Amazon Niche Sites Still Work

I forget whether it was Extreme Review or another offer but at least one of her products recommends targeting keywords like "over the counter cutting boards". While these types of phrases are rather easy to rank for, Google generally shows "Shop for...." ads directly above the search results.

People searching for "over the counter cutting boards" are likely shopping for them so they are quite likely clicking those "Shop for..." ads and really not going any further.

The trick to doing well as an Amazon affiliate that relies on SEO is to target terms that DO NOT produce "Shop for..." ads in the SERPs.

So, while her info isn't necessarily "out of date", I do question some of the strategies espoused. However, in the interest of transparency, I haven't utilized this particular strategy (might mess around with it in the future). Instead, I use my own low-competition strategy to profit from my Amazon niche sites while also using social media on others.

Why do you think its out of date?

Exactly. There is no such thing as an Amazon site or a Clickback site or a Share-a-Sale site or an Adsense site. Those are just monetization methods and you can mix and match them to just about any business, though obviously some are more suited to some businesses than others. On our site we use a variety of monetization methods depending on what the product being sold is, though Amazon certainly our biggest income generator.

Alternatively, when you can consistently sell 10,000 to 50,000 Amazon products per month, the 24 hour cookie and 8.5% commission are also insignificant limitations, even if the product prices are fairly low. Just a different way to skin the same cat -- though in either case the same two questions apply: (1) Can you get traffic? (2) Can you sell?

And with programs like Clickbank you get a store nobody has ever heard of and a shitty product. The point is that networks like Clickbank aren't offering those high commission rates because they want to -- or even because digital goods are cheaper to produce and distribute than physical.

They're offering these high rates because they have to -- it's a matter of supply and demand. And the reason they have to offer high commission rates is that their products are harder to sell than physical products sold on places like Amazon. So to make it worth it for their top affiliates to sell with them, they offer higher rates so that their affiliates will make up for their overall lower sales volume with higher per product commissions.

This isn't to say you can't get a high sales volume on a place like Clickbank, but for every $97 weight training guide sold on Clickbank, I'd guess that 1,000 $10 physical books or kindle books on weight training are sold on Amazon -- from known authors with professional editors, photographers/illustrators/designers, and with lots of customer and professional reviews. Of course, that doesn't mean that you would sell 1,000 products on Amazon to every Clickbank product you sold. Every business is different and for you it may actually be the other way around.

Again, I'm not saying Amazon is superior to Clickbank -- different businesses and different marketers match better or worse with different monetization streams. But if you're choosing your affiliate program based on commission rate and cookie length, you're likely making a big mistake.

And I'd also say that if you're choosing your affiliate program because you can't figure out how or don't want to cash a check, you're probably making a mistake too.