Advice Appreciated - Big Affiliate Amazon Sites Plan | Warrior Forum - The #1 Digital Marketing Forum & Marketplace

8 years ago

I'd build one big site with social media channels, YouTube channel and a mix of affiliate promo content and non-promo content.

This is what I do and it's been the most lucrative site I've ever built. It didn't take long to get to 1 million monthly page views (8 months). Granted only 125,000 monthly page views is from organic search traffic, but that's not bad in under one year.

Had I split my time and resources across 20 sites, I would probably be spinning my wheels still.

Choose a niche that has wide appeal, get social media traffic and add content targeting long tail keywords to promote products as an affiliate.

[ 1 ] Thanks

Signature

How I hit $10,000+ per month very fast w/ 1 niche blog - Click Here to learn more (no opt-in).

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9703269].message }}

Intrepreneur

8 years ago

Go for authority.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

But look at it now.

ONE city. Many things.

If you want help and advice, hit me up.. I've built two large authority sites with success.

[ 1 ] Thanks

Signature

SEO, copywriting and backlinks service UK

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9703305].message }}

yukon

Banned 8 years ago

Long term - skip the 40 sites & build a smaller group of legit content feeder sites that draw in organic links.

A single authority site helps a lot, I have two that target the same niche. I aim to rank my feeder sites to feed traffic back to the main money sites and/or building email list. Obviously I also use the feeder sites for link building.

Currently working on a 3rd authority site that has a $25 product & easily 1 million unique traffic per month spread out over about 10 of the main keywords, that's not counting longtails either.

I expect at the very least a 0.5% conversion rate on traffic/sales from testing the same product on my older authority sites that are only moderately niche related to the product. The new site is laser focused on the niche/product. That 0.5% is very conservative, hopefully that number will increase, just basing the number on existing sales/test.

The cool thing about authority sites that consistently have a lot of traffic is, when you start a new site you have access to instant traffic, a sitewide link on an established authority site sends a flood of traffic to any new same niche site on the first day the site goes live.

[ 1 ] Thanks
1 reply

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9703315].message }}

nik0

Banned 8 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

Long term - skip the 40 sites & build a smaller group of legit content feeder sites that draw in organic links.

A single authority site helps a lot, I have two that target the same niche. I aim to rank my feeder sites to feed traffic back to the main money sites and/or building email list. Obviously I also use the feeder sites for link building.

Currently working on a 3rd authority site that has a $25 product & easily 1 million unique traffic per month spread out over about 10 of the main keywords, that's not counting longtails either.

I expect at the very least a 0.5% conversion rate on traffic/sales from testing the same product on my older authority sites that are only moderately niche related to the product. The new site is laser focused on the niche/product. That 0.5% is very conservative, hopefully that number will increase, just basing the number on existing sales/test.

The cool thing about authority sites that consistently have a lot of traffic is, when you start a new site you have access to instant traffic, a sitewide link on an established authority site sends a flood of traffic to any new same niche site on the first day the site goes live.

So you kind of do it the other way around?

You build a feeder site that receives a link from the authority site, thus it starts to rank and might receive organic links and then you link back from the feeder site to the authority site again right?

My whole point is how to reach momentum, if we don't want to use any shortcuts with expired high PR domains. Can take a long time for a wannabee authority site to really become one when relying on whitehat only and I hate waiting

Thanks

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9704168].message }}

SEO-Dave

8 years ago

I've done what you are thinking about and now I'm going the otherway, slowly reducing the number of domains I own, combining multiple domains into one.

I used to use expired domains for it as well, last time I tried it the PR reset and the domains didn't rank any better than a newly registered domain, so moved to using new domains. If I wanted a head start today I'd buy domains that haven't expired and show untapped potential (have done this as well, it works).

With loads of sites you have the power to link them together, BUT get it wrong and you are a link farm. Also have to build links for them all, no backlinks = no rankings and the more you own, more you have to interlink them which is a risk.

