fasttrak
Elite Member
- Sep 12, 2016
- 3,514
- 3,986
I was asked recently about my experience with a $45 'built for you' Amazon site I bought from BHW a couple of years ago and if I would recommend the service. Here was my answer
>>Happy to answer - I never made a single $ from the site, it absolutely was not a good investment.
But then I thought, perhaps I could be a bit more helpful and provide a few pointers of what I have learnt over the last 2 years. And having written it up, I thought I would share with everyone.
Summary - it really is easier than you think to make $'s from Amazon/affiliate marketing. As long as you are patient (expect several months, not weeks), prepared to put in the effort, create quality content and focus on quality link building.
Site Design
Wordpress is really easy, just give it a go. You do not need to know how to code and you can try for free with wordpress.com/create.
Your focus should be on a clean, simple, FAST design, nothing flashy as your content is going to sell the products, not the design, so do not get hung up on this too much.
If you are new and money is a problem, checkout @Festinger's posts and grab a theme and plugins to get you going. Nice to register them once you make few $'s though and support the dev's.
Hosting & Domain
If you are happy with your wordpress.com testing, it is time to get yourself a domain and hosting.
Hosting
Again, do not get hung up on this. There are some great sellers on BHW, but also, Namecheap is fine to begin with, and most importantly cheap.
Domain
Unless you are buying a domain at auction, just use a new one, i.e. any name you feel works but stick with .com, .net TLD's. Partial match still works well but you can use pretty much anything you like, just use your common sense.
KW's and Keyword Research
This is where I got stuck for a LONG time but here is how I got over the hump and now I have TOO many KW's and not enough time to make the most of them all, for now!
Firstly, think of something you are interested in, something that you can talk to others at length about.
This is important as you need to write a LOT of content on obscure points related to this subject. I like gaming but I am not going to choose that, it is going to be too hard. I like football, but again, not an easy niche to start with. I like hill walking and do a lot of it, there is bound to be some easy KW's there I could write about (I do not target this personally, so if you like hill walking, go for it!)
Now, type your chosen subject into Google.
Tip - It would be a good idea to use buyer intent KW's so you can get competitor sites to analyse and find juicy KW's, so for example, you could use 'best mens walking boots'.
I am using Google.co.uk as I live and walk in the UK, so that is the stuff I know and can write easily about. Obviously, you can target the US, Canada, Australia, Asia, Europe if you want to, whatever and wherever you have personal knowledge of.
Have a scan through the results and pick sites which are either affiliate sites or magazine type sites. So, looking through the top 20, I am going to take a look at the below to start with.
gearweare.com
cleverhiker.com
coachmag.co.uk
Tip - Remember, you are not targeting 'best walking boots' as your KW, you just want some potential affiliate sites which are doing OK that you can analyse for easy KW's.
Now, use Ahrefs (trial) to take a look at each of the domains, go through their top pages, organic KW's and use the filters to narrow down the KW's 'From 0 To 0 or 2'. You are basically looking for long tail KW's (zero/0 difficulty) which have 100+ searches per month
Tip - Once you have found an organic KW which meets our criteria, it will show you the page it belongs to, click on the little arrow and choose Overview from the pop up menu and you will then be shown the analysis for that specific page. Look at the organic KW's and you will see lots of others you can rank for (check as well).
Bonus Tip - You will also see how many RDs/BLs Ahrefs has picked up and get an idea of the competition. Obviously more analysis with other tools is needed as well for the competitor link difficulty part but it gives you an idea.
Next use KW finder to check difficulty for the KW, and only go for <=20.
I choose United Kingdom and English for my search parameters.
Now take a look at the top 10 and check out how many links each page has and their DA, PA and Rank, obviously the lower the numbers the better (go for green!).
Tip - look at the type of sites/pages ranking and follow some of the excellent guides on BHW to determine if these sites are beatable.
Gold nuggets = easy difficulty, high sales value (affiliate/Amazon).
If an affiliate site is ranking for the KW's you have identified and you have seen in Ahrefs the estimated value of the traffic they are getting for that page, you probably do not have to worry too much about checking the product sale values.
But again, the higher the better, as selling one product worth $1500 per month is better than selling 50 at $15 per month.
