Curunir's First Amazon Affiliate Website

Hello and welcome to my journey!

I've been lurking in the forums and yesterday I decided to try the Amazon Affiliate Program for the first time. So let me start with an introduction.
I've build a few websites in the past, but they were far from blackhat or affiliates. In fact they were websites for things I have interest in and never monetised the websites. Imagine more like magazine websites but I haven't figured a way to make money with them.

I've never tried adsense, amazon or other affiliates so this is all new to me. I have an adsense account for original youtube videos I upload but never been paid to date. As far as backlinks are concerned, I have no experience apart from some website directory submitions I've done in the past and I own no backlink software or even tried one before. I've only once order a backlink from a service here in BHW to see if this can make a difference but since the order is not completed yet, I have no experience from that either. All in all, apart from a basic experience on wordpress, I could say I'm starting from scratch.

So, to come to this website. I was aiming to make a large Authority Amazon Affiliate website, but I don't have the funds to support it for the time being, so I decided to build a niche specific website, monetise with amazon and if I could have some income from it I would definately try to scale to something bigger.

As far as budget, I should say that I live in Greece and its current financial situation doesn't make payments to paypal and foreign banks easy. In fact I can't forward money to foreign countries at the moment, so basically I can only buy domain names and hosting. As far as content is concerned, I'll have to write it myself and as far as link building is concered I can only work with program trials if any, until I get a commision from Amazon.

What I've done so far:
keyword Research
I've made a basic keyword research with free tools I could find. I generated possible keywords with a website similar to ubersuggest, narrowed down the keywords with a trial of Market samurai so as to include only keywords with buyers intention and lastly used google planner to find the actual search volume so see which keywords to keep. The final list is of 1 Main keyword (10.000+ searches), 5 let's say longtail subkeywords (around 1000 searches each) and 100 variations of those 6 keywords such as different order of keywords etc with obviously less searches, around 10-50 per month.

Domain and Hosting
I've found an domain exact as the main keyword + some letters, domain must have been used before as I find backlinks to it which makes me wonder why would someone abandon it and if I've made a good choise. The anchor texts are only for the website URL, nothing irrelevant.
I'm not a domain guru but the domain shows good stats I guess with High PA+DA. Its a few years old. I host the domain in a shared hosting plan I have for unlimited websites.

Website:
I've installed wordpress, some necessary plugins and a premium theme.

Content:
I've created an About page, put like 700-800 words and 2-3 free to use pictures.

Things to be done:
- I need to create a Logo/Profile Picture/Banner for the website and social profiles.I want to try facebook and youtube as parasites. I guess I have to create a FB page and a Youtube Video and find a trial of some backlink software to send them backlinks.
- I need to write a disclaimer for amazon before I add the links. I don't know much about it but I'll check Affiliate Program or google to learn more.
- Thinking of adding a contact page to seem more legit.
- Create unique content for the website. I will probably write a huge article for the main keyword, 5 smaller articles for the secondary keywords, and use the variations/longtails inside the articles for diversity.

The Unique Content part will be time consuming but I can not oursource it at the moment. Once I've completed the above I'll think of more work to be done. At the moment the website obviously have 0 Visitors, 0 Social Followers, 0 profit and 10$ spent for the domain. I'm not after quick cash as I see this project as a way to learn by doing and obviously if I can find something successfull I'm implement it to other websites if applicable. I'm planning to update the journey until I complete the contect and find a way for link building. Then I'll update progress and income if any. Let's see how much can I learn from this journey. Thank you for stopping by and don't hesitate to comment.

You seem to know the ropes! I will be following!

Best of luck!

Your english is good so you shouldn't have any problems writing content by yourself. A great way for someone just starting out is to rank for new products on amazon, like "product review". They usually don't have much competition and if you are the first one reviewing the product you should be able to rank easily.

Anyway good luck with your journey.

Decided to follow along with you. Hoping you succeed at this journey! Best of luck.

Like to follow amazon journeys. Good luck

Good luck with your journey - I'll be following.

Good Luck - subbed!

I love a good Amazon journey.

Best of luck. I'll be following.

Good luck with your journey! Keep update this thread,

All the best for your journey mate...

All the best in your journey buddy, I'll be following.

Thank you all! Let's see the update!

Update for yesterday:
I created a Logo-Banner which I put on FB. I was going to use it for the website header but ended larger that I thought so and decided to use it some other way on the site... Something like "Featured Photo" in the future.

I wrote an amazon affiliate disclaimer, a contact page and a privacy page that I uploaded to website.

