My first ever IM journey. Amazon Affiliate Site to $1000/month

ThaiDreamer said:

Hola amigos y amigas!

I haven't updated the thread in the last Q of 2021, so it's about time.

And the big news is...

My first IM journey has turned out to be a success!

When I first started this thread in January 2020, my goal was to reach $1,000 of passive (or semi-passive) income in 2 years.

The goal was reached in November 2021 and vastly surpassed in December 2021, which makes the journey complete!

However, I'm just getting started...

But let me first show you the results for the last 2 months of the year that contributed to me reaching the goal.

/November 2021/​

Because of Black Friday, I was kinda hoping that this could be the month that the goal was reached.

And I was right

• Traffic

November turned out to be the best month traffic-wise (outwith the following December that outdone it).

The website had over 21k organic users + additional 2k organic users that aren't included in the pic below because for some reason Google indexed some pages with the "RSS" and is showing the traffic in the "Other" source in GA.

Total organic users: approx 23k.

View attachment 197846

• Sales

Yay! November reaches the 2-year goal!

I made just over $1,000 across three Amazon markets which made me incredibly happy.

Total earnings: $1,015
RPOV (Revenue-Per-Organic-Visit): $0,4

View attachment 197847

• Content

In the month of November, 8 articles were added, with an average of 2934 words per article.

Total words added: 24961

View attachment 197848

/December 2021/
​

Quite frankly, December exceeded my expectations as I noted a 50% growth in my earnings compared to November which surpassed my end-of-the-year goal by 50% as well.

• Traffic

Again, December proved to be the best month traffic-wise to date. The site recorded over 23k organic users + 3,5k organic users from the RSS channel (again, not sure why Google does it. Can someone explain?)

Total organic users: approx. 26,5k

View attachment 197849

• Sales

As already mentioned, the December earnings result surpassed my goal by 50% and although I'm an optimist, I was positively surprised by the result.

Total earnings: $1,551
RPOV: $0,06

View attachment 197850

• Content

The content result is very akin to November which I was happy with as that meant consistency on my side.

In total, 8 articles were added, totaling 25,246 words with an average of 3,156 words per article.

View attachment 197851

/Overall Site Stats After 2 Years/​

All right, so how does my website look after 2 years of more-or-less regular work?

• aHrefs

View attachment 197852

• GSC (last 3 months)

View attachment 197853

• Google Analytics (last 2 years - monthly)

View attachment 197854

• Content

/What's Next?/

Well, I couldn't have been happier with the fact that for once I stuck to my plan and achieved my goals. Consistent work does really pay off!

I wish I updated the journey more often but the mere fact that I put it on here kept me motivated to keep going, so thanks BLACKHATWORLD, I guess!

A new year just started and I have high hopes for the website but also some worries!

If you've read my thread, you know that I'm struggling badly with getting new articles indexed. The November and December results could have been so much more impressive if it wasn't for this issue!

In short, since around July, I've been experiencing super slow indexation of new articles on my site. There's no rule to this: some articles index in a couple of weeks but most take forever (I still have some August articles yet to be indexed!).

I've been scratching my head what can be the cause of this and so far I've done the following:

• Vastly improved my website performance

After Google rolled out their Core Web Vitals, I had issues with many of my pages regarding speed. I wasn't paying much attention to it till this week when I considerably improved my site's performance with the help of WP Rocket and @nSnoopy (thanks, mate!)

My current website performance looks like this:

Desktop:

View attachment 197857

Mobile:

After finishing the work with speed performance, I asked Google to verify the Core Web Vitals via GSC. It says it takes 28 days for the verification so I'm waiting.

• Put more effort into link-building

For 2 years I focused mostly on content, but now I want to pump more link juice into the site, particularly to the Root Domain as I've heard this may help the cause, too.

• Increased the number of internal links

I published more internal links pointing to the unindexed pages, hoping this will speed up the process.

If you have more ideas on what I can do to get the pages indexed quicker, please let me know!

/Plans for 2022/

Okay, if you've made it that far, you might as well learn about what are my goals for the new year!

• Treble my earnings by December 2022 (the result must reach $4,500)
• Treble my organic traffic by December 2022 (the result must reach 79,5k)
• Publish 500,000 new words (approx. 155 new articles)
• Diversify my income stream: apply for platforms such as Ezoic
• Reach $200 income per month on two new websites I just bought domains for
• Update this journey more often!

