hekke's Amazon Affiliate Journey

Hey guys and welcome to my journey!

So a little background about me. I am currently 16 years old and I've been into IM for 18 months now. I have had my ups and downs with multiple methods during this time. I was making $xxx per day with CPA until I realized I wasn't enjoying it so I stopped it completely.

During the CPA period (September 2014) I started a website, put up 5 articles and monetized it with Amazon Associates. I didn't do any work other than this. Let's fast forward until November and this site made it's first sale; this was the moment where I got addicted to Amazon Associates.

Although, instead of working on that site and expanding it I started 3 new sites without any keyword research. These sites haven't made more than a dollar until this day, lol. It was 2-3 months since I started focusing on the first site again, I added about 15 articles and changed the design completely, the CTR increased from 30% to 70%. Today that website makes $x,xxx per month.

So, now you know the background story about my Amazon experience. So let's jump right into what this journey will be about, shall we?

So as some of you might have noticed, I started a Amazon journey about a month ago. Due to the fact that I didn't have the sites planned out I started to post some updates on my other sites. I regret that I did that as the journey should only be focusing on the sites in the journey - and only use my other sites as reference; if needed.

In that journey I started a site 18th of May. I will still use this site for this journey but I will also add another site that I will start TODAY. The first site will be called 'RED' and the new site that I start today will be called 'BLUE'. The updates for each of these will be marked by these colors.

UPDATE
As I started this website a month ago it already got 16 articles uploaded - this isn't much at all in one month. I am in the process of scaling it a lot this month as I was focusing on the silo structure of the website but I decided that I would skip that and just structure the site as my other sites.

Here is a how I structure my sites & how I will structure RED & BLUE:

Homepage
|
Menus:.........Category 1..................Category 2....................Category 3........
..........................|................................|..................................|..............
Sidebar:.........Reviews......................Reviews........................Reviews.........

Please leave your opinion about this set up and if you know a better way to structure the site to get the juice flowing. I don't really understand all the ropes yet, I haven't set up a authority site before, heh.

Also, RED made it's first sales 2 days ago on 3 niche related products. The commission - $10.47.

UPDATE
This site isn't set up yet. Although I can talk a little about the niche research and everything. The niche is actually related to RED so I stumbled upon this niche when I was looking at some products to review for RED. The sites ranking on the first three spots are ranking because of their DA, they have like 1 page dedicated to this niche. The other ones are really weak niche sites with just a few backlinks from blog comments on .edu blogs OR YouTube videos and Amazon product pages without any links pointing to them.

The products for this niche range from $50-$300. My standard is to have products that are mainly $100+ but this niche is really huge so I got tons of different types to review - so I don't really mind. This might be good as I can dedicate pages for 'under $100' and target those who don't got too much to spend on these products.

Today I will scrape all the keywords from my competitors using SEMRush and put them in a .txt file so that I can sort them. Tomorrow I will forward the keywords for the first 'Best of'-article (1-2k words) to my writer and also let a cheaper writer write individual reviews of all the products in the 'Best of'-article.
_______________________________________________________________________________________

I've decided that I want to start off by doing one 'Best of'-article at a time so that I can keep the content organized. The first 'Best of'-articles will be surrounding all the different types of this product. Let's say my niche was "Toasters" - I would add Best Oven Toasters, Best Bagel Toaster, etc in the beginning and after I am done with each type I would add - "Best Cheap Toasters", "Best Toasters for Elders" (lol), etc.

To all the 'Best of'-articles I will add reviews on the individual products that have been mentioned in the 'Best of'-article and put all of them in a sidebar next to the article.

The first goal for these sites will be $100/day.

Well, I think that's it for now. Tomorrow I will share a post I posted in my last thread which is a template of a 'Best of'-article and also a template on a Review-article. I hope that it will be helpful for someone out there!

If you got any questions, don't hesitate to ask them here!

Until next time,
hekke

I have a question: how are you going to bring traffic to your website with Amazon Associates?
and what were the first methodes - articles only?
Thanks! And gl with your journey!

Good luck on your journey buddy, amazon associates is pretty easy money. and a good start for anyone looking to get into Internet marketing.


Follow this thread noobs!

DreamInf said:

I have a question: how are you going to bring traffic to your website with Amazon Associates?
and what were the first methodes - articles only?
Thanks! And gl with your journey!

Click to expand...

I think you've misunderstood what Amazon Associates is. I won't generate traffic with them, I will generate traffic with search engines and from my website send the visitors to Amazon to get a commission each time I get a sale.

I need some content to rank so that's what I am doing right now, putting articles on my websites. Thank you for wishing me good luck!

