blackwar85 amazon journey

So pretty much this is gonna be my first serious internet marketing journey ever. I did some bingads PPC some years ago, but it was more for entertainment because I was bored at summer break. Made 10 bucks thanks to bingads voucher. I have decided to really but my mind and effort in to internet marketing this time. There is no way i am going to be working 9-5 for the rest of my life after I finish school.

Why amazon?

First idea was to start usual blog about fitness. Before IM came to my life weightlifting was all that i was interested, now it is little bit more at the background. Plan was good at first , but quickly i realized that there are thousands of fitness blogs/websites in internet and competing with them would not be smart choice for me.
Amazon grabbed my attention when i saw huge Danny`s threads about it. I read them all and got some understanding how amazon affiliate works. I did some quick research about it and saw that many amazon affiliate webpages that ranked first in SERP were not impossible to beat.
Niche that i chose is my hobby too ( not related with fitness).

What I have done so far?

• Bought PMD, was created about month ago.
• Installed magazine theme+plugins on it.
• I wrote about 10 product reviews + 7 articles.
• Twitter, fb, google+
• Some basic link building: article directories, few web page directories, niche forum posts, email outreach, blog comments.

I have been very careful with link building. Danny said in his thread that I should wait about 2-3 months before some serious link building. Maybe creating web 2.0 and more aggressive approach in general. Good news is that i have already made a two sales, one was the product I reviewed and second was some random memory card. Made 2 bucks from them

What are my future plans?

I am going to get this single website monthly revenue to at least 100$ , then I would start making other amazon niche sites. I am in favor of Danny`s approach to make multiple websites not one bigger authority site. More long term goal is to get decent income something like 2-3 thousand a month. So I could slowly start my own life because I am going to get 18 in this year. After i make decent monthly income with amazon I am probably going to start some kind of PPC or CPA project. But that is far away, at the moment my only focus is amazon.

I hope that this post has given you some overview of my doings. I am not planning to make that long posts like this anymore. I do not know yet am I going to update this thread as often as possible or only list important things from time to time. We`ll see.

Great start bro. I wish you good luck with it.

I did not put as money hours into work as usual, but that was because it was school day. I normally average about 3-5 hours on schooldays and on free days whole day when I do not have gym session planned. There really is not much to do with my amazon site, i do not want to start aggressive link building before 2-3 months. I try to be active in various social media channels but this is not the most important part for me because generally they are not interested in buying the products.
I add content 1 time per week. If i would add often then it fill probably defeat the purpose of niche site. I already have about 17 articles and plan to add 1 in week for next 2-3 months until steady traffic comes. When I do not work with my amazon site i generally read about SEO/IM blogs or just guides about it. Plus Napoleon Hill book Laws of Success and each and everyday before going to sleep i listen to one podcast.

Today I added rollover effect to my amazon buttons. It is so funny how simple it looks here. But I had virtually no previous experience with photoshop. It took me a while to get all the shadows on the second button. Looking back now that was the easy part, the more difficult part was to add CSS/HTML code to my website to get it working. I tried numerous methods in internet and finally settled with simple html code. Button loads quite slowly, but it is at the end of the article so hopefully visitor won`t see any problems.

• Very interesting is that I have not had a single visitor in my webpage today. Normally i have about 10 without me promoting my page somewhere. Most of the come from google+, forums and generally i get 1-3 search engine clicks per day. When I add fresh content to fb and google + maximum visitors per day have been 50.
• Second weird fact is that people does not seem to like my new content in google+. When i started out i got 5-10 (+1) to my content. Now, last two articles have gotten only 1-2.
• I have been posting my webpage links in some forums thanks to google alerts. I think I should maybe switch it up to blog comments to add more variety.

Have a good night/day! In my country it is approaching midnight.

Update number #2

I have checked out some other journey threads and come to conclusion that amazon affiliate program is very popular. That is quite interesting, maybe someone is in the same niche as me?

In weekends my main mission is to write content. Normally I get it done within 3-4 hours. Today however I decided to go a little bit deeper, thanks to skyscraper method I found in quicksprout and backlinko blogs. So I searched for hot and popular topics in my niche and found some of them. Then I contacted many authority figures in my niche , to make my new post even better. Regular articles are not bad either, but they really do not act as WOW content which I am shooting for now. Hope this new approach will work. I did some blog comments too.

Visitors

I do not know what is happening, since I became active in BHW my traffic has been 0 yesterday and 2 today (LOL). I regularly get traffic from google +, but I guess not anymore. To sum it all up, everything is going pretty much according to plan. My site is quite new yet 1 month, approximately half a month ago it got indexed . I know I just gotta be patient and wait some months before steady traffic starts to come in.

