Thulf's Amazon Affiliate Niche Site Journey

Hi BHW. Glad to be here in 2019!

A little background for the sake of this journey:
I joined BHW in September, 2017. Before that, I had started to look into making money online via get paid to programs (pay per click sites, survey sites, transcription sites, etc) at around the summer of 2016. I got fed up with peanuts in exchange for my precious time in this life. Having made over 100 € like that, before the summer in 2017, I figured I'd take a risk and start a porn tube site following a guide on another forum. In short, it failed... I worked on it for 5 months until I gave up on it. I had learnt enough to see that it was going nowhere.


However, with this newfound knowledge from a failed attempt, I started my first (and only) Amazon affiliate niche site in 5th of April, 2018. I had signed up for all the IM forums and watched all the gurus I could find by that time. Doug Cunnington and Income School guys along with r/juststart and BHW journey section proved most influential. However, I've been SUPER unavailable and I was able to work on the site only a little bit for this entire year that has passed now...

How the affiliate site got started:
Instead of a poor quality shared hosting I used for the tube site, for the affiliate site I opted for a VPS from Vultr along with FREE hosting by ServerPilot (they're not free any longer, but my free contract still stands - lucky me!). Though I made the mistake of going with Godaddy for the domain because they offered the best deal at that time... With wordpress being the core platform, I was ready to start the affilliate site.

How I chose the topic/keyword:
I ordered a keyword package from this forum here, from the diamond guy, I think, the cheapest package (because I didn't have all that much hope for this new journey either). The package provided me with a relatively common seasonal outdoor sports topic with keyword research I had absolutely no use for in all actuality (due to the SEO strategy I went with).

What's my SEO strategy then?
My SEO strategy, if one can call it that, is all about content & interlinking power. I write about everything related to the main topic I think people would need to be aware of whether they want it or not (in an on-page SEO friendly way of course). I don't care that nobody is actually searching nor caring for most of that stuff, Google does.
I'm guessing it's something to do with Medic update and the whole authority thing, but that's just a piece of a crazy theory of mine. The bigger picture is quite simple tbh... And then I write about the thing people with their little attention spans do care about, AND I interlink the crap out of it on top of all things!

And hows the affiliate site doing now then?
Since I haven't had the chance to work much on the site, it's not doing as great as its potential (I think) is. If I had to judge how "complete" the site is, I'd say it's 8% done.

How's that 8% working out for me thus far, you may be wondering... I'm satisfied, all things considered.

As of April, 2019:

Expenses:

• 1 domains: approx $32 (March, 2018 - March, 2020)
• VPS: $70 ($23.85 left of that $70, approx $3.60 per month)
• Outsourced content: $238
• Total: $340 (304 €)

Earnings:

• Amazon Affiliate program: 336.72 €

This month, May, 2019, is already over 200 € and is likely going to be around 300 € due to seasonality.

Nice one mate, looks like you're already doing well.

What's your total word count so far approximately?

P.s. office space is a great film!

jamie3000 said:

Nice one mate, looks like you're already doing well.

What's your total word count so far approximately?

P.s. office space is a great film!

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The total wordcount is exactly 100,836. It's actually mentioned on the picture of a speadsheet just above the Google Analytics pictures.

Thulf said:

The total wordcount is exactly 100,836. It's actually mentioned on the picture of a speadsheet just above the Google Analytics pictures.

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Ah yes I see now. Your bounce rate seems quite high? Any reason why that might be? I know every niche / site is different.

I also love the film office space. Hood luck with your journey.

davids355 said:

I also love the film office space. Hood luck with your journey.

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When they smash that printer up in the field haha

jamie3000 said:

Ah yes I see now. Your bounce rate seems quite high? Any reason why that might be? I know every niche / site is different.

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That's a good question.

I can't put a finger on it decicively, but if I was to ponder and wonder, I hope it's because the visitor got their answer without needing to surf around for more.

Since it's an affiliate site, most of the content is review posts. These review posts are around 3000 words long and entail absolutely everything I think needed to be said about said product. It's not one of those fluffly blog posts type reviews one can find all over the internet. I think or at least hope that I've managed to meticulously structure the review type content in a way that's easy to skim through in order to find the information the visitor particularly would want to find out about as quickly as possible. I don't think the high bounce rate could come from visitor hitting the back button due to not finding something right off the bat and choosing another article. Most of those review posts rank for the first position on Google and there are only a handful that rank for other spots on the first page other than the 1st spot.

Though I might be totally wrong and it might be what I fear the most - a visitor hitting that back button due to some negative reaction seeing my content the way it it.

Good luck, OP! Looks like you're already on the right track.