You can outsource this if you wish and there are several services on BHW that can help you, some better than others.
Content
Now you have your KW's, this is the fun part. Write several 1500+ word articles for the KW's or groups of KW's if related.
Quality is key here so take your time, think about how you can cover every aspect of the subject with proper structured content. As you are researching the KW, look for questions that people are asking and find the answer. Ask the questions in your article and answer them.
Obviously, you have looked at who is ranking for these KW's, unless you have an auction domain, you are going to have to write more and do it better, because if you can get your on page SEO right, you can maybe even rank for these KW's without any direct links.
Tip - Take a look at your competitors page in SeoBooks KW density Checker tool (its free) and then look at your own. If it is working for them, it is likely going to be a good place to start, but in general, just write naturally, these are easy KW's so as long as your content is decent, you should be fine.
Bonus Tip - As a bonus, write 60% information and 40% buy articles, i.e. more informational articles than buy articles. Google likes this.
Bonus Tip 2 - Personally I do not add any affiliate links to my content until they are starting to rank on Google. This seems to work best for me, but obviously I do have some outbound links to authority non competition sites as it would not look natural to have zero links.
You can outsource this if you wish but I have not had much luck myself and write most of my content (not all).
Link Building
GO SLOW WITH LINK BUILDING, especially for new sites. I cannot stress this enough. Guest posts on REAL sites or high quality PBN links from services from the likes of @Leith is the way to go. But remember, we are targeting easy KW's so this should not be your main focus.
Tip - Look at recent posts on BHW which give decent high DR profile link ideas and get a few of those for free. @fizakhan1 has posted lots of great ones recently.
Create social profiles and make sure you post your articles on each and engage with others.
Results
For a new site, it will take a couple of months to settle in Google.
Give it time, do not rush it, which is why you start with long tail KW's.
I have seen auction domains crush my niches for medium difficulty KW's in a couple of months (entire niche), so if you want a quicker route, that is obviously the way to go and you can skip the link building part, if the domain is top draw.
Thats all there is to it. Honestly, writing this up has been harder than creating 6 decent information pages today for a new site, so give it a whirl, have a go and take it slow and steady.
Good luck and I hope this helps you in 2019.
>>Happy to answer - I never made a single $ from the site, it absolutely was not a good investment.
But then I thought, perhaps I could be a bit more helpful and provide a few pointers of what I have learnt over the last 2 years. And having written it up, I thought I would share with everyone.
Summary - it really is easier than you think to make $'s from Amazon/affiliate marketing. As long as you are patient (expect several months, not weeks), prepared to put in the effort, create quality content and focus on quality link building.
Site Design
Wordpress is really easy, just give it a go. You do not need to know how to code and you can try for free with wordpress.com/create.
Your focus should be on a clean, simple, FAST design, nothing flashy as your content is going to sell the products, not the design, so do not get hung up on this too much.
If you are new and money is a problem, checkout @Festinger's posts and grab a theme and plugins to get you going. Nice to register them once you make few $'s though and support the dev's.
- [MEGA GET] Free Access to my Premium WP Themes and Plugins Storage!
- [GET] ANY WordPress theme you need for FREE
Hosting & Domain
If you are happy with your wordpress.com testing, it is time to get yourself a domain and hosting.
Hosting
Again, do not get hung up on this. There are some great sellers on BHW, but also, Namecheap is fine to begin with, and most importantly cheap.
Domain
Unless you are buying a domain at auction, just use a new one, i.e. any name you feel works but stick with .com, .net TLD's. Partial match still works well but you can use pretty much anything you like, just use your common sense.
KW's and Keyword Research
This is where I got stuck for a LONG time but here is how I got over the hump and now I have TOO many KW's and not enough time to make the most of them all, for now!
Firstly, think of something you are interested in, something that you can talk to others at length about.
This is important as you need to write a LOT of content on obscure points related to this subject. I like gaming but I am not going to choose that, it is going to be too hard. I like football, but again, not an easy niche to start with. I like hill walking and do a lot of it, there is bound to be some easy KW's there I could write about (I do not target this personally, so if you like hill walking, go for it!)
Now, type your chosen subject into Google.
Tip - It would be a good idea to use buyer intent KW's so you can get competitor sites to analyse and find juicy KW's, so for example, you could use 'best mens walking boots'.