Just for the record I am going to post a picture of my first amazon sales.



PS! I wonder how I can add bigger picture?

I'm on a similar journey. I'll be keeping an eye out on this one. Looks promising. Good luck!

Update number #3

Today I worked all day just optimizing the site. Starting from on-page seo. One of method i figured out was typing in my keyword and saw that best ranking google adword ads got pretty good titles and descriptions, so changed some of my own based on them. Did again some blog commenting, not spamming or anything. I did not even include my website link in half of those. I really want to keep the spam and pointless promoting to minimum so people would start trusting my site overtime. I still worked on my WOW content I mentioned in previous post, I try to engage the whole community in it as much as possible. It is gonna be interesting to see am I going get some good social attention after I am going to publish this article? I hope definitely hope I will. I did a lot of email outreaching, trying to score those links/resources backlinks.

In previous post i wrote that i only had 2 visitors yesterday. But waking up early this morning I had already 8, good thing is that every single one of them came from search engine. One from bing too, so I finally got indexed there too. I have about 7 hour time difference with USA, so yeah, when I write before going to bed that i have 0 traffic then probably USA people are just going to get active at this time. So let`s see what tomorrow morning brings. My KW rankings fluctuate quite a big, I just were 50 in best-insert keyword- yesterday, but now above 100.

Now little question to BHW community. I read today that it is good to link out to big and trusted authority sites, that it will raise trust in google eyes. Of course I do not blindly follow anything. so what is your all opinion to linking out to other bigger sites as me having niche site? I personally suspect that if i would link to bigger authority sites people will most likely stay there and my change of them clicking my amazon links decreases.

That is it for the day and Kazimierz I hope you will achieve your goal too!

Was just passing through your thread and read your question and my answer to that is:

So imagine link juice flowing through the internet. The juice heads through your website and then just stops at your website- this looks kind of suspicious, don't you think? If you link to big trusted authority sites, then that looks more natural for link juice flow.

wengthemeng said:

Was just passing through your thread and read your question and my answer to that is:

So imagine link juice flowing through the internet. The juice heads through your website and then just stops at your website- this looks kind of suspicious, don't you think? If you link to big trusted authority sites, then that looks more natural for link juice flow.

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Yeah in some ways you are right. But at the same time, every big amazon affiliate site I have seen does not link out at all. Of course they are not the greatest examples. One famous amazon affiliate which was sold for really big money while ago does not stand out in my opinion at all. Design is nothing special, article structure seems to vary from post to post(probably outsourced). But what this site has is powerful PBN behind it. Something I do not have and don`t even have money to create/buy in near future.

I will probably link out to trusted authority sites, but only in articles not in reviews.

Today I did not do anything special, old routine: social profiles, email, serpbook, google webmaster, alerts and stuff like that. Worked on my big post too. About 1/3 is ready. Traffic is steadily rising, yesterday averaged all-time high 5 search engine clicks according to google webmaster. Not good at all, but at least the trend is positive.

good luck to you, I'm planning to start with Amazon too!

Look interesting!! Pm me About amazon i don't have any knowledge for amazon

wengthemeng said:

Was just passing through your thread and read your question and my answer to that is:

So imagine link juice flowing through the internet. The juice heads through your website and then just stops at your website- this looks kind of suspicious, don't you think? If you link to big trusted authority sites, then that looks more natural for link juice flow.

Click to expand...

Just to make my view point known, I think having link juice flowing outward from a site doesn't really hang on avoiding suspicion. It's just that as a new site starting out, linking to authority sites improves your credibility in the eyes of readers which is what the SERPs want to reflect. It is like a student's thesis having excerpts of authority journals and academic publications, and listing references/bibliography later on.

Authority sites also link to on-site articles to support the credibility of a newly written content. It's the same thought process, and further demystifies why interlinking articles on a site pushes up search engine rankings (in addition to low bounce rate).

Conclusively, I think the OP should work on having only a little percentage of total site links pointing outward. Low OBL is still important in positive SEO.

-hotdew

magestic said:

Look interesting!! Pm me About amazon i don't have any knowledge for amazon

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Magestic, just search for amazon affiliate and you should probably find a lots of threads about it.

I always love to follow this IM journeys.
So far I have earn more money being an Amazon affiliate than with Adsense.

@blackwar85: Be sure to also checker site speed and that it loads fast enough so you don't lose traffic because of speed. Also is good for SEO purposes.

Yeah I have read that site loading speed is one of the ranking factors. Not a big one, I like to think , but small things obviously add up. It is really great that you pointed it out right now, because I did site check in quicksprout and load time was 2.64 seconds. This is too high . Just checked google some tools for that and found optimizing image + cache plugin. Going to find out do they really work.

