[Successful Journey] Scaling Amazon Affiliate from $1000/m to $10k
- Thread starter Bloooop
- Start date
christinebarrowstk
Registered Member
- Oct 16, 2021
- 53
- 17
I wish you good luck. Starting time is the hardest time!
ANewBeginning
Banned - Scamming
- May 13, 2021
- 1,040
- 721
Just keep scaling what you do, mate.
You just need to do what you did 140x and you are there!
D
Deleted member 1544059
Guest
Nice post/journey. Love to see your dedication and openness
erlingcremintm
Registered Member
- Oct 17, 2021
- 59
- 24
Good luck
Bloooop
Regular Member
- Apr 29, 2014
- 486
- 2,326
Update - End of October Report
This month has been a roller coaster for my personal life. So once again I didn't do anything until some time last week where I pushed through and wrote a single article for my second site.
Everything else has just been left to run its course. As such, there's hardly much to say in this update so it'll be quick.
Let's start with the penalized site AKA project BBO.
Traffic Report:
Traffic went down 16% last month. However, I'm seeing good movements for a few keywords I lost earlier after the initial Product Reviews update. A few keywords even started ranking #1 or #3 but it didn't translate into more traffic.
Granted the niche is outside of the peak traffic period which is between March-September.
Over the past months, I was looking at the number of keywords I'm ranking for and trying to compare it to the initial ranking phase of the site (October to December last year) and I think I'm not making as much as I was back then. I'd attribute that to the fact that Google took away a lot of e-commerce keywords.
At the end of the day, I don't think there's much that can be done to recover this site unless it recovers by itself. Until then I'm not touching it as that'd be a big waste of time.
Here's a look at the SERP tracker for the keywords I monitor:
PS. A good portion of the keywords are e-commerce terms and I'm ranking highly for Best XYZ terms or Review terms. I also lost a few spots for info keywords but I seem to be gaining back those slowly.
Moving on to the Second Site:
For those who don't remember, this is the site I started shortly after seeing success with my first one. I didn't do anything with it because the niche required a stronger domain and since I'm not a pro on backlinks I left it for a while.
After building the site on an Expired domain(first try) and seeing success with that too I decided to finally work on this one since I was sure I'd be making $10k with both sites.
If things worked out, I'd surely be making $10k since the other one would be making at least 7k/month and this one is currently making 4-5k per month.
But no use crying over spilled milk.
Luckily my dreams are still possible if everything works out this month and I get to sell this site. If I get just one more month of earnings over $4k I'll be good to list it and get it sold which I think shouldn't be an issue.
The site is built on an extremely brandable domain, 0 backlinks built, 1 niche relevant 301 redirect that is extremely clean, 100+ high-quality articles with excellent conversion rates, 2k+ page views per month, not yet monetized with ads, great SOPs, and content plan.
So any buyer that gets it can immediately add another $1500-$2000 to the monthly earnings. I think that alone is a good selling point.
Anyway on to the metrics...
Traffic for Last Month:
A few articles are summer-related, so the traffic can be considered peaked for this time of year unless you account for holiday period boosts. But it's not bad. I tweaked one article that saw a boost in traffic shortly after tweaking(adding more content) and I wrote one other article closely related to the one I tweaked. But it isn't indexed yet. Once that one ranks it'll be another 100 views per day easily.
Earnings for Last Month:
Earnings from Ads:
Total Earnings: $6,479
And that's it for October's report. Wish me luck that everything works out and I can sell the second site at the end of the month.
BTW I'm planning to start a local agency if I do get to sell the site so I can have people do my work for me.
All the others require some time and investment.
Within the next two years, I'll be diversifying more into Ads and flipping websites. Initially, I figured if I could make $10k per month I could easily retire in 8 years. But there are more than one ways to skin a cat.
I can also sell 1 website for 120k each year or a single large site for 500k-1mill. So I'm not focusing so much on the monthly earnings anymore. I'm still working towards breaking $10k but building assets that can be sold is a lot easier.
For instance, it takes about 120 articles to build a site making $3k depending on the niche and monetization. This can be achieved within 3 months then letting it age for 8 months or so. However, it'll take 2-3 years to build an asset generating $10k per month and at least 200+ articles with great links going to the site.
Without capital and being tolerant of the risks involved with SEO it'll be harder to make it to $10k than it would be to make a site making $1-3k.
So as it stands, I theoretically have one asset worth $200k that I intend to list for sale at the end of the month. Once that is off my hands I'll take the capital, start an agency and buy a few sites making $100-$500/month and scale those to $3k.
I'll do this while working on my other projects to provide cash flow.
The goal is to be able to list a site for sale every 3 to six months within 2 years then take the earnings and repeat the process until buying a few real estate properties. If I sell 10 sites for over 100k I'll be set to retire in my country.