Hawkster said:

Good luck on your journey buddy, amazon associates is pretty easy money. and a good start for anyone looking to get into Internet marketing.


Follow this thread noobs!

Click to expand...

Thanks! I totally agree with you, great method for anyone starting out in the IM industry. Plenty of money to be made here.

All you got to do is to send traffic to one of the most trusted websites and each time your traffic buys something, you get a commission. With Amazon's outstanding upsell, your conversion rate will be really high. They will make sure to convert those that can be converted, lol.

Hi guys. Here is the template for the 'Best of'-articles and the template for Review-articles, these could be sent to your writer if you are going to outsource or be used as template when you write it yourself. Some niches might have some other topics to bring up on the 'Best of'-articles - this is just a general outline.

Best Of-article Template

Introduction (what you will provide on this page)

Example of Introduction:
Todays market can be really confusing. New companies are popping up every week claiming to have the best PRODUCT(S) 2015 on the market but that is not possible. We've analyzed the best selling PRODUCT(S) on the market and have filtered out the good ones from the bad ones so that you can find the best PRODUCT - for you.

Comparison chart

What is PRODUCT?

Types of PRODUCT(S) (if there are different types, that is)

Pro's and cons of PRODUCT (Depending on what niche)

PRODUCT Reviews (2015) - one more great buyer keyword

Review 1

Review 2

Review 3

Review 4

Review 5

Conclusion
______________

As you can see in the introduction, I put 3 buyer keywords just in that small text, it's not that hard if you think about it. The PRODUCT(S) should of course be switched with the products you promote or the keywords you want to target.

P.S. Don't copy paste my introduction, it was just an example how it could look. There are thousands of ways to rewrite that small text, use your fantasy.
______________

Review-article Template

Topic: *** Review

Words: ***

Template

Introduction

Pros

Cons

Conclusion
______________

As you can see, I don't target any keywords in this article - they usually come pretty natural so I don't find any need to mention that. I rather target those keywords in the 'Best of'-article and use the reviews as filler content.

Hopefully this will help someone when writing or outsourcing the content for their website.

UPDATE
This night I spent searching for a theme for my site, I found a good one and set the site up with About, Contact & Affiliate Disclosure page. After that I collected keywords for the first best-of article - I found about ~10 keywords that I will target in the article - those were sent to my writer just now. I also ordered 5 review-articles from my other writer - his team was off for a while so the articles are delayed.

For today I am planning to write up some posts myself, the ideal would be if I could pull off content myself for these two sites. This would make my content better quality and I would also cut off some expenses. When the base content is up I probably just need to upload 1-2 articles per day - I could easily pull off that myself. We'll see, the more I learn about this niche, the easier it is to write about the topic. For example, I can throw together a 1k word article for my other site in just a few minutes - that's the ideal for these sites as well.

UPDATE
As I said above, my review-article writing team had a few days off so the articles is delayed a bit. Today I will collect some keywords for a best of-article to my other writer and upload it later tonight - that writer's TAT is a few hours, lol.

Until next time,
hekke

I've seen you post quite a bit in journey threads I follow. I'm launching my own journey soon, and definitely keep following yours. I hope to learn from your journey like I learned from many others!

The best of luck to you!

keep it up Hekke!

Your thread contains AMAZING tips with which anyone here can earn!

Guys this is journey that i love the most because Hekke explain all what he does very detailed!

There you are. You deleted your other journey? I didn't take a screenshot of how you search for keywords yet lol! Can you share it again here?

Great stuff again, Hekke. I am subscribed and wishing you luck

Good luck to your journey Hekke. I have started with amazon affiliate 4 months now and I make around $50-$60 per month. Maybe I can learn something from your thread to scale up my earnings

Wish you all the best on amazon mate. Its sure bring you with something in experinced itself. Just do what you think right and ask if you need something in here. Here we got alots of experinced people's that worth to be ask.hehe just my two cent tought.��

I like the template, it gives me a little directions as it was little bit confusing for me. Do you think a writer will fully understand the template if I send him the kw's with the template for guidance?

How do you increase the CTR from 30% to 70%? Mine is just 20%.

Hey Hekke,

I've just added you on Skype, however I've noticed you're from Sweden so have a quick question.

When you're doing research on keywords and products, how do you manage the country element?

For example, lets say I am UK based, and my chosen product is going to be irons.

The term "Best irons" gets 1,000 searches a month, however "Best irons uk" only gets 70 searches a month. Now being in the UK, I ideally want to target UK traffic to my UK Amazon Affiliates account.

