Reviving Old Amazon Affiliate Site - $500/Month

I haven't made a journey thread in quite some time. I found this old Amazon Affiliate site that is sitting on a rather strong, expired domain. Good backlinks, and despite me not doing any type of SEO over the last 18 months to the site, it is ranking in the top 40 for keywords with 16,000 searches. Beating out other sites that the owners are clearly doing some extensive SEO. I have decided to pickup this old site, rather than just have it sitting there.

Over the last 18 months I have grown exponentially in SEO and the IM space due to different ventures. With that growth and experience, I have learned how manage my time very well and ensure that I do not waste excess amounts of time on projects that do not pay off. With that being said, I am certain I will be able to dedicate more than enough to this project without wasting a lot of time. Most of the processes I will take for this site will be outsourced. I only really plan on monitoring the site, uploading articles and optimizing pages for keywords.

The site itself is quite old and the domain was never dropped. I bought it a while back, then like many other projects, forgot about. Due to automatic billing the site has stayed in my possession over time.

Things I need to do:
1. Make monthly budget on what I want to spend on the site. This will probably be no more than $200. Creating a monthly budget is often a good idea because you will not get financially burnt out on a project. Having spending goals is just as important as earning goals as it helps visualize the future.

2. Create SEO plan. I plan on a fairly basic SEO strategy at the beginning due to the site being so well aged + plus solid backlinks. Content on the site has been indexed in the SERPs for well over 18 months, which only helps. I will probably do a mix of Paid Links/ PBN / Outreach. For Outreach, I will probably not buy any high DA links, and instead focus on DA 20 - 40 sites that are directly in my niche. This keeps costs down, gives me highly relevant links and they are easier for me to personally acquire.

3. Create content plan. There will be around 5 product guide articles, the rest will be product reviews + informative articles. I am thinking 10 reviews and 10 info articles will do the trick.

4. Post old articles. This was a mistake on my part. Early 2017 I ordered articles for the site, but never got around to posting them.

5. Create sidebar banner. This is really quite simple as I already have a few templates. Just a matter of opening Photoshop, creating it, and then posting it on the site. 20 minute job.

Current Ahrefs stats:
Organic keywords: 360
Organic traffic: 66
Referring domains: 70

Goals:
For this site I will consider it a success once I reach $500 per month. With Amazon Affiliate commissions being low these days, I don't really expect any kind of crazy affiliate money. I may look into using other affiliate sites in the future. For now, Amazon remains the easiest to use.

As long as I stick with it and don't slack off on this project (which sometimes happens for side projects of mine), I should be able to get this done within 4 - 6 months. SEO these days takes time, so I am not expecting any overnight miracles.

Best of luck OP, Just dont give up.

Good Luck.

Best of Luck OP

Best of luck OP. If the site has strong domain and established rankings, you won't find it hard to reach $500/month.

What would be your next goal? Flip it or grow it further?

Awesome, best of luck man!
Looking forward to next update.

Quick Update:

Since Friday I have:
1. Posted Old Articles
2. Created 2 sidebar banners
3. Written 3 guide articles. 3065 words, 2338 words, and 2372 words.

I am writing 1 guide article per day and plan on doing so until all my keywords are used up. I have around 6 left, so 6 more days of writing 1 per day. Easy enough, should get done. I spend around 2 hours per article. This accounts for researching, crafting the headings, optimizing for keywords and re-reading to fix mistakes. For keyword optimization I no longer worry too much about keyword densities anymore and instead focus on fitting in the keywords wherever it is natural. My only keyword density metric I look for is to never have more than 1% for a keyword. Even in a 3000 word article, once it starts getting mentioned too much the content quality takes a hit. I will instead rely on my aged site with good backlinks. As of right now I am having a tough time getting the articles to index in Google, which seems to be a problem many other people are having.

My one problem with the remainder of the articles is that the keywords are kind of competitive, and the products are low cost. Less than $20 for most of them, to make it worthwhile I will have to make my money through volume of sales. Although, due to my goal of $500/month, I would be happy with the low product cost guide articles netting me $100 per month. $1200 per year for a 2 hour time investment is definitely worth the effort.