The sites can be either monetized through affiliate or display ads. Display ads are more secure, but affiliate sites earn more with less work and time.
This month has been a roller coaster for my personal life. So once again I didn't do anything until some time last week where I pushed through and wrote a single article for my second site.
Everything else has just been left to run its course. As such, there's hardly much to say in this update so it'll be quick.
Let's start with the penalized site AKA project BBO.
Traffic Report:
Traffic went down 16% last month. However, I'm seeing good movements for a few keywords I lost earlier after the initial Product Reviews update. A few keywords even started ranking #1 or #3 but it didn't translate into more traffic.
Granted the niche is outside of the peak traffic period which is between March-September.
Over the past months, I was looking at the number of keywords I'm ranking for and trying to compare it to the initial ranking phase of the site (October to December last year) and I think I'm not making as much as I was back then. I'd attribute that to the fact that Google took away a lot of e-commerce keywords.
At the end of the day, I don't think there's much that can be done to recover this site unless it recovers by itself. Until then I'm not touching it as that'd be a big waste of time.
Here's a look at the SERP tracker for the keywords I monitor:
PS. A good portion of the keywords are e-commerce terms and I'm ranking highly for Best XYZ terms or Review terms. I also lost a few spots for info keywords but I seem to be gaining back those slowly.
Moving on to the Second Site:
For those who don't remember, this is the site I started shortly after seeing success with my first one. I didn't do anything with it because the niche required a stronger domain and since I'm not a pro on backlinks I left it for a while.
After building the site on an Expired domain(first try) and seeing success with that too I decided to finally work on this one since I was sure I'd be making $10k with both sites.
If things worked out, I'd surely be making $10k since the other one would be making at least 7k/month and this one is currently making 4-5k per month.
But no use crying over spilled milk.
Luckily my dreams are still possible if everything works out this month and I get to sell this site. If I get just one more month of earnings over $4k I'll be good to list it and get it sold which I think shouldn't be an issue.
The site is built on an extremely brandable domain, 0 backlinks built, 1 niche relevant 301 redirect that is extremely clean, 100+ high-quality articles with excellent conversion rates, 2k+ page views per month, not yet monetized with ads, great SOPs, and content plan.
So any buyer that gets it can immediately add another $1500-$2000 to the monthly earnings. I think that alone is a good selling point.
Anyway on to the metrics...
Traffic for Last Month:
A few articles are summer-related, so the traffic can be considered peaked for this time of year unless you account for holiday period boosts. But it's not bad. I tweaked one article that saw a boost in traffic shortly after tweaking(adding more content) and I wrote one other article closely related to the one I tweaked. But it isn't indexed yet. Once that one ranks it'll be another 100 views per day easily.
Earnings for Last Month:
Earnings from Ads:
Total Earnings: $6,479
And that's it for October's report. Wish me luck that everything works out and I can sell the second site at the end of the month.
BTW I'm planning to start a local agency if I do get to sell the site so I can have people do my work for me.
I see an opportunity available for the second expired domain I bought. I'm going to be testing it out this month and over the next few months to see what will happen.
All the others require some time and investment.
Affiliates will always be there as long as there are products, it might not be amazon but something else will exist. So I'm not completely abandoning the affiliate business model.
Within the next two years, I'll be diversifying more into Ads and flipping websites. Initially, I figured if I could make $10k per month I could easily retire in 8 years. But there are more than one ways to skin a cat.
I can also sell 1 website for 120k each year or a single large site for 500k-1mill. So I'm not focusing so much on the monthly earnings anymore. I'm still working towards breaking $10k but building assets that can be sold is a lot easier.
For instance, it takes about 120 articles to build a site making $3k depending on the niche and monetization. This can be achieved within 3 months then letting it age for 8 months or so. However, it'll take 2-3 years to build an asset generating $10k per month and at least 200+ articles with great links going to the site.
Without capital and being tolerant of the risks involved with SEO it'll be harder to make it to $10k than it would be to make a site making $1-3k.
So as it stands, I theoretically have one asset worth $200k that I intend to list for sale at the end of the month. Once that is off my hands I'll take the capital, start an agency and buy a few sites making $100-$500/month and scale those to $3k.
I'll do this while working on my other projects to provide cash flow.
The goal is to be able to list a site for sale every 3 to six months within 2 years then take the earnings and repeat the process until buying a few real estate properties. If I sell 10 sites for over 100k I'll be set to retire in my country.
The sites can be either monetized through affiliate or display ads. Display ads are more secure, but affiliate sites earn more with less work and time.
Do that for 3-4 months and you'll be making similar figures if you do things right.
Research and experience. I've explained more details throughout the journey.