Are you chasing your terms suffixed with "UK" or "Sweden" in your case, or are you targeting "best irons", using a .com domain with a Swedish Amazon Affiliates or USA Affiliate account?

nincyface said:

I've seen you post quite a bit in journey threads I follow. I'm launching my own journey soon, and definitely keep following yours. I hope to learn from your journey like I learned from many others!

The best of luck to you!

Click to expand...

Thank you!

Heh, I tend to spend quiet sometime reading journey threads. It is usually where you'll find the golden nuggets so I always keep an eye on all of the journey-threads that contains Amazon or SEO basically.

Best of luck with your journey as well, I will check it out when you open it!

Mareslo said:

keep it up Hekke!

Your thread contains AMAZING tips with which anyone here can earn!

Guys this is journey that i love the most because Hekke explain all what he does very detailed!

Click to expand...

Thanks for the the feedback Mareslo!

I like to be detailed so that people can easily replicate what I am doing if they wish to. I also want to be transparent so that people can stop me if I am doing something completely wrong, I've never built an authority site before, heh.

mhadzer said:

There you are. You deleted your other journey? I didn't take a screenshot of how you search for keywords yet lol! Can you share it again here?

Click to expand...

Yes, I deleted my journey so that people wouldn't get confused on what thread is the active one. I copied all of the posts I made in the last thread but I don't remember going through how I search for keywords/do my keyword research. I can do it now though!

First off I start off by finding a really broad niche on Amazon. Let's take "Electronics & Computers" as example, after that I go through some products in that category, look at related items and stuff. Once I see something that costs around $100+ per product I search for the generic buyer keywords + see how many searches it gets with Google's Keyword Planner. If I've found a niche where the products are $100+ and the buyer keywords get 500+ searches a month I continue to the next step.

So, once I've found a niche I do a search for "Best KEYWORD", "KEYWORD Reviews", etc. From there I take the top 3 rankers and analyze their backlinks, if the first three is BIG authority sites I try to get a hold of a smaller niche site ranking on the first page as well. After I've found top 3 rankers + a smaller niche site I put them in a backlink analysis tool. I personally use SEMRush but other tools such as Ahrefs works just as good. From these tools I will see what they are ranking for and I see what type of backlinks they got.

Here is the backlink reports of my main competitors:
RED


BLUE


If I find that the niche sites aren't powered by a big PBN & got weak links that I can build myself - I usually go for it. I know this is a long process but it is one of the most important ones in my opinion.

Jesse Custer said:

Great stuff again, Hekke. I am subscribed and wishing you luck

Click to expand...

Thanks!

nicefor said:

Good luck to your journey Hekke. I have started with amazon affiliate 4 months now and I make around $50-$60 per month. Maybe I can learn something from your thread to scale up my earnings

Click to expand...

About 3 months ago I earned $16/month with my first Amazon site - now it have earned me $2,6k so far this month. I can go through what I did in a post later on - I posted one in my previous thread so I can just repost that and add some more information.

success1988 said:

Wish you all the best on amazon mate. Its sure bring you with something in experinced itself. Just do what you think right and ask if you need something in here. Here we got alots of experinced people's that worth to be ask.hehe just my two cent tought.��

Click to expand...

Thanks! I will definitely ask if I need help with the site!

wizard04 said:

I like the template, it gives me a little directions as it was little bit confusing for me. Do you think a writer will fully understand the template if I send him the kw's with the template for guidance?

Click to expand...

The writer I got knows what I want so I just send keywords + products to review and he will provide an article exactly like I want it to be. If you switch "PRODUCTS" to your actual niche I think that template is quiet clear. Delete the parentheses tho.

lelou00 said:

How do you increase the CTR from 30% to 70%? Mine is just 20%.

Click to expand...

I will post what I did in another post. I shared it in my other thread so I can just copy-paste what I wrote there.

Evostance said:

Hey Hekke,

I've just added you on Skype, however I've noticed you're from Sweden so have a quick question.

When you're doing research on keywords and products, how do you manage the country element?

For example, lets say I am UK based, and my chosen product is going to be irons.

The term "Best irons" gets 1,000 searches a month, however "Best irons uk" only gets 70 searches a month. Now being in the UK, I ideally want to target UK traffic to my UK Amazon Affiliates account.

Are you chasing your terms suffixed with "UK" or "Sweden" in your case, or are you targeting "best irons", using a .com domain with a Swedish Amazon Affiliates or USA Affiliate account?

Click to expand...

I promote Amazon.com products only. I don't use any country related keywords unless they get great amount of traffic per month. If you want to get commission from your UK based visitors you can buy a plugin for WP that sends the visitor to the best Amazon store for them. If your visitor is from Sweden for example they get redirected to Amazon.co.uk instead of Amazon.com to decrease the shipping cost.