I've picked my list with the non-buyer keyword and found around 10 keyword phrases that could work for informational articles around the niche.

I've searched google's Top100 for my main keyword. I found obviously some large-review websites, guess you've seen them before, but also noticed quite a few niche websites in those 100. I've found interesting the fact that most of those niche websites have barely any backlinks, yet still in those top100, not page one of course but still.

I must admit that Amazon thing is addicting. I already found like 5-10 other niche ideas and still I haven't started this one lol. Anyway I want to start this one first so as to gain some more understanding how it works and we will see.

Things I would like to do today:
- I'm going to update a little the "About" page as i think I can make it more enganging in case someone decides to read it.
- I'm going to research and hopefully write my first post. I was wondering whether I should build up the informational articles and later on start adding reviews or the other way round....
- I'd like to create a video parasite. Would you spend 5$ and get a "teaser for a product review video + read more at ... " or a general "slideshow of photos + found more at ...." which I could create myself?

For the future:
- Since there is a trial version of GSA, I want to check it out regarding the FB and Video pages.
- I saw somewhere in BHW some free press release submition sites... I'll probably check them out....

An update for the last days. I focused on content so as to estimate how much time it would take if I had to scale it in the future.
The contect is a mix of unique hand written articles, some articles rewriter by me on sentence level and some copied from other sources.
I took the advice of Onlineonly and picked a few recently released products.


All in all:
- Rewrote the About Page to something more personal.
- Wrote some huge informational articles, no affiliate links, based on internet research. They are unique and cover the most about the niche.
I will add more as long as I find informational keywords.
- Wrote Pillar articles for the main keywords... More than 1000 words each, a lot of affiliate links through comparison tables, images, buy out buttons etc.
- A few spun (by me) reviews for the products to fill the website.

I added the keywords to serplab so as to follow how they move in the search. The following days I'll have to check their position and make any changes on page. I'll add for the months to come any review and informational articles I can write. I hope to add atleast one page per week to keep it fresh. In September I'll think about any backlink strategy I can try (since I have no experience) but I hope the old domain would help to minimize that need.

Sorry if I missed it, but are you already approved by Amazon? If you already have an Associates account, you're golden, but if not, you may want to put up a couple articles that don't seem intended to sell anything, as Amazon is not super fond of approving sites built solely for the purpose of pitching products. Once you've got that approval, though, you can use the same account on other sites, so it's not an issue.

neverquitting said:

Sorry if I missed it, but are you already approved by Amazon? If you already have an Associates account, you're golden, but if not, you may want to put up a couple articles that don't seem intended to sell anything, as Amazon is not super fond of approving sites built solely for the purpose of pitching products. Once you've got that approval, though, you can use the same account on other sites, so it's not an issue.

Click to expand...

I have bought an aged domain like 1 month ago, that I wanted to build an authority site on. I got approved for that domain even thought it had only a few dummy pages. So in this new website I have used that associate account which obviously have no commision to date. I don't known how it works but I guess like you said once approved it's OK. Maybe they have some manual review after the first sale? I have no clue.

The website got indexed after two days. At first I was nervous as none of the pages were found in search engine, so I throw a few of those "indexing" type of links. I found a free site that sends those whois-statistic links and submitted the main url. I added the website to web master tools and fetched it. Don't know which worked but atleast I can see my pages now on search engines.

The Serplab shows that out of the 96 keywords I used, 8 are nowhere to be found and the rest are between 100-200 position. I guess it's a good start.

UPDATE 4 Days Later:

ALL my keywords have disappeared from Search Engines, except ONE found around 50th position.

My thoughts:
- I have uploaded a sitemap to webmaster tools, and shows all web pages indexed.

- One concern I have is whether the Affiliate Links are the reason the pages got kicked out of SERP or not.
I have a free plugin that should take care of outbound links making them no follow. Should be working I guess. Any other recommendation apart from no following them? The outbound links are the actual amazon links, there is nothing cloaking them.

- The website is aged and had some backlinks around the niche. They are not automated links, they seem like coming from real websites. The only concer I have is that all these links have as Anchor text my main keyword I have focused. I see more than 60% of those backlinks have my main keyword so I was thinking that this might trigger something at search engines and I may have to reduce that percentage manually.

So, I guess I have to find a way to reduce the affiliate links on page and diversify the anchor text the backlinks already have. Any thoughts or comments are hgihly appreciated!

I reduced the amount of affiliate links at the homepage and a few hours later my keywords appear in SERP again.