Amazon Niche Site Journey

Welcome to my Amazon Niche Site Journey!

After years of reading in this forum, I now want to take some action. Some background information: I work as a (white hat) SEO consultant and I'm doing web development, both for more than 15 years now. So I'm pretty experienced, especially in analyzing sites and giving advice to other people. But I'm really bad in building my own sites, I often lacked the persistence it takes ? but not any longer. I'm now dedicated to succeed.

For my first journey I wanted a simple project with a goal that's not too ambitious. So I take a really old domain that I used for several (white hat) SEO tests all the years. This domain dictates the niche and here's a problem: It's a sub-niche within the electronic niche, so competition should be hard.

The good thing is though, that domain is really old. It's from 2000. As it expired 2004 I snapped it and four years later I put some relevant content on it. Did I tell you, that sometimes persistence is not my biggest strength? It's a wordpress site with 15 posts and pages, but the content in these articles is not tailored to sell. It has some rather good informations in it, which gives me some links for free. As we are speaking of links: I'm really bad at building links. Being a SEO consultant makes this more difficult, because I should stay away from all grey hat techniques; I don't want any client to find shady links I built ...

Some statistics:
opensiteexplorer: DA 20, Root Domains 9
openlinkprofiler: Unique Active Backlinks 17
Daily Visits: 50 (75% of my visitors come to two articles, that are ranking quite well, but are purely informational)
Amazon: 23 Clicks in 2015
Adsense: 52 Clicks in 2015, earning me 12,85?
(there's really no commercial content on it so far)

You see, I'm not starting from scratch. My plan is now as follows:

• Find relevant commercial long tail keywords
• Remove those Adsense ads
• Choose those keywords that are (hopefully) easy to rank
• Write great content (1000+ words) for those keywords
• Whenever I come some interesting informational content, post it as some filler article

What are my goals with this site?

• I want to prove myself, that I'm still able to build and not only to consult
• Improve my keyword research
• Learn what effect great content really has
• I'd be happy to get to 100?/month within six months

This site is obviously more a learning project than a get-rich-quick site for me. If I succeed, I'll start some more serious sites.

[I won't update this thread daily, but expect at least one post per week.]

Good luck buddy. Good quality cannot be rushed. Take your time, build a solid residual income site and then scale up.

Cheers!

Today I reorganized the site and, more important, published my first 1000+ words article for a very commercial long tail keyword. The keyword got 390 monthly local searches and allintitle shows 2390 results. On my keyword priority list, this keyword is way down and I wouldn't have targeted it, but a non-optimized page already ranks for that phrase on page 7. So I hope, that I can slowly enter page 1 with my new and extensive content.

good luck on that bro keep updating us!!

Just some quick notes:
Google already indexed my new article and rankings for it climbed from 68 to 49. Not much, but it's a start.
I lost two days of Google Analytics data, because I made a mistake while updating my Analytics tracking code. :-/
All Adsense ads have been removed.

Next steps:
Adding more relevant content.

Today I posted another 500+ post for a highly commercial LTK with just 170 local searches and 55 allintitle results. Some of these results are on well established blogs within my niche, so ranking will be harder than the numbers would suggest. I'm curious to see where it'll rank. As I said, this is mainly a learning project. I want to get some better understanding what competition would be easy to outrank and how to improve my keyword research process.

Other rankings are very slowly improving.

Due to some heavy work, I didn't publish new articles on my niche site. The article mentioned in the last post ranks on page 2. Obviously, Google sees my site as a valid source for information about the niche, but competition is too strong to enter page 1 immediately.

The site is slowly moving forward. It averages about less than one Amazon click per day, but the first two orders have been made now. Links are set continuously and completely unsolicited. Ranking on #2 for an important informational query really attracts a lot of links. That query has a monthly local search volume of 720. And according to the nature of the site, some of the links are really of high quality. Even a .edu link has been set some days ago.

I hope to complete two client projects by next week to have more spare time for this journey site. I have to publish a lot more content on it.

I'm still in the learnig proces and I was wandering if you have some books or courses to recommend? If you have a time to spare

Good luck, 100?/month is reasonable you can do easily better, is SEO your only way to get traffic?