This is something that I personally doesn't do yet, might have to add it soon though as it can be a little boost in earnings. I know that I get 100 daily visitors from UK on my first site so I should at least add a link localizer to that site, another $20 bucks in earnings per day wouldn't hurt.

Until next time,
hekke

Not sure if you mentioned this already since I skimmed it a little bit But what are the minimum monthly searches you'll be going after for? I know argon from his amazon authority site thread he's going after at least 480 monthly searches (I believe)

Great I'll be following this. As I may get in to Amazon affiliates pretty soon.

Good luck on your journey, Hekke. Some questions for you.
Do you post 2 reviews for each product you promote? One mini review in the best of article and one on its own page or did i understand it wrong?
If I got it right, how many words do you use for each mini review?150-200 I guess?
And about your template... Do you fit in long tail keywords like: best product for the money, best product under $50, under $100 etc or you create another page for each of them?

erickishere said:

Not sure if you mentioned this already since I skimmed it a little bit But what are the minimum monthly searches you'll be going after for? I know argon from his amazon authority site thread he's going after at least 480 monthly searches (I believe)

Click to expand...

Hm... I wonder where he got 480 searches from - maybe just a random number he chose? I try to include as many keywords as possible in each best of-article. The main keywords I focus on in an article is at least 500 searches a month but I try to include many keywords that are related which might only have 100 searches, or even less.

prinse said:

Great I'll be following this. As I may get in to Amazon affiliates pretty soon.

Click to expand...

Thanks!

braindebug said:

Good luck on your journey, Hekke. Some questions for you.
Do you post 2 reviews for each product you promote? One mini review in the best of article and one on its own page or did i understand it wrong?
If I got it right, how many words do you use for each mini review?150-200 I guess?
And about your template... Do you fit in long tail keywords like: best product for the money, best product under $50, under $100 etc or you create another page for each of them?

Click to expand...

Exactly. The mini reviews usually end up being about 200-300 words each. And yes, I try to fit in as many keywords as possible in the best of-articles. Although, I don't use "under $50" in the "Best PRODUCT of 2015" I rather throw it in another article where I talk about "Best Affordable/Cheap PRODUCTS of 2015".

Ok, so as promised. Here is how I went from a 30% CTR to 70% CTR:

Checklist:
*Homepage
*Comparison chart
*Sidebar image

Homepage
Having a homepage is a great way to include both a lot of links to Amazon but also to add a lot of buyer keywords. On my first site I get almost 50% of all the traffic to the homepage and on my homepage I got 32 links to Amazon. 15 in the comparison chart, 15 on the reviews, 1 above comparison chart and 1 in the sidebar.

So how do I insert 15 links in the reviews? Well, I review 5 products per "Best of"-article - so 3 links per review.

This is how I format the reviews:
__________________________________
Hamilton Beach 2 Slice Cool Touch Toaster Review
-Review here- -Review here- -Review here-

Find the best deals on the Hamilton Toaster!
__________________________________

To explain it in words - a link on the product image, a link after the mini-review and one on the product name above the review.

Comparison chart
This is another great way to put a lot of links naturally into the homepage. I put the comparison chart exactly after the introduction (look above on the best of-article template and you'll understand where).

This is how my comparison charts looks like:


As you can see on my comparison chart, I got a column with "price". I usually just put $-$$$$ depending on how much the product costs. So if it costs 100 USD I would say "Price: $$$" and if it costs 10 USD I would put "Price: $$" - this is the only way to do it unless you can get the price from their API or change it manually every time the price changes.

I put my own rating on the comparison chart, I hope this is allowed by Amazon - otherwise I need to switch this on all of my niche sites as soon as possible.

Sidebar image
This is something that I added quiet recently as I saw that almost 20% of all traffic on my page comes from a non-monetized article that I wrote about 3 months ago. I simply made a image where I showcased a product I chose - put some text above it saying "Best *PRODUCT* 2015" and then made a simple button under it saying "Check out current price!".

As I always do when I add a new thing to my site that is questionable to Amazon's ToS - I contact their support chat. I had a version before the one I got currently that had 5 yellow stars above it instead of "Best *PRODUCT* 2015" which apparently isn't allowed by Amazon. If you are going to include stars it got to show how many stars it got on Amazon, not just a random number of stars.

I use the Image Widget plugin to add a image to my sidebar - you can easily add a link to the widget.

And that's basically what increased my CTR with about 40 per cent!

I want to give a HUGE shoutout to antichrist as he was the one who originally gave me these tips. I want to spread them with you as I've seen a big increase in earnings as well as traffic since I added these things.

Hopefully this post was helpful!

Until next time,
hekke