I wish you all a Happy New Year. Let it be better than the last one!

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dlyhai said:

What kind of articles mainly bring sales？ best...?
What backlinks do you recommend to buy?
You do very great

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ThaiDreamer said:

Hi mate, thanks for the reply.

a) I wouldn't say I worked on my site "every day" but I tried to reach between 800-1000 words of written content daily (monthly average). During the 2 years, I only published around 30k words of outsourced content.

b) Elementor is of course not necessary but it helped me design the pages the way I wanted them to look. Now researching more about it, I'm thinking about moving away from it as it's not the lightest of theme builders. At the moment, though, I'm sticking with it as the current page speed performance is really good.

c) Regarding the Amazon re-application, unfortunately, I had to start all over again in the sense that I needed to deliver the first 3 (or 5 - don't remember) sales for them to review my site. The problem was the images I was using. I think to stay on the safe side, I bought an Amazon affiliate plugin already before applying 2nd time. To this day I'm using Amazlinks Pro and I'm really satisfied with it.

d) Thanks but I think backlinks are my weakest point at this stage, hence I want to concentrate more on improving the profile this year. I didn't build a lot of backlinks as I didn't have much budget. Nowadays, I try to spend up to $200 monthly on improving the backlink profile.

My favorite method is to scan competitors for their backlinks and pick out sites I like (good DR and a good amount of organic traffic). I then contact the website regarding a guest post opportunity. If they say they only accept paid posts, I ask for prices for a new article and a niche edit of an existing article.

Then I proceed to scan these websites for articles related to my niche and usually pick the one with the biggest amount of juice (most referring domains and most organic traffic). In the end, I made a decision whether to purchase a fresh article or add a link to an existing one depending on the price difference and the quality of the existing article (again, the number of RD and organic traffic it has).

I also do some forum links.

e) The informational-to-money article ratio is around 10-90 right now. I focus mostly on money articles but I try to make them as informational as possible too.

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ThaiDreamer said:

By far the best converting articles are buying guides.

ie. Best xxx Under yyy

The backlinks question I answered a few posts earlier.

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dlyhai said:

Do you focus on a niche or lots of different niches? thanks
you put price on there like under $1000, amazon will not ban your account?

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xstyle said:

Thanks for the detailed answer. Hope you will share more knowledge and some motivating screenshots of earnings and traffic.

Do you feel that GSC is not always accurate? My website is new but I see that I have 6 clicks one day in GSC, but when I check the result tab, I only see 1 click and 1 impression for a maybe 2 keywords, that makes it to 2 click, so 4 click is missing. What is your thoughts about this? I also dont see the serach queries in Google Analytics, not sure why.

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spectrejoe said:

What are you using to redirect Canada users to Canada Amazon and such?

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ThaiDreamer said:

Nothing special, using Amazon's OneLink feature. Far from perfect but don't know anything better.

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spectrejoe said:

What are you using to redirect Canada users to Canada Amazon and such?

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ThaiDreamer said:

Nothing special, using Amazon's OneLink feature. Far from perfect but don't know anything better.

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Thomas Shelby said:

Check out geniuslink, for me, OneLink sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, and I think it won't work if users have Adblocker.

They also tell you in the dashboard if the product is out of stock.

Congrats on your earnings btw! I will be watching this thread.

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spectrejoe said:

Didn't know that existed damn, been missing out on some extra profits I guess. I just signed up for .CA and .CO.UK however, once I link my .com to those 2 accounts, do I need to change existing links or is it automatically adapted?

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ThaiDreamer said:

Nothing special, using Amazon's OneLink feature. Far from perfect but don't know anything better.

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Thomas Shelby said:

Check out https://geniuslink.com/, for me, OneLink sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, and I think it won't work if users have Adblocker.

They also tell you in the dashboard if the product is out of stock.

Congrats on your earnings btw! I will be watching this thread.

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Hoangpro said:

Dear sir, i am sorry but can you help me anwers this question. I am using geniuslink but on geniuslink report i got 16 clicks and on amazon association i see only 5 clicks. What wrong with this and how can i fix it? Thank you.

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Thomas Shelby said:

Maybe on Amazon, they only count unique clicks?

It's better to ask geniuslink support instead, so they have better answers.

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