My Amazon Affiliate Journey to $500/mo starting from scratch

TrendWatchersAlerts said:

I spam my amazon links on YouTube and these are my results. Only been doing this for 30 days and it takes me 5min to create a quality video w link.

http://prntscr.com/s8b9vf

I post 3 links /day

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So your spamming ?
It takes you five minutes to create a video with a link.
You post 3 links a day.

3 Videos a day is not spamming...
Somethings fishy

jeffro89 said:

So your spamming ?
It takes you five minutes to create a video with a link.
You post 3 links a day.

3 Videos a day is not spamming...
Somethings fishy

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I mean I can do more than that, i just dont want to turn off my subscribers too much. I have 1k subs but so far I have over 160 videos posted as of now. It will probably be 3 - 12 months before i start seeing some series clicks on those links.

highpointer said:

What software are you currently using?

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I do it manually. I have an efficient system down which is why I can push out videos fast.

UPDATE - Long time no see

It's been forever since my last update. To be honest I gave up on this project by the end of April and have been focusing on my other side jobs outside of IM. However, I just recently decided to get back into it but this time with ecommerce. I am looking to start a Amazon Australia FBA business model instead of continuing down the affiliate niche site route. Buuuuuuut, I just reviewed my stats for the two affiliate niche sites I still have. To no surprise, they aren't doing well.

I'm giving up on Niche Site #2 which was a cat niche site and has gained no traction whatsoever with $0 income and almost no clicks. $531 total spent so far on this Niche site --> down the drain!

Niche Site #1 hasn't been doing too much better. Here are some stats:

• $3 to $7 made off of Amz affiliate income
• 170 to 250 pageviews per month
• Top 1 page is receiving 50% of pageviews
• Top 4 pages are receiving 70% of pageviews
• 50 to 80 clicks per month on Amazon Aff. links
• 3.22% conversion rate for my Amz clicks

I've spent $1,442 on this website total so far. I should have been making at least $1,442 / 30 = $58 / mo for it to have been profitable and worth the investment so far but I am only making $5 / mo on average instead. There's quite a huge gap there between $5 and $58 / mo and I don't think it's doable unless I add a shit load more content which I don't want to invest in any more. Instead, I'm going to try to go through the top 4 performing pages and manually update the content by myself.

I do have a list of content upgrades that I have been sitting on since April. My only issue is I don't like writing content myself. On the flip side, I don't want to invest much more into this website. Instead, I'm going to chip away at the list of content upgrade bit by bit. Most of the content upgrades are just adding words. On average I have 1000 word articles where as my competition regularly has 2000 to 3000 word articles.

Oh and the niche is season dependent so we'll see if anything changes for the rest of the year but I'm not getting my hopes up that's for sure lol.

Sad to hear you gave up, it looked very promising...

I would suggest you to go for digital products instead of Amazon. You can earn up to 80% commissions on digital products.

Also thanks to my own case study it is evident that it is about quality and not quantity. I have a niche site with more than 20k monthly sessions and the site just has 22 posts... I have not invested more than $800 on the project...

Check my journey for inspiration.

UPDATE - Just broke 1,000 pageviews per month

So just checked my account after a long time. Looks like things are looking up. I broke just above 1,000 pageviews for September. Also made $13.77 last month and quite likely will beat that amount in October. I literally haven't touched the site since April so I don't know if the website is a late bloomer or is just heavily season dependent at this point.

I need $58/month profit for the website to be considered profitable with all the money and time invested in it so far. I'll monitor it and see if gets anywhere close to $58/month. If it starts to seem promising, I'll possibly try to add more content and grow.

blueboy121 said:

UPDATE - Just broke 1,000 pageviews per month

So just checked my account after a long time. Looks like things are looking up. I broke just above 1,000 pageviews for September. Also made $13.77 last month and quite likely will beat that amount in October. I literally haven't touched the site since April so I don't know if the website is a late bloomer or is just heavily season dependent at this point.

I need $58/month profit for the website to be considered profitable with all the money and time invested in it so far. I'll monitor it and see if gets anywhere close to $58/month. If it starts to seem promising, I'll possibly try to add more content and grow.

View attachment 148916

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good luck

UPDATE - How should I monetize info articles?

My website is finally profitable! I made $39 last month and I'm on track to make $100 this month. You can see in the graph below, I haven't invested any money (or time) into the site since April 2020. I guess the site is a late bloomer. But also my niche is season dependent too.

• Total expenses so far = $1,455 (not including my time spent on the project)
• Total Amazon Affiliate income so far = $169
• Loss = Income - Expenses = $169 - $1,455 = - $1,286
• Site Value = Monthly income x scale factor = $100 x 30 = $3,000
• Net profit so far = Site Value - Loss = $3,000 - $1,286 = $1,714

Of course the above assumed I will continue to have $100/mo profit which I have no idea if I will be able to or not but time will tell. But still either way assuming a scale factor of 30, if I make a minimum of $43 per month, my investment would have paid off! Now I just need to scale it. I have at least 20 more articles that I have keywords selected for but have never had the chance to hire writers and publish them.

