If you haven't made a dime, here's a step-by-step...

I like to tinker.

About 3 weeks ago I started a new site - it was kind of an evening project. I really haven't done anything with Amazon, so I thought I'd give it a try. 3 weeks and 9 sales later it's made $33.18. Really not too shabby since I've done almost nothing promoting it. But more about what I didn't do later.

Below are the steps I did take. Try to keep up... it's complicated (not).

• I browsed Amazon looking for a family of products. We are surrounded by physical products. I just picked one and looked it up on Amazon to start my search. I wanted a family with products ranging from around $50 to upwards of $200 (like gas grills). The products I chose range from about $50 to more than $1200. They were a little heavy on the upper end, but I figured it was just a test, so it was ok. I'd read that electronics are a little tough, so I picked something else. My brain told me that the product family was something that people would probably buy on Amazon. That's the extent of product selection I did.
  
• I registered a domain name which included the product family. This wasn't so much about SEO as it was buyer comfort, however the domain might help a little for long tail searches. So for example, if the family were "gas grills," the domain name would include that phrase (i.e. gasgrillsplanet.com).
  
• Installed Wordpress. I could have used Twenty Ten (the new default theme), however, I just grabbed a free theme with colors that would sort of match the product family. In other words, if the site were for gas grills, I'd pick an outdoor-ish theme. I really didn't put too much effort in this - maybe 10 minutes.
  
• I installed the following plugins: All in One SEO; Google XML Sitemaps; SEO Searchterms Tagging 2 (modified to remove the footprints).
  
• I made a page for each of the major product types. This was really more for the visitor than anything else. I just wrote a few paragraphs about each type of this product. (i.e. gas grill, gas smoker, etc.)
  
• Finally I started creating posts. I did the above steps on one evening and added product posts over the next week in the evenings - maybe a couple of hours a night. I did this until I got tired of adding posts. If I'd added more there'd be more traffic and commissions. Eventually I will outsource it.
  
  Each post features a specific product. I included the manufacturer name and model number in the following places within the post: Title; H2; H3; first sentence; last sentence; 2 more times; alt tag on an image of the product (for example, "Weber E-620").
  
  I copied some of the Amazon information, like the bullets. I re-wrote some. I added snippets from a couple of the Amazon reviews, each one linking back to the product page. I added a couple of paragraphs towards the top of the post describing who would need one of these items and how it could be used. Within these paragraphs and in a couple of other places I added text links to the product page on Amazon. I added a large "click here for price" link. I made the manufacturer the only tag (again, for the visitors).
  
• I used SocialBot to bookmark each post as it was finished. Any bookmarking software would work for this - there are even plugins that will bookmark as each post is published. This probably doesn't help (much) with ranking, but it does help with indexing.
  
• When I got tired of writing these posts I stopped. I think I did about 35. If I'd done two a night I'd probably still be going 3 weeks later. Again, I'll outsource these posts at some point.

Now for "why this works."

First, I didn't over-analyze. I acted. Could the site be better? Sure. Could each post be better optimized? Yes. Keywords, products, domain name, pre-sell? Yep, yep, yep, yep.

However, people started finding my site on the first day. Almost all of my traffic is from long-tail searches including the model number. Today I'm on the first page for 9 of the products, so the traffic is slowly growing. But it's not some unattainable amount of traffic. The site has averaged 16 visitors per day over the last 3 weeks - it's building, but it's really just a tiny trickle. Knowing what I do about ranking and traffic, it will keep growing for a while.

Now for a couple "what if's."

What if you did the same thing.

What if every time your site earned $5 you used someone on Fiverr to throw some backlinks at a different post? How would your results be different?

Give it a shot then let me know...


-Kelly


P.S. No, I'm not doing an Amazon WSO - there are PLENTY out there. I "work" offline. I "play" with niche sites.

P.P.S. Only two of the products purchased so far are items from my pages - both were on the lower end. One of the unrelated items was... a gas grill.