I am using Google.co.uk as I live and walk in the UK, so that is the stuff I know and can write easily about. Obviously, you can target the US, Canada, Australia, Asia, Europe if you want to, whatever and wherever you have personal knowledge of.
Have a scan through the results and pick sites which are either affiliate sites or magazine type sites. So, looking through the top 20, I am going to take a look at the below to start with.
gearweare.com
cleverhiker.com
coachmag.co.uk
Tip - Remember, you are not targeting 'best walking boots' as your KW, you just want some potential affiliate sites which are doing OK that you can analyse for easy KW's.
Now, use Ahrefs (trial) to take a look at each of the domains, go through their top pages, organic KW's and use the filters to narrow down the KW's 'From 0 To 0 or 2'. You are basically looking for long tail KW's (zero/0 difficulty) which have 100+ searches per month
Tip - Once you have found an organic KW which meets our criteria, it will show you the page it belongs to, click on the little arrow and choose Overview from the pop up menu and you will then be shown the analysis for that specific page. Look at the organic KW's and you will see lots of others you can rank for (check as well).
Bonus Tip - You will also see how many RDs/BLs Ahrefs has picked up and get an idea of the competition. Obviously more analysis with other tools is needed as well for the competitor link difficulty part but it gives you an idea.
Next use KW finder to check difficulty for the KW, and only go for <=20.
I choose United Kingdom and English for my search parameters.
Now take a look at the top 10 and check out how many links each page has and their DA, PA and Rank, obviously the lower the numbers the better (go for green!).
Tip - look at the type of sites/pages ranking and follow some of the excellent guides on BHW to determine if these sites are beatable.
Gold nuggets = easy difficulty, high sales value (affiliate/Amazon).
If an affiliate site is ranking for the KW's you have identified and you have seen in Ahrefs the estimated value of the traffic they are getting for that page, you probably do not have to worry too much about checking the product sale values.
But again, the higher the better, as selling one product worth $1500 per month is better than selling 50 at $15 per month.
You can outsource this if you wish and there are several services on BHW that can help you, some better than others.
Content
Now you have your KW's, this is the fun part. Write several 1500+ word articles for the KW's or groups of KW's if related.
Quality is key here so take your time, think about how you can cover every aspect of the subject with proper structured content. As you are researching the KW, look for questions that people are asking and find the answer. Ask the questions in your article and answer them.
Obviously, you have looked at who is ranking for these KW's, unless you have an auction domain, you are going to have to write more and do it better, because if you can get your on page SEO right, you can maybe even rank for these KW's without any direct links.
Tip - Take a look at your competitors page in SeoBooks KW density Checker tool (its free) and then look at your own. If it is working for them, it is likely going to be a good place to start, but in general, just write naturally, these are easy KW's so as long as your content is decent, you should be fine.
Bonus Tip - As a bonus, write 60% information and 40% buy articles, i.e. more informational articles than buy articles. Google likes this.
Bonus Tip 2 - Personally I do not add any affiliate links to my content until they are starting to rank on Google. This seems to work best for me, but obviously I do have some outbound links to authority non competition sites as it would not look natural to have zero links.
You can outsource this if you wish but I have not had much luck myself and write most of my content (not all).
Link Building
GO SLOW WITH LINK BUILDING, especially for new sites. I cannot stress this enough. Guest posts on REAL sites or high quality PBN links from services from the likes of @Leith is the way to go. But remember, we are targeting easy KW's so this should not be your main focus.
Tip - Look at recent posts on BHW which give decent high DR profile link ideas and get a few of those for free. @fizakhan1 has posted lots of great ones recently.
Create social profiles and make sure you post your articles on each and engage with others.
Results
For a new site, it will take a couple of months to settle in Google.
Give it time, do not rush it, which is why you start with long tail KW's.
I have seen auction domains crush my niches for medium difficulty KW's in a couple of months (entire niche), so if you want a quicker route, that is obviously the way to go and you can skip the link building part, if the domain is top draw.
Thats all there is to it. Honestly, writing this up has been harder than creating 6 decent information pages today for a new site, so give it a whirl, have a go and take it slow and steady.
Good luck and I hope this helps you in 2019.