Amazon affiliate is the only way I have monetized the website right now. Half of my articles are info articles that are not monetized at all! I need to fix that soon. Not sure where to start with the ad monetization. If you're reading this, let me know what ad monetization services you'd recommend?

Hello, nice journey my friend.

I have one advice for you, before you focus on monetizing ur website or blog, work like hell on content, KW, traffic and growing.

When you have a decent up of results, you can focus on monetizing method.

For example, this month and december, focus on : articles, traffic, optimisation.

Only on January maybe February you can put a new monetization method...

---> And just have a question, could you please send me ur excel or stuff to write your expense and income?

Thanks my friend, and good luck!

I think seeing it growing is the biggest motivation. Great to see you still active. Wish you good luck and will have an eye on your yourney.

Awesome job keep up the good work

As several others have mentioned, you produce some beautiful graphs! (I gotta up my pivot table game)

As a suggestion for monetizing, have you considered commission junction? Sounds like it may be an answer in your case.

Interesting journey, I shall watch the progress! Cheers for sharing

interesting journey. Thanks for share

Don't give up man!

where are you getting your articles from?

mike67000 said:

Hello, nice journey my friend.

I have one advice for you, before you focus on monetizing ur website or blog, work like hell on content, KW, traffic and growing.

When you have a decent up of results, you can focus on monetizing method.

For example, this month and december, focus on : articles, traffic, optimisation.

Only on January maybe February you can put a new monetization method...

---> And just have a question, could you please send me ur excel or stuff to write your expense and income?

Thanks my friend, and good luck!

Click to expand...

Yeah let me remove private info and get that posted in the next post.

Suh do Nym said:

As several others have mentioned, you produce some beautiful graphs! (I gotta up my pivot table game)

As a suggestion for monetizing, have you considered commission junction? Sounds like it may be an answer in your case.

Click to expand...

Thanks! The graphs take a lot of fidgeting before they look this lol. Regarding commission junction, that would only be like affiliate links to certain products right? I was thinking of in content relevant display ads. I've started with media.net ads. Three ads (top of page, after 7th paragraph, and bottom of page) on all of my info articles. No revenue yet but I don't think I even have enough traffic on those articles for display ad revenue anyways. I'll be monitoring it in the next week.

mdtanos said:

where are you getting your articles from?

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I explain my content strategy in a previous post in this thread. Use this link to check it out: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/m...o-starting-from-scratch.1217022/post-13081015

UPDATE - I share my expenses/income pivot graphs TEMPLATE

A lot of you guys have asked about the expense/income graph I keep sharing on here (see below for an example). I decided to share with you guys a template of the google sheet file I use to make these. I'm not sure how useful you will find it unless you delve into the PivotTable options to figure it all out. You also might find some value in the list of every single expense I had on this job except my own job with their dates (see below for a snippet of it).

See this link for the google sheet template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a0R_g323MYz5OHZpORLDkoyfNcvsX4uXtXbUn7n8fiw/edit?usp=sharing

This might sound silly but I actually got excited when I saw your excel graphs and tables. I do the same for my site... My primary day job requires me to essentially live on excel. To be quite honest that's the one skill I have significantly developed while working there that transfers into my real life. I can comfortably say I have spreadsheets and pivot tables for just about everything in my life now. I mean, if you cant measure it, how can you improve it?

ps. Great journey, hoping to achieve some similar results.

UPDATE - Reached $243/mo. and 6,500 pageviews/mo!!

Things are looking up. My rankings keep rising and so does the pageviews and affiliate income. The display ads have barely made any income tho. Also Amazon Canada hasn't brought anything in since the first couple of sales.

END OF YEAR SUMMARY
Total Invested = $1,510
Total Income = $ 445

End of year monthly income = $234 / mo.
Scale factor = 30
End of year value of website = 30 x $234 = $7,040

End of year profit = website value + total income - total invested
= $7,040 + $445 - $1,510
= $5,975

If I were to sell my website today my ROI would be = profit / investment = $5,975 / $1,510 = 395% ROI

The ROI number above doesn't have much value because it doesn't factor in the following:
1- All the time I spent on setting up the website which would need to be converted in to labor costs
2- The website may not have consistent $234/mo. income because my niche is season dependent. So I may be over valuing the website

But in any case, I am about half to my goal of $500/mo. passive income cash flow through one niche site. I have a couple other business ideas being currently implemented so that's why I have barely spent any additional time on this for the last 6 months. But at least 2020 has shown me that Amazon affiliate niche websites are still definitely profitable and that I should spend more time and money into for 2021!

Goals for 2021

• Add 20 more articles to the 40 current articles on the website
• Re-write and expand on 20 to 30 of my current articles that need to rank higher
• Reach my goal of consistent $500/mo. affiliate income
• Figure out how to better monetize info articles
• Reach over 15k pageviews per month for the whole website
• Purchase more link building packages and get more guest posts
• Start expanding into keywords that are harder to rank for