putting the site together. I am taking a slightly different approach to Amazon with this KW, so I figured I'd take a shot at it and see what happens. That's how I've learned what works, and if it bombs I'll know what doesn't! I also neglected to mention before that the KW is 1300 monthly searches with low competition, so it will be fun to see where I can rank it. Here's a log of what I did:

• Registered EMD (I know it's not the golden ticket it used to be years ago, but I like the KW intent)
• Set up Wordpress (plugins, settings) with a theme I bought for $40 - Streamlined a lot of my process and gets rid of 1-2 plugins I was using before.
• Got in touch with a writer I worked with on my last project, have a product review on the way.
• Designed my logo - didn't take long and looks great.
• Wrote an 800 word product review.

I estimate that I will have this site mainly content "complete" (15 pages) in a week or less. I'll evaluate how much more I can fit on it after that, because more content never hurts.

Earnings:

$0 - couple of clicks. My conversion ratio on the clicks is sitting at 15% - not bad.

What a day. I'm questioning if I'm totally crazy after what I did for the first part of it, which was move site 1 to a new domain name. (Without redirecting the old one) Here's why I did it:

• Google SERPS stagnant or getting worse. (For easy KWs)
• Backlink profile was pretty bad. I hesitate to say impossible to fix, but definitely not worth the trouble. If you can INSTANTLY see a big issue with multiple referring domains (PBN), I guarantee you that an algorithm can or already has.
• If it's going to take time to recover, might as well put start it fresh and do it that way.

Lesson to be learned here: Don't buy PBN posts on public sites you don't control. Period. I was impatient and foolish to think it would be okay, and the momentary SERP boosts weren't worth it.

The great thing is the domain KW is 4x better (from a 300 KW to a 1300 KW), and I put a new theme on it that will make it look much better once I put the details on it.

Things are also progressing very well on my third site. I'm up to 5 product reviews already and the site looks great. Between my writer and I it is no issue to pump out content at a fast pace. I'm still not sure what to expect in terms of how much additional content I'll be able to fit on it, but I consider it around 50% done now. (content wise)

No earnings to report, and since I totally revamped site 1 I don't expect that to change for a few weeks at least! I'm hoping I made the right decision with it and will see it come back up in the future.

PEACE

Good luck on your journey.

What type of WordPress theme do you use?