Effective Traffic Sources for Amazon Aff Site

I'm responding to my own post (that's a little sad)

anyways, I am not looking for useless traffic. Social (Viral) traffic is great for blogs/giveaway type sites but are less than useless for product review sites.

the people who visit as part of a viral campaign end up hitting the back button before the pages even finished loading.

I'm asking for genuine profitable traffic that can be generated relatively simply - without tricks or special squirly tactics

Over 90% of my traffic and sales are directly from article syndication in niche ezines, blogs, websites, and even offline magazines and newspapers. For an in-depth explanation of this marketing model, I always recommend Turn Words Into Traffic by Jim Edwards.

Red,

Many sites that were hit hard were actually static sites....In other words, these sites were left alone without any fresh posts....Did you update your sites or did you tend to build each one and move on?

If you still want to go the route of bypassing Google, let me suggest that you look into setting up a Squidoo lens related to your affiliate site. They're not hard to setup and Squidoo gets a strong following. There are many good guides if you're not familair with it. Just be sure to link to your site a few times throughout your lens.

Articles, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube... You don't need to rely on Google for anything.

Unfortunately, the best traffic for product review sites is search traffic. Think about, who goes to YouTube or Facebook for info about a product they want to buy? No one. They Google it, just like you would.

This is why it's so frustrating when Google kills your traffic overnight with a click of a button. My best Amazon site - took a year to get where it is - got hammered with this update. Never done anything remotely sketchy, just plain old fashioned SEO (articles written by ME, forum posts, some blog comments). It's got plenty of content and is actually a really helpful site.

Anyone else feel me when I say f*** Google?

bump. looking for more assistance

It is frustrating. My income decreased from $2,000/month to less than $10/day since the Penguin update and I wasn't using any paid backlinking services.

Also, sites which had fresh posts were affected so it doesn't seem that this algo update had anything to do with freshness of content. This is further proven by all the old, outdated sites now ranking on page 1 for good keywords.

Jan Roos said that he gets a 100% ROI using PPC on his Amazon sites. However, just about every Amazon WSO out there teaches to use SEO to drive traffic. This suggests that using PPC is rather difficult and requires a lot of testing and tweaking, etc..

There is list building, but I don't see that a viable source of traffic for this business model. If you have a good list, you might get some traffic and sales, but most people who have their credit card out and are in the buying mode go to a search engine, not read an email. Plus there is the other obvious problem that you need traffic in the first place to build your list.

People say don't build your business on other properties so you're in control, but im starting to think for this business model that building on other properties is the best way forward because it's clear that these algo changes hit people hardest who have their sites self hosted. Sites like blogger, etc.. remain unscathed on the most part.

Except YouTube is Google. People go on Facebook and Twitter for social, not to buy products at least the vast majority do.

We are one of the oldest and largest privately owned pay per click search engines and advertising networks on the market. I would be glad to share some more information with you about how we might be able to add to your marketing mix. Drop me an email at bstanley at 7search dot com and we can discuss further.

Brad

I don't think you should give up on Google, if you've already built your sites and they were earning, as that would be wasted time. Try to find what's wrong and rectify it.

Social media in itself will not get you buyers, but I strongly suggest you get your review sites some social activity to give an impression of an active site. I'm pretty sure they're taking these things into account slowly.

Might be good to get involved with pinterest, as that looks like it may be another viable business model for Amazon Reviews, and direct linking (for now). After they begin moderating a little more, it'll probably be most useful for linking to review pages.

I find youtube is only a viable option if you own the product and review it in a unique way. For example:

If you owned the product you were reviewing, you could put it through several tasks either suggested by users or tasks you think the general public would try to achieve with said product. Also a breakable test wouldn't be too bad, but you need either good capital for it, or a company to sponsor you their products for more publicity.

As said your other option is PPC (very profitable if you know how), or as mentioned by MYOB getting your articles syndicated. The thing to do here is not write a review and submit it to blogs, ezines and other outlets, but rather find a problem the product fixes and talk about it.

So I wouldn't kick Google out just yet, but instead simply add other ways in which to profit that sound like they could work.

Another is to build a list on your amazon sites. You can offer up coupons and updates on new products or reduced prices.

*EDIT*

Tip, there are some programs about that regularly send you excel files of products on Amazon being sold for heavily discounted prices (up to 90%!!). Watches worth $500 being sold for $50 for a limited time etc... If you build a list i'm sure they'd like to know about these special offers, if only for special occasions or because they can't ignore a good discount like that

Excellent tips, Jason. Very thought provoking...hadn't considered a lot of what you said.

-Brock

Google Alerts could be good

there is a product called Google Pump that shows how to do it

Dave Guindon made it and it is good stuff - exact step by step tactics

I got the product free in a bundle, basically you will get alerted when someone posts "what is the best key word?" or whatever alerts you want, then you can go answer... you will create good links and drive traffic

the product I recommend explains it much better in about 7 videos if I remember

hope this helps, it will involve work although you could outsource it

good luck

is there still a problem for Canadians? If so how can I work around? I can't pm yet so don't know how to contact you.

I have already purchased.