Since you're profiting, it's just a matter of growing the process from here

Love that spreadsheet. Will use this system myself as well from now on to keep an eye on things
And i must say, impressive work man, posts like this help me to stay patient and on track, so thank you for that (second month building my own aff site)
As far as the Seo goes, you have not done any link building?
Wish you all the best and more success on your journey!

Seeme like you are doing quite well. But 100k words seems quite a lot honestly.

shantanuvarun said:

Seeme like you are doing quite well. But 100k words seems quite a lot honestly.

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Gone are the days of thin affiliate websites with spun content. If you want to make money in the long run you need to put in the effort, time and money.

How come traffic crashed after July 2018? How many backlinks have you built and what kind of backlinks?

davids355 said:

I also love the film office space. Hood luck with your journey.

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Thanks!

Aluminium said:

Good luck, OP! Looks like you're already on the right track.
Thanks!

Since you're profiting, it's just a matter of growing the process from here

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I've felt that way myself.

Ever since I found confirmation for myself that making money online wasn't a hoax and not even "hard work" as is tossed around so very often, which I still struggle with in a way (since it's actually so bloody easy to make money online, I'm still in conflict with this fact, given that people I know have almost no clue about the online economy of sorts and work so hard down the traditional lines either by emplyees or the employers in a small physical company they took the massive risk to set up just to make a living... Doing it online feels sooooooooooo risk free and, honestly, in comparison, easy even.)

vk.cigar said:

Love that spreadsheet. Will use this system myself as well from now on to keep an eye on things
And i must say, impressive work man, posts like this help me to stay patient and on track, so thank you for that (second month building my own aff site)
As far as the Seo goes, you have not done any link building?
Wish you all the best and more success on your journey!

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I found the spreadsheet style of documenting one's journey from the r/juststart and adapted it myself as well. It painted the whole big picture so nicely I even got tired, much to my surprise, of reading the fluffly blog post style journeys in comparison.

Thanks by the way, and good luck with yours.

shantanuvarun said:

Seeme like you are doing quite well. But 100k words seems quite a lot honestly.

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You say that, but I've been following some of the other success stories where they brag about doing 100k in just a single month or less and going over $1000 in just the same.

Dark Sky said:

How come traffic crashed after July 2018? How many backlinks have you built and what kind of backlinks?

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It's a summer seasonal outdoors sports niche.

If one was to connect the timeline with the traffic potential from the few first posts the site had at that time compared to now, it speaks volumes what the summer this time around might turn out to be. It's gonna spike again.

And when it comes to backlinks, I've built none. Not a single backlink. It's just the power of interlinking.

The way I've worked it out is that I've written lots of very detailed info pieces related to the niche (whether people are actually searching for it or not - nothing goes to waste). And when I mention some aspect of the product in the actual review itself, I link to the very detailed info piece that explains it as it's own set of content package. In this way, I turn a 3000-word review post into a 100,000-word valuable content mix minus the words from most other review posts. The review is focused to be skimmable yet thorough, allowing the reader to learn more in much detail only if they wished to - since I hate the blog post type reviews myself, I didn't make my visitors go through the pain of having to read the fluff that's essentially a transition to some other topic within the review just to maybe find out if in that block of bloody text is the answer they've been interested in either by themselves or sparked by something they just read.

Thulf said:

I ordered a keyword package from this forum here, from the diamond guy, I think, the cheapest package (because I didn't have all that much hope for this new journey either). The package provided me with a relatively common seasonal outdoor sports topic with keyword research I had absolutely no use for in all actuality (due to the SEO strategy I went with).

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Which package did you take may i know? btw great journey.

watchdogseo said:

Which package did you take may i know? btw great journey.

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I must admit I remembered it wrong. It was not "the diamond guy" who provided the keyword package service. It was namhq89.

The confusion came from the packages he called different color "diamonds". Red diamond packages, silver packages, etc.

The provider has since been deleted or something. His profile and his thread brings me to an error page with the page not found.

example: blackhatworld. com /seo/money-back-guarantee-let-me- find-you-the-right-keywords-to-dominate-your-niche

Thulf said:

I must admit I remembered it wrong. It was not "the diamond guy" who provided the keyword package service. It was namhq89.

The confusion came from the packages he called different color "diamonds". Red diamond packages, silver packages, etc.

The provider has since been deleted or something. His profile and his thread brings me to an error page with the page not found.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/money-back-guarantee-let-me-find-you-the-right-keywords-to-dominate-your-niche

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I think that is his old thread mate, as I ordered from him a month ago, same package. Think his new thread is called "amazon keyword snatcher"

You've got a great results so far. Wish you good luck! Following...

Do you write content on your own?

Looks promising to me.

Wish you the best of luck

Just curious, how many articles do you have on your site?