My first $250+ day on Amazon

Very hard to track down now that Google doesn't show the keywords people type in to find me. Most traffic comes to my homepage which is optimized for my main keywords so I can't pin point it on any other page.

I do have a little better idea as the data servers in Asia seem to update slowly and now I do see some of the main keywords at #7 and #6 opposed to page two before, still that shouldn't be good for that much traffic. I suppose all the longtails with 2014 etc are responsible for it.

Some of it is outlined on my blog (no opt-ins or anything) but here a short version of it.

Site building

- Did some keyword research focusing on "best ..." ".... review" keywords, for exampe:

• best flat iron
• best flat irons
• flat iron review
• flat iron reviews

I made sure it was at least 7k exact searches combined for those four main keywords, most way more though. The title of the homepage reads like "Best Flat Irons | Flat Iron Reviews 2014"

- Picked 10-15 products from Amazon per niche, focusing on as many different brands as possible and wrote 1 review for each (well outsourced), 300-500 words each and published it as posts.

- Published 5-10 informative articles per site, about 400 words each and published it as pages.

- Made a static homepage using Wordpress that links to either the reviews or directly to monetized, this differs from site to site, direct linking to Amazon is more profitable. The homepage is about 1500-2000 words in size

- I hardly inter linked any of it, all the reviews and informative articles are linked from the sidebar using Recent Posts and Pages widget

The sites are nothing special for the rest, and probably somewhat poor monetized, though aggresively.

The sites where I link from the homepage directly to Amazon have review pages that are NOT monetized. The sites where I don't link from the homepage the reviews ARE monetized.

Over monetization with small sites is quite risky and I have the idea Google looks at the total amount of affiliate links compared to the number of pages instead of looking at number of links per page. At least that's my philosophy about it.

This basic outline of how I build a site is not really the best way if I have to be real honest, the sites were build in a hurry with real low quality content. My next sites will be better categorized with multiple categories based on: brand / price / perhaps features like power if it's appropriate, for a site selling generators it can be quite useful.

I've build 20 of these crappy sites so on average they make $100/month each, this $250 was just a top day, I get a combined 2000 pageviews per day so I expect $2000-$2500/month in this set up.

Personally I prefer not to use excerpts on categories and neither full posts, instead I like to go for custom made static categories. There are a few ways to do that, just Google it I would say.


As for link building:

I only build links at my most basic budget blog network of PR3/PR4 domains.

In total about 60 per site and each post is surrounded by 100 words of content, I build them in batch of 20 eaches time, and one or two batches I decided to drip feed. Half of those were stickied on the homepage with about 20 OBL linking out to all types of topics.

Though I recovered after adjusting the network I don't really recommend this type of link buidling anymore. Because of the adjustments we now use static homepages on this link network, so no more sticky posts and no more links on pages with tons of other links (this is what both tanked me and recovered me after I started using excerpts).

The links were build in a time stack of 2-3 months and back then I already had the idea it wasn't working as great as it should as it was quite an amount of juice.

Also have to admit that the competition has increased pretty big time this year for those "best / review" keywords so for starters it might not be the best approach.

Keep in mind this not a guide or meant as advice, I would do it differently this time.

I just answered your question by outlining what I did to get these results, which are in fact marginal at best. Sure $2k/month for $4-6k investment is great but it could've been a lot more though the investment would have been more as well.


How I would do it nowadays:

- Get better content writers, write lengthier content, eg 800+ words for reviews

- Publish more content and divide it better over multiple (3-4) categories at least

- Interlink the posts in each category with proper optimized anchor text's

- Stick to my own set rule, max 50 affiliate links for a 50 page site

- No affiliate links on at least half of the pages

- Spend a little more time on keyword research for inner and category pages

- Build a network of niche relevant high PR domains around the site

- Setup social accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Google+ and update them

- Do a little bit of social bookmarking and some paid press releases for extra exposure, with a little bit I literally mean a little bit, not a little bit of blasting, I guess I would place links at max 10 bookmark sites (only the most popular ones)

- Build some links on my Diverse network which is of higher quality and contains different type of sites like directories, magazines, pinterest clones, press releases, bookmark sites etc.

- Perhaps build some web2.0 blogs

All that together gives you a much more legit backlink profile and allows you to have a great anchor diversity, which is real important these days.

Costs of this new approach: Most likely $1500+ per site. as I would spend about $500 on the content for the site and about $1000,- for the link building.

I already explained it above.

Absolutely, and it teached me some very important things, that are in fact just common sense but it's easy to over look it when it worked for years.

The two most important things that Penguin 3.0 targets are:

1) Links on pages with many other links, think of bookmark sites, web directories and blog comments, but also the once immens popular public blog networks, though Google made manual attacks on them it's now not even needed anymore as people tank instantly when they have many of such links.

2) OBL footprints, when you rent links at a network of 10, 20, 40 sites you often end up with the same customers on the same set of sites, that is one huge footprint you're leaving.

Funny enough 95 percent of the SEO services that used to work (I'm not talking about the people reselling Fiverr gigs or Senukex campaigns), and that are advertised at the IM forum all have exactly these footprints that Penguin targeted last month so I think this will have a drastic impact on the IM world.