You can for sure. I was at that point too. Everyone starts from nothing. I used to look at people making 3k and thought how amazing it would be so I worked hard and gained knowledge while working and here I am. Now I'm looking at people making $30k-100k and thinking how amazing that would be so I'm working hard towards that again.
Two.
ranga
Senior Member
- Aug 9, 2009
- 800
- 628
My experience in this regard is different, IMHO scaling a site which is out of sandbox to greater highs is much easier than making a new website go from 0 to $3K provided there the site is in a niche which has stuff to discuss. In my case I got stuck in a niche on one of my sites which don't have much more to write about, so going for broader niches from now on.
clientica
Junior Member
- Jul 28, 2021
- 148
- 88
What is the point to run an agency? With your website you are a boss. With cllinets - always a lot of headaches, low margin, you always own something to somebody.
Bloooop
Regular Member
- Apr 29, 2014
- 486
- 2,326
There are ways to vet a niche's potential, particularly through competition research. Granted some niches have much higher difficulty than others and require more investment to rank and as you mentioned there are also a few with limited potential in terms of topic availability. But with experience, you can spot these niches easily. At least with what I know now, spotting the money makers isn't an issue.
But you are right scaling a site out of the sandbox is easier than getting a brand new site going. Most of my sites so far with the exception of the expired domains were allowed to age for about 1 year with some initial content. That definitely had something to do with how quickly they took off.
Still, I don't think it is as difficult as we make it seem. You really just need to crank out 120+ articles as fast as possible and make sure they aren't all over the place(topic clusters, interlinking, relevancy) then do a 301 redirect or leave it to age while adding 1 article a week. In 8 months you are guaranteed $500/month then it'll start doubling every month following that. At least that's been the case with my builds.
My other journey will be a great test to see if that's the case.
Thanks
I'm not doing client work. I'm getting workers to do my own work for me using my processes. Consider getting a VA online just that I'll have more control over their time and what they do day-to-day.
I could hire VAs online but the cost to do so will be in USD and I'd be hiring mostly from third world countries. While if I hire locally (I live in a third-world country) I'd be paying less and in my local currency. At the same time, I will be cloning myself so I can get more work done.
How great it'll work out IDK. I'm trying to train someone on my processes and so far it's really slow. What takes me 30 minutes is taking them 4-5 hours.
It's all in the journey. I've gone over how I write articles and so have most of the other popular journeys. I think @Kikerinka recently gave a quick overview of how to do it and our processes are nearly identical but his guide is more geared towards info content. Nonetheless, the principles are the same and should be applied to every piece of the article.
For the second site, it was a brand new domain that was aged for a year then I spent $800 on the expired domain to 301 redirect. Built on WP with Astra.
clientica
Junior Member
- Jul 28, 2021
- 148
- 88
I have 5 employees. That's ok. They always work slower than me, but I can get rest when they are working. So it's worth it.
I split tasks as simply as possible for employees so they work better. I made all the necessary videos and instructions on how to get things done, so I don't have to explain it again and again to each employee.
I wish you good luck with scaling.
Unfortunately, I am living in an expensive city so I cant open an office here, all my teammates work remotely.
carewebsoft
Banned - Shitlisted and did not do the right thing
- Oct 26, 2021
- 336
- 84
nice journey...keep it up in sharing
Really good journey and it just show that it is possible to rank and do a lot with just being a bit creative but also put in the hard work. I am doing something similar my self but have other goals and I think that I can make it. Right now I am in the starting phase. I got some questions regarding WP.
If you have for example a category called Kitchen appliance, and in there you have a sub-category called Kitchen towels. Then you have a acrticle about best kitchen towels for small kitchen. Do you set it to be shown in both categories? Do you use no-index on the category Kitchen appliance and Kitchen towels or how do you do it? Do you put any meta description on category page?
Also I have more of a general question. My WP website is really slow, it have come to that point that I want to delete it and install everything once again, but not sure how that will effect my posts that I have published a month ago or so. Those posts are not indexed. I would save the content and set up the same url-structure to not loose anything. What is your recommendation?
I asked this on another thread as well, and yes I saw that you mentioned WP-rocket. Is it good to have and is it easy to configure?
If you have for example a category called Kitchen appliance, and in there you have a sub-category called Kitchen towels. Then you have a acrticle about best kitchen towels for small kitchen. Do you set it to be shown in both categories? Do you use no-index on the category Kitchen appliance and Kitchen towels or how do you do it? Do you put any meta description on category page?
Also I have more of a general question. My WP website is really slow, it have come to that point that I want to delete it and install everything once again, but not sure how that will effect my posts that I have published a month ago or so. Those posts are not indexed. I would save the content and set up the same url-structure to not loose anything. What is your recommendation?
I asked this on another thread as well, and yes I saw that you mentioned WP-rocket. Is it good to have and is it easy to configure?
