How do Amazon sites get traffic?

11 replies
I am on about Amazon affiliate sites. They generally tend to be review type sites with few other pages of content. I can't imagine they would rank well on Google because they are generally considered thin, affiliate sites. I have seen few examples of successful Amazon sites sold on Flippa. Couple of them generating profits running into thousands a month. Are they utilising PPC traffic. If so, can they make enough in commission from sales over and above the cost of buying the traffic?
#amazon #sites #traffic
  • Profile picture of the author Jonny2spoons
    If they were making a fortune from driving traffic through PPC they wouldn't be selling the website!

    I seriously doubt there is much margin in PPC as an amazon affiliate. SEO is the way I would go, but add lots of unique content to avoid thin content penalties.
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  • Profile picture of the author Nate92
    Originally Posted by Anton543 View Post

    ...I have seen few examples of successful Amazon sites sold on Flippa. Couple of them generating profits running into thousands a month. Are they utilising PPC traffic. If so, can they make enough in commission from sales over and above the cost of buying the traffic?
    First off, like previously mentioned, if they were making thousands a month from those websites, they would not be selling them. I'll explain why this is in the following example

    Example:

    A man has a tree in his backyard. This tree, every month, produces money like leaves. Every month, the tree grows money, drops it, and begins replenishing it's leaves for the next months "fall", or "dropping of leaves(money)".

    His neighbor really like that tree, and loves how it produces thousands of dollars a month. The owner of the tree agrees to CHOP IT DOWN and sell it to the neighbor for $2,000.

    The tree is now dead, since it was disconnected from it's roots, which are the life source of the money leaves. It is now useless, even if replanted to another yard.

    --end of Example--

    If you had a tree that made you thousands of dollars a month, and all you had to do was take an hour a day to water it, would you sell it to someone who doesn't know how to take care of it, let alone, knowing that in moving the tree, it could potentially die.

    Point is, these websites are not making any money. That's why they are selling them, trying to get new people to buy them off of them so they can get some return on their investments of starting the website.

    If you want to make money with an amazon site, you can buy a pre-built amazon website. DO NOT expect it to instantly start making you money!

    You need to add massive amounts of unique, quality content through articles, reviews, and decription/overview pages to drive in SEO traffic.

    Amazon does not pay high enough commissions for general products to be sold through PPC. The most profitable Amazon affiliate sites are in unique micro-niches and have content that overpowers any competition in their niche. This is possible, and easy to do, if you know what you're doing.

    PPC is best for high-ticket products or digital products. I also do not recommend PPC for beginners, as most beginners lose money starting out, get frustrated, and quit before split-testing and turning an add into a profitable income.
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  • Profile picture of the author megalinktraffic
    The actual way amazon get more traffic is through affiliates promoting the site hectically all around the internet thinking of getting more commissions.. this way each and every affiliate who sends thousands of visitors get 1 sale whereas amazon or other similar sites who do have an affiliate program will get their site promoted by 1000 affiliates who sell 1 product thro their effort of sending 1000 visitor.. whereas the vendor will get 1000 sales from its 1000 affiliates..
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  • Profile picture of the author shellerik
    I would imagine that it depends on the niche. In my niche I earn five cents per visitor on average. Unfortunately buying PPC for the relevant keywords would cost way more than that so I rely heavily on traffic from search engines. I get about 1,000 visitors per day just from search and that number is growing by 50 per month.

    I rank well because my site is not thin. It currently contains more than 3,000 products and for each product it lists more specifications than Amazon. It provides so much value that it has become the authoritative site in the niche. People on forums often link to my site rather than linking to Amazon when answering each other's product questions. Quite a bit of my search traffic comes from people searching for the name of my site and 40% of the sessions are from return visitors.

    If you build something truly useful the traffic will come.
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    • Profile picture of the author Anton543
      Some good points made. Thanks. Information will help.

