Total noob Journey from 0 to whatever with Amazon

Hello people,

today im going to finally start my way to earn some € online.
Been reading the forum for weeks now and decided its finally time to start and do something instead of just read, think, abandon, repeat.

My plan is to grow enough monthly income to make a living off it within 2 years.
First project will be an amazon niche website.

Problem is, im a total noob with everything regarding IM.
Im an IT guy tho, but my focus is on hardware and server/network management.

I write this Journey to be some help to other total noobs out there, as well as some kind of self-motivation to keep going.

To clarify how much noob i am: I saw the Backend of WP for the first time around 1 week ago.
I have no clue what im doing, and i mean literally no clue. Will just start and use this forum for a solution when a problem occurs and see how thing will work out for me.

So this journey will not only contain seo, monetization, niche finding etc, i will also spend alot of time getting used to WP, any tools and sites i need to use and so on.

I will try to spend as much time as possible with this project, but i also have a normal 40h job and a family etc. There might be days where i will update this journey 10 times a day and then there might be a week without posting anything at all.

Already have an US based hosting plan and domain, i will use for testing before i buy a local plan and domain (.de)

This was pretty much just the introduction, i will start now and write the first update later.

Good Luck! I am in the very same boat as you, I will follow and maybe we can learn together?

Good luck with your journey man!

Good luck for your journey bro.

best of luck man. wp has a bit of a learning curve not too hard though if you know php from messing with servers. I'd look toward other forums such as stackoverflow or wordpress for tech support. Probably get faster answers there.

Good luck to your journey !!!

Good luck on your journey!

Don't forget to read and understand Amazon affiliate TOS (or search Google for bloggers that have posts on that topic). There are some really important things that you should, which will keep your Amazon account safe.

Good luck on your journey. I am pretty much on the same noob level as you. Working on my first amazon niche site and still learning even basic things about SEO and wordpress. Hopefully it will be done in a week and I can start driving traffic.

thanks for your support and tips guys
im at work currently, will post first update when im at home.

pisnami said:

Don't forget to read and understand Amazon affiliate TOS (or search Google for bloggers that have posts on that topic). There are some really important things that you should, which will keep your Amazon account safe.

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yes, i have heard about that already. also need to inform myself a bit about german law about such things, it tends to be strict when it comes to advertising things

First Update

Alright, yesterday i started to get used to WP. I guess its pretty simple once you get used to it, however i find the Menu/Site/Article management a bit inconvenient.
Was searching for a good theme i could start with but non pleased me, so i just grabbed the 2013 theme and started to modify it on my own.
Iinstalled the "TS Widged Pack" and "Visitor Traffic Real Time Statistics" plugins (anyone knows a good alternative for latter? i find it pretty featureless and the "go pro now" ads are annoying af)

In another thread user "judaculla" adviced me to work alot with templates, which sounds logic to me.
So i started to customize the site, filled it with placeholder content and a basic menu/site/article structure, so i could use this template site as a blueprint for every new site im going to create in future.

When the template site was more or less complete, i decided to apply for amazon partner program already.
They told me it takes up to 48 hours until my site gets checked and either approved or denied, but i recieved an "Your Application has been accepted" email literally one minute after registering there. is that normal or just luck?

Today i will spend my time on refining my website template and finding an easy way to modify some color shemes etc when i just copy/paste it for any new project i start, so every new site would still look a bit "unique". Any suggestions?
If i find the time i will also play around with amazon ads a bit to see whats possible for me.

By the way, are there any must have plugins for WP i should be gettin asap?

Cheers

I found it was easy to get accepted to the Amazon program, but when I made my first commission they checked my site and closed my account, citing a lack of content on some pages. I had some product pages where there was only a picture and brief description of an Amazon product with a link, because I hadn't finished filling out all the descriptions.

