A question to Amazon Affiliates...

Amazon Affiliates is a great way to start for new ones like you. I think you should start building a product review site for each product and start build high quality backlinks in various sources.

In my opinion, a good design that fits the niche is always a good idea, but the crucial part isn't how the homepage is designed... it's about HOW the visitors got to your page in the first place (for the most part)

The right keywords, tactics, traffic sources all play their own parts in whether the visitor is looking to buy or just researching. Therefore, site preparation BEFORE it's built has been the biggest factor of success vs. failure on Amazon Review sites for me.

The reason I said "For the most part" is because even if you get traffic that's ready to buy, if your page/site looks like crap and doesn't make sense, it will put off a lot of people immediately... meaning that design DOES play a factor... but as long as it is appeasing and easily navigable then you should be fine.

So for me, I don't think to myself "hey, I want to build a review site about [Insert Niche]" and then just build it out. I might START my thought process and research out that way, but generally my keyword research determines the niche I will go into.

-Come up with idea
-Check amazon ratings/reviews
-find BUYING keywords that would work well (research comp., search counts, etc etc)
-buy domain
-outsource content (I hate writing)
-build out site skeleton with design, etc
-input content and tweak/SEO and interlink pages
-drive traffic

That's obviously a "quick" draft of what I do.

Now, as far as the homepage goes, I've had success with multiple layouts. I 'generally' don't have products on the homepage *unless* I have a couple "specials" there or something. The first way you mentioned with the "Read More" and "Visit Website" I do have and use and yes, it works... On those, it is actually a theme:

Best Wordpress Review Theme | ProReviewTheme.com

and on others I have custom built it to simply link to product pages inside the site... which still works well. One thing to just remember is each page on a site can target it's own keyword(s) so if you seo each page for a buying keyword, traffic will be driven to that page rather than the homepage.... as it is targeted to what the visitor is looking for.

If you want to see a site that is built WITHOUT that ProReviewTheme, that I just designed and put into action, PM me and I'll show it to you.

kelik - Analyzing other Amazon review sites is a great way to get formatting ideas but once you've done that, you need to analyze the needs of your site visitors.

If you built a site around "lcd tv reviews", you'd get traffic from people typing that exact phrase into Google. Imagine what those visitors would expect to see on your page when they landed there that would keep them on your site:

• Is it a lengthy article that they have to read?
• Is it just snippets of reviews of the hottest products?
• Is it a buying guide?

The answer might be different from one niche to another, however, my best results have been from using my site's navigation menu to help visitors filter themselves down to the content best for them.

If a niche is brand sensitive, you might put links to reviews by brand on your home page. If a niche is price sensitive, you might put links to reviews broken out by price. If it's a complicated niche like LCD TVs, you might have a link to a buying guide, too.

With choices like these immediately available to your visitor, you cater to a broad range of needs without making your visitor have to work hard to find what they want. Your site becomes a helpful tool the visitor can use to quickly get to the information best suited to them.

Although you will need to test your particular visitors, there are certain layouts that convert better than others.

A great example of an affiliate and review site is:
Web Hosting Reviews and Rating - Best Web Hosting User Reviews 2012

You need to think like your visitors, what are they looking for? How would you like to see information if it was you who were looking for that information? Most review site visitors are NOT in full buy mode...they are still looking for information that will help convince them to buy a particular item or not.

Hope this helps and keep it going! Leah

Thanks for your great answers

I was just thinking today about it. Do you guys think it is a good idea to check out amazon affiliates sites that make money on flippa and design yours accordingly?

I have a website that use the technique that you explained and it works great!

But you could also setup a static page at your homepage, if you are going after a generic exact match keyword. The static page should contain a 700+ words article about your mainkeyword(exact match domain).

Why should I set it up as a static page?

• To make it easier to rank your homepage.

Why do I want to rank my homepage?

• Your main keyword often get a lot more searches than your 'product keywords', but also when you rank your homepage it will be easier to rank your innerpages.

Can't follow me? Ok, here is an example:

Let us say that your niche is: Coffee Makers
Then you setup a website called: coffeemakers, coffeemakerreviews or something like that.
Then you make your homepage static and put up a 700+ words article about coffee makers.

Now the search engines see an complete article only focusing on coffee makers (if you on-page SEO is optimized properly, I won't get into that now, so look it up )

So get to work, both methods works great :-)