      By the way, is it worth promoting Amazon due to its 24 hour cookie? I read somewhere that if you send the prospective customer directly to the cart then the cookie is three months instead of the 24 hours you get if you send them to the product page. Is this correct? Most of the products I'll be promoting will be in the $30 to $150 range.
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      • Profile picture of the author myob
        A technique I've used for many years is to develop informative websites which attracted the demographics most likely to use the selected products I was promoting. Rather than write "product reviews", I found it far more effective to strongly recommend products for specific applications. For example, a website targeting automotive repair shops would contain specs and "white papers" for major equipment in use by professionals in the business.

        To get around Amazon's 24-hour cookie limitation, I have found it to be extremely advantageous to build lists of customers and promote to these subscribers throughout their decision cycle. Sometimes it could take days, weeks, or even months of consideration before a purchase is made. By consistently providing valued service and up to date information within the niche, the chances of the purchase being made through your affiliate link may be increased by several factors of magnitude.
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      • Profile picture of the author shellerik
        I certainly think the 24 hour cookie is worth it since I'm making around $2k per month from it now. The nice thing about it is that you get commissions for anything they buy on Amazon in those 24 hours, not just the product you linked to.

        Only about 1/3 of the orders I get commissions on are for the products on my site. The other 2/3 are accessories for those products or completely unrelated things people just happened to buy that day.

        Items in the $30 to $150 range make up about 3/4 of my orders and 1/2 of my earnings. I also offer items that price up into the thousands and I found there is a second sweet spot right around $300-$350 in my niche.
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  • Profile picture of the author nomore9to5
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    • Profile picture of the author wayneh
      My traffic comes almost entirely from the search engines and I've never had a problem getting my sites ranked - I put a massive amount of time and effort into choosing my niches and keywords though. I tend to go for keywords that are relatively low competition and that rank easily with minimal promotion and backlinks. Most of my articles and reviews are 1000-2000 words and I try to make them as useful as possible to the reader, so I wouldn't consider my sites 'thin' (Google doesn't seem to either).
      This is a great description of how you can get traffic to your site that converts. The content needs to useful. A mixture of reviews and information posts works well.

      There is then no need to build backlinks to the site, other than promoting on social media sites to get more traffic from them.

      If you have the right niche with good images on your site you can get a lot of traffic from Pinterest that can convert also.

      It doesn't happen overnight. There is a need to work steadily and consistently to start to get results
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  • Profile picture of the author midge
    heres a little blog post on getting traffic to an amazon store but you could use it for any site I guess. It mainly goes into Paid traffic or free traffic like youtube marketing / building up social profiles but something may be of use to you:
    How To Increase Traffic to Your Amazon Store (Or and online Ecommerce Store) - so you want to make money online?
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  • Profile picture of the author kilgore
    Originally Posted by Anton543 View Post

    They generally tend to be review type sites with few other pages of content. I can't imagine they would rank well on Google because they are generally considered thin, affiliate sites.
    There's no such thing as an "Amazon site" -- Amazon Affiliates is a monetization method, not a business model. I agree that the type of review sites you describe are basically crap, but they are far from the only way to use the Amazon Affiliate program.

    As far as getting traffic, you get traffic to your site the way you do any other site. In our case, we rely on a mix of social media, email marketing, search engines and direct traffic. Of course for any of those to work, you have to have a site that's worth visiting -- and revisiting. Something that your typical "Amazon review site" doesn't do.
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  • Profile picture of the author FatGans
    Here are some "Reason for sale" from Empire Flippers:

    Seller needs money for other works
    Seller is looking to raise cash for reinvestment in his other niche sites
    The seller is raising funds to reinvest into another project.
    The seller wants to invest in mobile applications and other projects.
    Seller will reinvest the proceeds into other online and offline ventures.
    The seller does not have the time to maintain the site
    Raising funds to invest into bigger project.
    The seller is raising money for an event they are hosting.
    Seller is currently focusing on a new project and a new company at the same time.
    Seller needs funds to support family.
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