As for plugins, for a new site I usually install WP Smush for image compression, Child Theme Configurator (just helpful for managing files when creating a child theme, you can always do this manually), W3 Total Cache (settings need to be tweaked from the default), Yoast SEO, All In One WP Security, and if using Google Analytics I like having Google Analytics Dashboard for WP. Perhaps also Contact Form 7 or similar, Guerrilla's Legal Pages (for Terms of Use and Privacy Policy), and particularly considering your location you might want to check out something like WF Cookie Consent.

Congrats, and thank you for the first update. Please keep more coming .

If you need help with your german sites I can help you out. I am running german amazon affiliate sites by myself.

I will keep reading your journey becase is good good luck and nice day

Great,Congrats, and thank you for the first update. Please keep more coming

thanks again guys

Chrischa said:

If you need help with your german sites I can help you out. I am running german amazon affiliate sites by myself.

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Nice, how successful is it going for you?

slidings said:

I found it was easy to get accepted to the Amazon program, but when I made my first commission they checked my site and closed my account, citing a lack of content on some pages. I had some product pages where there was only a picture and brief description of an Amazon product with a link, because I hadn't finished filling out all the descriptions.

As for plugins, for a new site I usually install WP Smush for image compression, Child Theme Configurator (just helpful for managing files when creating a child theme, you can always do this manually), W3 Total Cache (settings need to be tweaked from the default), Yoast SEO, All In One WP Security, and if using Google Analytics I like having Google Analytics Dashboard for WP. Perhaps also Contact Form 7 or similar, Guerrilla's Legal Pages (for Terms of Use and Privacy Policy), and particularly considering your location you might want to check out something like WF Cookie Consent.

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Thanks for the warning, will keep that in mind.
Will check these plugins out!


Update 2

Found a good way for my blueprint plan, using the plugin "Duplicator". It copies my entire WP and packs it into a zip and creates a php installer script. just need to upload the blueprint zip/script on any new webspace, run the script and be done.
Yesterday i bought a local webhosting plan and a domain. Unfortunately there were some problems with the provider so i couldnt work on my new webspace.
Used the free time finding a niche.
BHW has so many threads about this topic and i felt kinda overwhelmed.
On some German blogs people recommend using Market Samurai, so i gave it a try with the trial version.
I must say im totally not impressed by this tool. It 1) is slow AF 2) crashes or freezes constantly and 3) overwhelmed me even more.
Then just decided to stick with google Trends, Adword planer and manual google search to check competition on the first page.

Finally found my niche in the beauty section, got 2 main keywords with 61k and 33k searches, 2 long tails with 5.4k and 3.6k searches. manually checked the competition.
The 61k keyword has a pretty decent competition, mostly local (city based) beauty stores, one amazon aff site and one beauty magazine.
The 33k keyword is incredibly spammed with amazon aff sites, but they all look really bad, either totally blown up or just looking incredibly dubious.
For the long tails it looks pretty much the same, so i will try to rank and get visitors with a slim quality design and to the point information.
No idea if it will work but i want to get started before im stuck in "read, think, abandon, repeat" again.

The pricing of my niche products is between 20€ and 100€. Probably could be better but i guess its enough to slowly increase my amazon %.

Next on the plan will be installing some more WP plugins and then getting content for my page.
Im a bit tied between writing the content on my own or getting it done by outsourcing.
A friends GF used to write content for a text trading website, so maybe i can make a deal with her.


Cheers

I just started with 2 sites a few weeks ago. So basically I am still learning a lot about SEO etc. I also think I picked a wrong niche/keywords. I will start a third site in the next days and I think it will perform a bit better

Chrischa said:

I just started with 2 sites a few weeks ago. So basically I am still learning a lot about SEO etc. I also think I picked a wrong niche/keywords. I will start a third site in the next days and I think it will perform a bit better

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I see I have vacation from 12th Sep on so maybe i will find some time to catch up with you, so we can share experiences and information

careful with overdoing the plug-ins. kills load time unless you have a dedicated webhost. The hard wp codex way is usually the correct way. Just make sure you back up your shit via github/dropbox/drive or w/e.

Best of luck buddy.