Have spent a lot of time recently significantly reducing how my network interlinks and it's resulting in an increase in traffic: looks like the links where hurting rankings. Come to the conclusion it's safer not to interlink much, which then begs the question why own so many domains if you can't link relevant content together heavily? I do miss the early 2000's when you could add sitewide footer links with exact match anchor text and you'd rank in a few months for competitive SERPs :-)

With a small number of sites you can interlink webpages on a site as much as you like (think Wikipedia) with no risks and you'll need less backlinks to power the same amount of content due to trust/authority. I moved most of my SEO content onto one domain earlier this year, now I can interlink it heavily where before I had to be really careful.

If I were starting from scratch today it would be minimal domains and if I wanted feeder sites would be free blogs (Blogger etc...) to protect the main domains from anything not so SEO white.

David

Thanks
1 reply

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9704217].message }}

nik0

Banned 8 years ago

Originally Posted by SEO-Dave

I've done what you are thinking about and now I'm going the otherway, slowly reducing the number of domains I own, combining multiple domains into one.

I used to use expired domains for it as well, last time I tried it the PR reset and the domains didn't rank any better than a newly registered domain, so moved to using new domains. If I wanted a head start today I'd buy domains that haven't expired and show untapped potential (have done this as well, it works).

There is a big difference between hosting a site that you aim to rank on an expired domain and using an expired domain to rank other sites. For example I just published an article on a PR4 domain with a link from a PR5 Harvard page with just 10 links there (9 internal / 1 external to my domain).

I decided to check the rankings of that site, it popped up at #300 or something for a few days, then it disappeared.

However the money site did move for the four main keywords that all ranked a #6 to the positions #4 #3 #2 and #2. That site hadn't received linkbuilding for almost a year as we forgot about the site.

As for the PR reset, the PR shows as PR0 while that PR5 link is still in place so it should be a real strong PR3 or perhaps PR4 due to the low amount of links on that page so you could say the PR is reset, I call it removed by Google to remove the incentive of the buyer. I have a lot of strong domains that show as PR0 or even PR n/a, they all index new posts very well and they are all able to rank sites.

Makes me think why Matt Cutts said (we lower the PR of sites to remove the incentive of the buyer) if they could just take away the strength of the domain. I think they can't. Yeah sure the site itself ain't ranking but the juice it passes to other sites still works as always (see it like some Panda penalty that also stops the own site from ranking but zero effect on ranking other sites).

Originally Posted by SEO-Dave

With loads of sites you have the power to link them together, BUT get it wrong and you are a link farm. Also have to build links for them all, no backlinks = no rankings and the more you own, more you have to interlink them which is a risk.

Well, if I would build 20 sites in the same niche and interlink them all then there are enough relevant anchors coming in to rank them, and in a quite powerful way when doing it with PR3-PR4 domains and perhaps the strength of the domains itself could be leveraged by funneling the juice in an internal way. I do have a few additional networks that I can use to power them up but it doesn't become much more natural that way.

Originally Posted by SEO-Dave

Have spent a lot of time recently significantly reducing how my network interlinks and it's resulting in an increase in traffic: looks like the links where hurting rankings. Come to the conclusion it's safer not to interlink much, which then begs the question why own so many domains if you can't link relevant content together heavily? I do miss the early 2000's when you could add sitewide footer links with exact match anchor text and you'd rank in a few months for competitive SERPs :-)

I'm a bit divided about that. What I personally see quite often is when sites receive a lot of blog posts from WP type of sites that the rankings start to freeze after some time, and if you keep on adding the rankings go down instead. This seems to be a WP footprint issue, so logically if you've add to many and rankings either freezed or went down, then they also go up again when you remove them. Sometimes it's so severe that it's almost penalty like and by removing it you lift that penalty.

I'm annoyed about it as well as I have about 600 sites at the moment but I can't link all or even a large portion of them to one site to rank tough keywords, as it simply doesn't work that way. Most think, wow with such network you can rank anything. Maybe but then it needs to be done much more in a tiered way or in combination with a ton of other (spammy) links to reduce footprints and then those WP links won't hurt you but the others will eventually.