Going forward I plan to finish those 6 guide articles, coming up with an SEO plan - which won't be difficult, and I plan on starting to write informative articles. Informative articles are great for fleshing out any site and they add relevance to your site in the SERPs. Properly interlinking is a big deal in SEO, so I will take full advantage of that. As I said in the OP, I plan on writing 10 info articles and 10 review articles for starters. I will more than likely write 2 of those articles per day, with each of them being 500 - 800 words. I will also need to add charts and more images to the articles I have already posted.

Until next time!

All the best. Get success quickly.

Quick update:

Since Wednesday I have:
1. Written 5 guide articles. 2494 words, 2864 words, 2420 words, 1505 words, 1539 words. (Total: 10,822)
2. Post all 5 articles

Overall, I am quite happy with the consistency I have kept up with this project. I have 2, maybe 3 guide articles before the guide articles are complete. The two shorter articles are for low competition keywords with only forums and 400 word articles in the SERPs. Once I have finished writing the last 2 - 3 guide articles, I will then go back and add in all of the images, Amazon Affiliate links and charts. I am currently having a hard time getting the articles to index, but I am sure they will soon enough. It is the first time in quite a long time that I am having difficulty with indexation.

Another positive that has happened is on Ahrefs, my keyword rankings have improved. I went from ~320 US keywords to around ~380. Not bad for no backlinks built. Top 40 for keywords that are 3000 - 30000 searches per month.

After the images, charts and links are done, I plan on crafting an SEO plan. It will be rather simple in the beginning. Consisting of mainly foundation links to boost the site up. Thankfully, the site is well aged with good backlinks already in place which will make the process easier overall. Once I get these pesky articles to index, I have a feeling the keywords will begin rolling in. Another thing I plan on doing after finishing up these last 2 articles is to write 10 product reviews and 10 info articles, for starters. These are always good for filling out a site and interlinking - which adds authority.

I am happy with the progress I am making overall.

Until next time!

shafi432 said:

Best of luck OP. If the site has strong domain and established rankings, you won't find it hard to reach $500/month.

What would be your next goal? Flip it or grow it further?

Click to expand...

Forgot to answer this. I would probably want to grow it further for a while and then flip it. Getting to $500 per month with a site is harder than going from $500 to $1000.

are you going down the 2 and 3 tier backlinking method?

Best of luck OP. Wishing you all the luck in the world..

Bookmarked! All the best!

Did this with a affiliate site recently making about the same, it was easy to recover with fresh content and new links. I decided im not going to sell any sites on empire or flippa, the over time value of them is far too valuable, if i dont have time ill just hire a va or someone to keep on top of them rather than sell cheap

All the best. Superb work.

Floopa75 said:

Quick Update:
I am writing 1 guide article per day and plan on doing so until all my keywords are used up. I have around 6 left, so 6 more days of writing 1 per day. Easy enough, should get done. I spend around 2 hours per article. This accounts for researching, crafting the headings, optimizing for keywords and re-reading to fix mistakes. For keyword optimization I no longer worry too much about keyword densities anymore and instead focus on fitting in the keywords wherever it is natural. My only keyword density metric I look for is to never have more than 1% for a keyword. Even in a 3000 word article, once it starts getting mentioned too much the content quality takes a hit. I will instead rely on my aged site with good backlinks. As of right now I am having a tough time getting the articles to index in Google, which seems to be a problem many other people are having.

Click to expand...

I just read that big G is no longer penalizing high keyword density for quality content, so, maybe even that low 1% you are shooting for won't matter.

Now, what makes content quality is to be determined.

Good luck with the journey.

Quick update:

I have since finished all of the articles. I wrote 11 total and it's over 25,000 words. Not too bad, they all have images added as well. I do not currently have Amazon links embedded yet. Since the articles are not ranking high yet, it's not a big deal. There has been an increase in keyword rankings as well. With about a 25% boost in number of US keywords since the last update.

Overall, I am happy with the work done. I managed to get all the articles indexed finally. Now, I plan on waiting a little bit, crafting an SEO plan and getting after it. I will be doing outreach, diversity links and paid links.

redarrow said:

are you going down the 2 and 3 tier backlinking method?

Click to expand...

Probably.

Yarharharharhar said:

I just read that big G is no longer penalizing high keyword density for quality content, so, maybe even that low 1% you are shooting for won't matter.

Now, what makes content quality is to be determined.

Good luck with the journey.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip. I will see how it plays out.