Personally I never blasted 100's of links on PBN's, we mostly did a few dozen, but even a few dozen was enough to tank.

Big thanks to Google for allowing us to rank quickly again after cleaning up our mess.

So when I look back at it I'm glad I only build links at properties that I own and that I don't build any other links for the sake of diversity. Ok now I can again as I know what to avoid but imagine we did 100's of bookmarks, web direcory links and blog comments (kind of the worse links to get these days), it would be impossible to clean up that mess.

Passive income is definitely possible but it requires a lot of work upfront, that most are not prepared to do.

I ain't saying passive income till you die, but for at least 6-12 months shouldn't be much of a problem, after that there might be some adjustments needed as you never know with Google

I realize that, still it's a nice pay day.

I expect this month to make $4000,- and next month $2000,-

There sure will be a guide in the making, it will be for free but it will be heavily monetized as I'm having a few projects in development as we speak:

- New keyword research tool that doesn't ignore important factors like most of these tools do

- Web hosting

- A new writing platform, we aim to fill the gap between iWriter and Textbroker

- My SEO service of course.

All that combined should allow people to make money online in the exact same way as I'm doing it, I really hate those people selling information and at the same time their main source of income comes from selling the guide / coaching. Looks kinda fake to me but opinions are divided on that.

In addition to all that there is a greater plan going on and that is flipping and selling sites that either make money or don't, this could increase my income exponentially. Especially sites that make money so it's very important for me that my process works good as the main income should come from making money from Amazon.

Imagine if I launch 20 sites a month and each makes $100/month, which is pretty low really but realistic, I messed up bigtime and still make $2000+/month.

Flip that for 20* monthly income same like EmpireFlippers claim, that is about 15* monthly you're left with after fees and such, so that would be good for $30.000,-/month if that is ongoing, which is a decent chunk. However with my new plan the aim is to make sites that make $500/month instead of $100/month so that would be $150.000 revenue/month + a small maintenance fee to keep the SEO going.

Yep I love to dream

OMG 1000 sites, initially I planned to do that as well, but I filtered on search volume first and discovered that Google ranks different type of keywords in complete different ways, take for example:

- garden fences

vs

- best lawn mower

Let me tell you that garden fences has a lot less competition, still it's much harder to rank.

Same applies for cultivators / tillers, they are less competitive then lawn mowers but cause it's a single word (or two words in case of garden fences) it's insane hard to rank for it.

Now some might think, why not target: "best garden fences" or "best cultivator", well head over to Google Adwords keyword tool and look at the search volume and you have your answer. In other words no or very little traffic.

I think you focus more on product titles though? I did sold quite a few garden fences and tillers, though nothing like the sites that do rank on the first page for the main keywords.

Somehow I have the idea there is a lot of relation between ranking for the main keywords and the rest of the more longtail keywords on the site, eg if it doesn't rank for the main keywords you don't get much longtail traffic either, but that could also have to do with my site setup, maybe you can detail a bit more about how you do it? Are all your sites unique or do they have scraped content, or do you attach a shop to your site perhpas that's only accessible by visitors and not by Google?

Unique content and plenty of it is very important when ranking a site, so if your sites are auto-generated ones then link building won't help you much as they will hardly have any impact if at all cause then you deal with Panda related issue's and no link in the world will over come that problem.

PPC in combination with affiliate offers or for clients?

I love SEO as always, sure it's a struggle sometimes but that also makes it interesting, I always say Googles is my greatest teacher, some few tips as I write long posts and could easily be missed:

- Avoid links at pages next to other irrelevant links, these are very hazardous, think of public blog network setup in old fashioned ways

- Bookmark sites (pure evil now), almost all put up endless lists of links on the same page

- Web directories (though most seem to be adjusted where you have your own page so not the end of the world, but still Google treats most as pure spam.

- Blog comments obviously, mostly nofollow so no help while they can hurt rankings

That's it really, so in case of PBN make sure to use a Pages structure or use Excerpts on category/archive level or in case you want to do it even better keep them niche related.

There's no more to it then that, downside is that it's obvious more expensive to setup a strong private blog network, not talking about weak dropped domains, So that's the only struggle for most, the costs involved.

I'm going to do it a little differently in the future as following:

- Smallish sites but on expired high PR domains, maybe they'll rank maybe not, otherwise they still make up for a decent real looking private blog network, I want to have 200 of them (I already have 400 of such domains as we speak btw) so it wouldn't hurt to lose some clients so I can use them for myself

- Medium sized sites, as mentioned in my previous post, those will cost me $500 on content and $1000,- on link building, so total $1500,-/site. I want to build at least 20 of them, probably in about 10 niches.

- One huge authority shopping / review site in magazine style, this one will receive links from the medium sized sites and from some of the smallish expired domain based sites that manage to rank well with the goal to drive traffic, this authority site will come last, and for that I will use exceptional good writers to come up with great linkbait content and thus do link outreach.

That way I would have 21 sites to provide income and 200 sites that might make some money as well, that should be enough to make a decent living, though I think I'll never stop expanding.