Free resources for Amazon?

These are the monthly commissions received from Squidoo and from the one Amazon tracking ID I use for just Squidoo lenses (does not include any income from my Amazon sites):

.......................Squidoo.......Amazon....... Total
Nov 2011.........$583.09.......$711.79.......$1294.88
Dec 2011.........$538.17.......$1196.95......$1735.12
Jan 2012..........$609.93.......$1402.34......$2012.25
Feb 2012..........$675.50.......$2246.47......$2921.97

This reflects the month paid so the Feb 2012 amount was received in February but was the result of December activity (nice Christmas shopping bump, there).

I can't see what I'll get in March and April from Squidoo yet but my tier rankings and traffic are on track to receive at least the average of what I've been making and my Amazon tracking ID already shows I've earned over $1000/month for each of those two months.

I've been on Squidoo for three years as of this month and have 302 live lenses. That information is a bit misleading, though, as a lot has happened in the those three years. The bulk of my traffic and sales come from maybe 50 lenses. My focus is significantly on my own Amazon sites although I still build or outsource lenses every month.

I have a mix of informational lenses that rank well inside of Squidoo and in Google and earn Tier 1 money each month and some very sales focused lenses that rank well in Google and generate the Amazon activity.

I like to pick products that people buy based on how they look (home decor items, clothing, accessories) and build lenses around related keywords for a long tail keyword for that item. Then I try to do a better job than Amazon at finding the best selection of those products that fit the keyword. Display them nicely and encourage visitors to learn more info about each product at Amazon and you can generate a lot of clickthroughs and sales.

Thanks! I'm a huge Squidoo fan. I've been using them to promote Amazon and to promote my own sites for years and have never had a bad experience.

I really don't spend as much as one might expect. I do a lot of my own link building for my sites. I do have a subscription to BMR but I don't use it regularly and, when I do, I write my own posts.

For a new site, I rely heavily on RSS feed submissions, article directories, bookmark sites and web 2.0 sites for my backlinks. I write the content for the backlinks myself and submit the content myself. Periodically, I might outsource a package of backlinks when working on a challenging keyword. I've used Joseph Then's service several times and he and his team do an excellent job.

Once I get a mass of content on a site, natural backlinks start to do the bulk of the work. Some of my posts have been linked to by the manufacturer of the products I'm promoting. Those are powerful links.

For my lenses, I bookmark each one to about 10 bookmark sites. My lensmaster RSS feed has been submitted to some RSS submission sites so those links get picked up pretty quickly. A link in FriendFeed will often get indexed before the lens itself.

If a lens is doing well but needs more backlinks, I'll write a single article for it and spread that around. I choose fairly low competition keywords as part of my Squidoo strategy so not a lot of backlinking is required to get these to rank well.

All of my links (sites and lenses) go through a ping.fm account where I've connected several social networking sites. These are really just to help me get a post/lens indexed and started along the path to ranking.

I do have a VA that costs $250/month that I use for some article submission in order to build tier 2 links for my sites and lenses (links that point to my backlinks).

I also have a subscription to SENuke X which I've had for two years but I haven't used it in about five months. I switched laptops and just haven't taken the time to move it over to the new laptop. When I was using it, it was almost exclusively for article directory submission and bookmarking because I liked that it saved me some time.

I could probably shift all the article submission and bookmarking to my VA so I wouldn't count SENuke X as part of the cost that one might need in order to duplicate what I do, if that makes sense.

I probably SHOULD outsource more, but I have a hard time letting go.