That's why I was thinking of operating in 10 broad niches, 20 sites in each niche, makes a total of 200, interlink only 20 per niche, and link the 10 broad niche / authority styled sites to one huge authority sites. Though an authority site with links from just 10 domains....

Originally Posted by SEO-Dave

With a small number of sites you can interlink webpages on a site as much as you like (think Wikipedia) with no risks and you'll need less backlinks to power the same amount of content due to trust/authority. I moved most of my SEO content onto one domain earlier this year, now I can interlink it heavily where before I had to be really careful.

If I were starting from scratch today it would be minimal domains and if I wanted feeder sites would be free blogs (Blogger etc...) to protect the main domains from anything not so SEO white.

David

Perhaps I have to do more with public links as well.

Thanks
2 replies

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9704293].message }}

SEO-Dave

8 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

There is a big difference between hosting a site that you aim to rank on an expired domain and using an expired domain to rank other sites. For example I just published an article on a PR4 domain with a link from a PR5 Harvard page with just 10 links there (9 internal / 1 external to my domain).

I decided to check the rankings of that site, it popped up at #300 or something for a few days, then it disappeared.

However the money site did move for the four main keywords that all ranked a #6 to the positions #4 #3 #2 and #2. That site hadn't received linkbuilding for almost a year as we forgot about the site.

As for the PR reset, the PR shows as PR0 while that PR5 link is still in place so it should be a real strong PR3 or perhaps PR4 due to the low amount of links on that page so you could say the PR is reset, I call it removed by Google to remove the incentive of the buyer. I have a lot of strong domains that show as PR0 or even PR n/a, they all index new posts very well and they are all able to rank sites.

All my SEO experience tells me a new link doesn't pass instant SEO benefit, your SERPs moving are highly unlikely to be due to a link you added days ago. IME what you do today unless it's a MASSIVE change won't have a significant impact for months. Obviously if you change the content, could have an almost instant impact, but benefit from links isn't instant/fast, it's months.

How competitive are the SERPs that changed? Are we talking competitive with a lot of traffic or long tail with hardly any traffic?

This week my SEO site moved back into the top 10 for the SEO Tutorial SERP (was hovering around 12-15, now 8-9), that's nothing I've done this week, been busy working on other sites. Had I added a decent link last week it would look like it had an almost instant impact. You have to be careful with these types of moves and making conclusions.

I bought a crappy site (~100 posts, most out of date phone news) a while back 4gtouch.com (think I paid $40) added a few links and forgot about it. Noticed it's traffic went up this month (Webmaster Tools), nothing major, but interesting: one of the articles is ranking for water damage phone SERPs and this month the one post has generated just under 600 visitors from about 8,000 impressions. I haven't done anything to the site for ages, it's probably a case the links I added are finally passing full benefit. Might be worth spending some time on the site now.

I used expired domains for both ranking in their own right and to help rank money sites. I realised quickly if I'm spending money and time building sites, adding backlinks try to make money from them all.

It's a shame PR isn't updating anymore, you could have tested if PR is fully reset by linking from an expired domain with high PR to a newly registered domain (add no other links) and see if the new domain had a PR you'd expect from the link.

I did this test about 5 years ago and the new domain didn't have the PR expected if PR wasn't reset. Every test I did suggested PR reset and link benefit reset.

Just thought of an SEO test for you. Give it a couple of weeks to be sure your current SERPs are stable, remove the link you think resulted in the SERP move.

If you are right about links passing fast SEO benefit you'd expect the reverse to be true as well. If it took a week for the SERP to move up, you might expect the SERP to drop in a week. If it does re-add the link and the SERPs should recover in a week or whatever period you saw the SERP move.