Have not bee posting anything about my journey for some days. Haven`t done something remarkable, still writing my big article. One thing I have learned in life general, but especially in internet marketing is that when something seems easy, then actually it is not at all. I have been doing small fixes like: organizing text, adding/optimizing pictures and dealing with different problems that randomly pop out for some hours now.

blackwar85 said:

Yeah I have read that site loading speed is one of the ranking factors. Not a big one, I like to think , but small things obviously add up. It is really great that you pointed it out right now, because I did site check in quicksprout and load time was 2.64 seconds. This is too high . Just checked google some tools for that and found optimizing image + cache plugin. Going to find out do they really work.Have not bee posting anything about my journey for some days. Haven`t done something remarkable, still writing my big article. One thing I have learned in life general, but especially in internet marketing is that when something seems easy, then actually it is not at all. I have been doing small fixes like: organizing text, adding/optimizing pictures and dealing with different problems that randomly pop out for some hours now.

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2.6 seconds is actually good is you are using a platform like Wordpress. Use pingdom tools and gtmetrix to actually measure better your site speed.

Yeah, I took the "loading time too high" standpoint from quicksprout, it was marked as red. It probably is not the best way to measure my website aspects. I do not know, but both pingdom and gtmetrix time out. Google pagespeed shows 77 for mobile and 88 for desktop. About them plugins, I found out godaddy host won`t let me download cache plugins. If I really would want I could maybe optimize images because so far I have uploaded all images as raw without resizing them before or anything.

EDIT: Good news, just checked amazon, someone ordered some of my niche stuff if it gets shipped then it will add 10 EUR. Will post picture tomorrow. I got only 5 clicks yesterday, but good to see conversion from one of them.

I don't even visit BHW much these days - but when I saw your thread and see what your doing I wanted to post a couple of things.

Probably most important when your starting out in the first 2 months - get great content on your site - organize it so people can find it - optimize everything like buttons/text/images and then see what people tend to like and what they don't and make changes.

add a favicon - add a great header/logo ... all the little things that other Amazon Sites just don't do - and you can tell just by looking at them how bad alot of them are... sure they make money for a little while before dying - but that is not we are looking for .. alot of these things take time the first time you do them - but after that it becomes really easy/fast.

Don't worry about success/failure at this point - worry more about how to make the highest quality site you can .. WHY ? because this is a long term business not a short term one - and the better your keywords/content.structure when you hit Top 3 for your keywords the traffic will come .. then you will make Sales.

I started with 3 Sales a Day then 20 Sales a day - and I thought that was great - but then when I got to 100 Sales a day - I hated to see anything less than 75.

So learn your lessons from Site 1 - test/improve ... then move into other niches/products that maybe even better than the 1st Site you started .... but always check the competition for your main keywords first -- you must be able to get to Top 1-5 otherwise it won't be worth it -- because Social Traffic comes and goes which won't be enough.

Anyway you took action - wish you much success in the future.

Thank you for your comment Danny!

Atm I am in process of making really big and unique article in my niche. I have a lot of reviews/articles rewritten from multiple authority sites. But every other niche site I compete with has them too, so these articles do not add special value. But if I finish this wow article I it will hopefully draw attention because it is different.

Yeah, making site look good/optimizing for user experience is a important thing. I can flat out say that my website looks more professional and gives good user experience because of magazine theme. It enables to access reviews/articles very logically from homepage. None of my competitors amazon site offers it.

I choosed amazon affiliate program because I was looking for long term business. So I know I have to be very careful with my link building, posting in forums- anything that looks unnatural to google when my webpage is still new.

Maybe it is just me, but I sense from your comment that you think my site is not doing best. Of course it is completely fine for you do think so. I personally, beginner I am, think I am not doing too bad. My niche is something I am familiar with. I checked competitors for main keywords. There were some amazon websites in first page, but only reason why they ranked was because the site is old. Site design was awful, some content was flat-out copyed from bigger authority site and it didn`t add some value. Going straight to amazon would be probably better. I made sales sooner I even thought. Of course I understand that in grand scheme of things, I am only at the start. So I have to work hard and make things happen.

You are right, this is my first site. I try to mess/test it so long till I get decent sales/system worked out. Then I am going to scale it. Social traffic is just bonus, I market my new content there and even got a sale from there one time. This is no way audience I am targeting, but helps to get my brand name out there.

The 2 items finally got shipped. I said I am going take picture, so...

blackwar85 said:

The 2 items finally got shipped. I said I am going take picture, so...

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That's great! Congratulations! I would say being constant is a key factor. Don't just make 10 articles and be done with your site. Make 1 article per day instead in a constant way. Also be patient.