Increasing Amazon Associates to $500+ monthly

One can't say without taking a look at your site.

However, judging by experience, you should increase your traffic level, conversion rate or settle for a new niche.

It's allowed to have and keep sites in different niches and market if you have the capacity to build and run them to profit.

I wish Amazon would bring back the associate program for all states. There are still 11 states that are no allowed to have it. Maine unfortunately is one of them. Frustrating to have a large chunk of your income suddenly cut off because your state added a tax on internet orders, so amazon said "Up yours!" and cut off affiliate programs for those states.

When Maine was still on the list, I was getting most of my traffic from twitter, facebook (vis posts I made to a group I ran), BlogSpot (now called Blogger) and Squidoo. Squidoo is no longer around, and now we have tumblr and pinterest which I would be using if the affiliate program was still available for Maine.

I think the BlogSpot/Blogger posts were where I was getting my top traffic. What I did was I wrote reviews for products I've used/owned/books read, etc, and instead of posting the reviews on Amazon's reviews, I posted it as a blog post, with a link to the product. I did really long reviews, 1,000 words+ and often took pictures of how I used the products.

When I started my SBI site I was doing the same thing and was getting good traffic from there as well, and SBI probably would have been my #1 traffic source for Amazon Associate income, if Amazon hadn't pulled Maine out of the list of approved states.

SBI is very well suited to building a review site like that, but it's fairly expensive ($300 a year) and quite a process to upkeep, so it's not for everyone.

I'm not sure how you are doing your Amazon links right now, but if it was me, I'd be doing reviews on an BI site and a Blogger blog, then promoting those pages/posts on twitter, because that was working very well for me when I was doing it.

Here's a cool little traffic hack I use for websites already recieving traffic like yours is.

Go to your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, and select your website.

Check out the top queries that your website is getting impressions for.

If there are keywords there that are bringing you traffic, and you don't have a dedicated page for that those particular keywords, make one and you will bring in more traffic.

Sure you'd love to double your income. I'd love to double my income too. Who wouldn't? But that doesn't tell us anything that might be useful in understanding why your income is so low, what's holding you back from growing it or even what your doing to get the little you're already earning?

So what is or are your issues?

Are you having trouble driving traffic (or getting return traffic)?
Are the products your promoting not resonating with your customers?
Is your sales copy not effective?
Maybe it's something else entirely?

If you notice, everything that I said above applies to any online business, not just a business using Amazon Associates. But the thing is, the Amazon Affiliate program is a monetization method, not a business model. Threre's no one size fits all, magic button, magic want or magic sequence of steps that any Amazon affiliate can take to increase sales just as those things don't exist for other types of businesses.

Tough to "scale" niche-y sites that rely on long tail seo traffic. The best way to scale and increase earnings is to simply make more sites.