David

Thanks
1 reply

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9705369].message }}

nik0

Banned 8 years ago

Originally Posted by SEO-Dave

All my SEO experience tells me a new link doesn't pass instant SEO benefit, your SERPs moving are highly unlikely to be due to a link you added days ago. IME what you do today unless it's a MASSIVE change won't have a significant impact for months. Obviously if you change the content, could have an almost instant impact, but benefit from links isn't instant/fast, it's months.

How competitive are the SERPs that changed? Are we talking competitive with a lot of traffic or long tail with hardly any traffic?

The keyphrase isn't hugely competitive, in fact it are 4 phrases, and in total it's good for about 6000 exact searches/month, break down of the keywords without revealing the niche:

- best ... ....
- best ... ..... (multitude like flat iron vs flat irons)
- ... .... review
- ... .... reviews

Can't really call that very longtail, either way it was good enough to go from $200/mo to $500/mo. It's a bit seasonal so I won't remove the link now, might do that in the low season to see if it changes anything.

As for significant change, the site ranked with very little power previously, after I added the first strong link it moved up real quick, after about 5 days and it kept climbing up for about 3 weeks, those 3 weeks just passed btw so it's all quite recent.

The site was already ranking at the first page, so it's not that significant to move to the top, it would be a complete different situation if a site moved from not in the top 500 at #2 in Google after adding just one strong link. If that was the case I would have agreed with you.

Thanks

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9705528].message }}

SEO-Dave

8 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

I'm a bit divided about that. What I personally see quite often is when sites receive a lot of blog posts from WP type of sites that the rankings start to freeze after some time, and if you keep on adding the rankings go down instead. This seems to be a WP footprint issue, so logically if you've add to many and rankings either freezed or went down, then they also go up again when you remove them. Sometimes it's so severe that it's almost penalty like and by removing it you lift that penalty.

I'm annoyed about it as well as I have about 600 sites at the moment but I can't link all or even a large portion of them to one site to rank tough keywords, as it simply doesn't work that way. Most think, wow with such network you can rank anything. Maybe but then it needs to be done much more in a tiered way or in combination with a ton of other (spammy) links to reduce footprints and then those WP links won't hurt you but the others will eventually.

Your SERPs freezing/dropping sounds like over using your network for links.

Consider a 100 domain network with 10 webpages per domain, so just 1,000 webpages.

You decide to only link out once per webpage to another webpage in your network and to only link to one page per domain (so no site sends more than one link to any particular domain).

That sounds like a super safe linking strategy right?

Not really, the network is going to be heavily linked together. Each domain will link out to 10 other domains in the network, in total it's 1,000 links to the same 100 domains, that's a PBN footprint even though that's not heavy interlinking.

Most network owners aren't that conservative in their interlinking. When you have a network in multiple niches it's so easy to over link even when you have strict rules all links must be in the same niche. It's human nature to add "just one more" :-)

David

Thanks
1 reply

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9705392].message }}

nik0

Banned 8 years ago

Originally Posted by SEO-Dave

Your SERPs freezing/dropping sounds like over using your network for links.

Consider a 100 domain network with 10 webpages per domain, so just 1,000 webpages.

You decide to only link out once per webpage to another webpage in your network and to only link to one page per domain (so no site sends more than one link to any particular domain).

That sounds like a super safe linking strategy right?

Not really, the network is going to be heavily linked together. Each domain will link out to 10 other domains in the network, in total it's 1,000 links to the same 100 domains, that's a PBN footprint even though that's not heavy interlinking.

Most network owners aren't that conservative in their interlinking. When you have a network in multiple niches it's so easy to over link even when you have strict rules all links must be in the same niche. It's human nature to add "just one more" :-)

David

Some knowledge about the network

- monthly clients receive links at max 10 percent of the domains in that network
- a reseller that brings in 60+ different clients/month
- one time clients of my own that buy diverse numbers of links
- the network isn't set up in one day, some have 10 posts others have 300 posts

So there's quite some randomnes, instead of 1000 pages linking to 100 domains it's more like 10.000 pages linking out to 500 domains, where some domains received 5 posts and others as much as 100 posts.