Helln000:

I have to admit I never read a book about SEO or IM. I started SEO so long ago, the only sources then were forums like this one, doing experiments and observing what others do. Having now a plethora of blogs, books and forum discussions I understand you're overwhelmed by a lot of information, often contradicting each other. You just have to follow some threads here, where experienced SEOs can't agree on how important links are in contrast to e.g. user behavior or content quality. I know if I'd start today with SEO I'd be completely overwhelmed by all the diverging information.

So, some concrete advice:

• Read some of the many online SEO tutorials out there. Learn what they have in common and you get some basic understanding.
• Search in Google for some typical queries. Not the big ones like "car", but something really more specific like "blue diesel car". Look for results whose domain name is identical to the query (so called EMD ? exact match domains). These sites should be rather small, no more than 10 or 20 pages. Examine what they are doing, how they structure the site, how long the articles are, how they designed the site and so on. Do this for several sites and you get some good idea what works and what not.
• Get a free account for one of the link analysis tools (e.g. Moz or Majestic) and analyze the backlinks for the sites you found before. Learn how many links they have and how they got them.
• Build your own sites according to what you have learned so far and learn even more by doing.

JasonGraham said:

Good luck, 100?/month is reasonable you can do easily better, is SEO your only way to get traffic?

Click to expand...

This is a learning project for me. Having done so much consulting, my doing skills have been really poor lately. If I get to 100?/month with this site I know how to scale things up and I'll do it. So, yes, SEO is my only way to get traffic so far. I try to read and learn a lot about other traffic sources especially Facebook ads, Youtube videos, Instagram and Pinterest, but I think its best for me to concentrate on SEO first.

SEO is very good for long term, but it could take some time before you see results (except if you find long-tail keyword with no competition or very low)
Social medias can get you immediate traffic for free, of course you have to keep posting to get visitors

*** Updates ****

My article addressing the 390 monthly local searches commercial KW climbed from about 50 to 34. Without having time to publish new content, the rankings are improving extremely slow. My other commercial post (170 local searches) entered page 1 this week and now ranks on #6.

I slowly get more Amazon clicks, but it's still too less to make money.

Bottleneck for the project are definitely my client projects, that are progressing slower than expected. And there's another project eating my time, but that's a story for another journey.

Looks like you are doing ok so far - nice to see you have something on page #1 as well.
Are you building backlinks to your posts or not? I didnt notice any mention of your strategy....

Also have you done any research on how much your keywords are worth in total if you get them ranked? Might be worth doing that because then you would have a better idea of how best to invest your time - I see you are tied up with other projects but it might be the case that its worth sacrificing some of that other stuff to focus on this.

davids355 said:

Looks like you are doing ok so far - nice to see you have something on page #1 as well.
Are you building backlinks to your posts or not? I didnt notice any mention of your strategy....

Click to expand...

No, I don't build backlinks to the commercial posts. I've got some informational posts that are getting backlinks on its own, without doing active link building. I hate active link building and my strategy is that the unsolicited backlinks for the informational posts are helping to improve the power of the site and thus improve the rankings of all of the posts, even the commercial ones.

davids355 said:

Also have you done any research on how much your keywords are worth in total if you get them ranked? Might be worth doing that because then you would have a better idea of how best to invest your time - I see you are tied up with other projects but it might be the case that its worth sacrificing some of that other stuff to focus on this.

Click to expand...

I haven't done this for two reasons. First of all, I chose that niche because I had that domain with this little project on it. And second, it's a learning project. I want to understand what I can achieve with the existing link power of that domain. If I earn money from it, it'll be even better, but that's not the main focus.

Time is indeed my main bottleneck, but I can't stop my client work at the moment for financial reasons. So I want to learn how to rank websites on domains that already got some link power. If I'm confident enough that I'll achieve this, I will scale this. I'm good in finding expired domains and I'm good in white hat seo. I have just to learn to combine these capabilities to make money.

Good luck on your journey mate You are very experienced and I don't think you'd have a problem with making the site earning $100/day, let alone $100/month Just keep making some time to work on this project and you'll earn more than you've imagined

Nice Target, I want to follow your tips and trick, so please share it


Thanks
IM