All links in the same niche would make it worse really, as then you have a small amount of sites linking out to a limited amount of websites, and thus the footprints increase big time.

I really don't know how far Google go's with these type of things, no one knows really.

Penguin 3.0 just refreshed, quite a few of my Amazon sites recovered that each received 60 posts at this specific network, I didn't remove a single post for my affiliate sites, all I did was adjusting the network so that links don't show up on the same pages anymore (category/homepage).

Anyway, it's too simplistic to just say this or that is the cause.

What I learned in the last few years is that the quality of a certain website plays a huge role on how likely it is to receive a penalty.

For example, most of my sites tanked, and a decent portion recovered due to adjusting the network. A client of mine that builds much better quality Amazon affiliate sites hardly had any site of his tank, while he received much more links from my network than my own sites. This is just one simple example, I have tons of these with each update that launches. It are almost always the decent quality sites that get away with a less then whitehat approach, while the crappy sites tank in an instant.

With quality sites I mean in the eye's of Google, eg well structured, full of relevant content, decent optimized and such.

Thanks

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9705552].message }}

Kevin Maguire

8 years ago

Advice Appreciated

Kevin Maguire
Advice Offered

Get the hell out of this Amazon Affi crap and move into bigger paying projects.

Thanks
1 reply

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9704839].message }}

nik0 Banned 8 years ago

Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire

Advice Appreciated

Kevin Maguire
Advice Offered

Get the hell out of this Amazon Affi crap and move into bigger paying projects.

I want to experiment a bit with Clickbank as well, promotion through email newsletters but I suppose that's not what you mean either.

You know ranking Amazon stuff is relatively easy and easy to scale without much thought, ranking in payday loans, viagra, insurance niches requires a whole different approach I think.

My last Amazon project of 20-25 sites was pretty much of a failure as I waited way too long with building links and did some things wrong, still I broke-even, and now they're still making a $1000-$1500/month combined, not much but it's pure profit now and totally hands free and a possible sales value of $15k+, so even when doing it all wrong it still pays off pretty well (should've made $5k+/month though, that's why I call it a failure).
- Thanks
{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9704852].message }}

ulianov

8 years ago

My advice is just focus on 1 website and make it authority site with a lot of high quality content

Thanks
1 reply

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9704870].message }}

weirdcurt21

8 years ago

Originally Posted by ulianov

My advice is just focus on 1 website and make it authority site with a lot of high quality content

I doubt it will work for a long term. If your authority site suffers what would you do? Avoid putting all eggs to one basket.

4 years ago, I had good success with Clickbank with one authority site, till Google Panda came and destroyed the only one of my income resource. It was depressing, but lesson learnt.

To OP, have you tried this method? It seems promising.

Trick to make it fast!!! - YouTube

Thanks
1 reply

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9704915].message }}

nik0

Banned 8 years ago

Originally Posted by weirdcurt21

I doubt it will work for a long term. If your authority site suffers what would you do? Avoid putting all eggs to one basket.

4 years ago, I had good success with Clickbank with one authority site, till Google Panda came and destroyed the only one of my income resource. It was depressing, but lesson learnt.

To OP, have you tried this method? It seems promising.

Looks like a quick way to get your account banned.

Either way, I don't think it will be appreciated by Amaozn.

The link ain't a hyperlink either so wonder how many people will really take the effort to copy/paste it.

Thanks

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9704928].message }}

webbassets

Banned 8 years ago

I'm currently building 500 sites a marketing them purely on PPC marketing startegy. I've found success with small amount of site and i am planning to scale up and i appreciate your suggestions

Thanks

{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9707628].message }}

Advice Appreciated - Big Affiliate Amazon Sites Plan

Trending Topics

What I've Been Up To...Finally Made It

How to know what to charge for advertorials, ads and guestblogs

Last Resort...Please Help

Fake stories? Or True Stories? Any thoughts?

Writer's block