in 24 Hrs ~ Why I Love Amazon Over Adsense

I have like 10 sites that don't have anything over $50. The thing is, once someone has my cookie tons of times I notice items being sold on my affiliate ID that I don't even promote. I sold a bunch of baby items the other day, and I don't have any sites that have anything to do with children- but some of them do target mothers!

I totally agree Jay- and that's why I do have those 10 sites that are strictly AdSense. But nowadays, I feel like it's not worth the effort for me to build sites based around it so all my domains in the last 6 months have been intentionally built to be Amazon sites.

I have had little success with Amazon but then again I don't own nearly as many websites as you do. How did you accumulate so many? Do you have your Amazon deposited directly into your bank account or do you receive monthly checks?

After all that why you still prefer Adsense to Amazon

90 percent of all my traffic to all my websites is via organic search from SEO I did myself on my sites, and the other 10 percent is from a few social bookmarks, youtube videos, and articles I have scattered about. The ages of my sites are all under 3 years old with some of them being as new as a week old. It usually takes anywhere from 1-3 months for me to be able to rank them properly. I usually hit the number 1 spot at around 3 months (I do pretty darn good keyword research if I do say so myself). I've been especially more cautious and slow on my newer sites in the last 6 months. In the beginning I took things a little fast since I was in a bit more of a rush to make a profit but now that I have a pretty steady stream of revenue I can afford to go slower.

Not every site I ever made was a success, some were flops. But the flops are what taught me how to make the ones I have a success.

This has always been my problem with AdSense... There is not accountability at Google, in regards to finding out 'why' they shut some people's accounts.

I've never had a problem with my account, and don't personally know anyone who has lost their AdSense account, but the stories are pretty common.

I never use Omakase. The majority of my sites are niche sites covering a specific category of products. So I will have review for various products in said category and use "Product In A Post" free plugin (with some minor css changes to make it do what I like).

I then build a custom Carousel Widget by hand featuring all the said products I review on the site. It's kind of a pain, because every time I write a new review I have to add it- but I think it helps get me more Amazon clicks rather than using Omakse where it sometimes puts random garbage in there.

I also never use general Amazon banners as I feel like they convert terribly.

I've never taken any course personally. I've picked up a few things here and there on this forum and just browsing Google, but I've mainly learnt from trial and error and my bachelors in Communication Studies came in handy quite a few times as I learnt a lot about how to communicate effectively and translated it into the online world. I also worked in the commercial insurance industry before switching to full time internet marketing- so basically taken all my knowledge from my previous industries and skill-set and converted it into the online world.

Thanks . Initially I wrote all my reviews- but as I've gained a steady income I've outsourced them. I actually use my friends little brother - he's 20 years old and I've been teaching him about SEO and in exchange he writes me the majority of my reviews for a reasonable price.

Ever since the beginning I've used WP Weaver theme - there's a free version in the WordPress theme directory - since then I've moved on to the pro (though its really not necessary I just bought it to support it cause I love it so much). Note there is two WP Weaver's , I use the older one (Weaver I) since they got rid of the two column posts on home page feature in the latest one, and my two column homepage sites convert higher than the single ones. Weaver has like 12 child themes built in and its very versatile. As I mentioned above I combine it with the Amazon Product in a Post (free plugin) and use some basic css to manipulate it to work how I like it.

You reassure me because I was about to start a new run of niche sites. I thought the G-update would've made my IM efforts worthless.

Hi Owen, thanks! I mentioned above, 90 percent is organic SEO traffic and the other 10 percent is from videos, articles, and social bookmarks.

I'm working on diversifying my traffic network- as I don't want to have to rely solely on Google to bring in traffic.

I actually tried setting up an AdWords campaign once on a site- and was rejected for being too affiliateish.

He said it. SEO

Did OK yesterday - was around $300. On days and off days

For all my sites I use my own private blog network, some manual blog commenting, some quality social bookmarks, some quality wikis, and have about 15-30 quality web 2.0's. I use all my junk backlinks to link back to those backlinks.


I personally only have 1 informational article on each site. I use the Weaver free Wordpress theme and stick that on a page and sticky it on the top. I also do a ton of interpage linking which I think really decreases my bounce rate. None of my Amazon sites have over a 45 percent bounce rate which I am proud of. Average time on all sites together, is probably something about 4 minutes.

I have between 4-8 posts on homepage and have between 8-30 product reviews on each site.


I research them in almost the same way I research my Amazon sites. Find a low competition keyword (but in this case instead of looking for OCI I look for CPC). I've just never had tons of huge success with them. It might be because rarely do I focus on keywords with over 4k exact searches - or maybe I just am better at doing product sites than basic "How to" and "informational" sites - either way, congrats on your success and stick to what works for you.

Organization is key - I've gotten it to the point where I end up working about 15 -20 hours a week. Once my sites are ranking I add about 1 review every 2-4 weeks, and sprinkle a few quality back-links here and there. I also have a close friend who has his own blog network as well so we sometimes will help each other out as long as the niche is similar, because I trust him and know the pride he takes in his network. I also use ManageWP which helps everything stay streamlined.

Private blog network is a mix of html sites and WordPress sites to try to avoid a footprint as much as possible. Also I make sure to have at least 3 posts on each of them with no outbound links at all, and to link to an authority site in every post that I do have links.

Hi Spen,

I'm glad you found it helpful. My two most important aspects when finding a niche are A. low organic SEO competition and B. high online commercial intent.

Hope this helps

I use Ultimate Niche Finder to for my initial OCI evaluation but also try to take a 3rd party stance and think about "if I'm searching for this term, am I looking to buy something or am I looking strictly for information?"

A strong middle ground always works as well.

With my first mfa site I am having very little success with amazon 1 sale in 67 clicks. Do you find that more expensive products convert at a lower rate because all my products are over $200 dollars. Also in an unrelated question does traffic affect your cost per click, because when I checked the contextual targeting tool for my keywords there all over a dollar and quite a few are over $2.00 yet my adsense clicks have been averaging around 25 cents. Yesterday I got my first decent click at almost a dollar incidentally my traffic has increased as a result of hitting page #1 for my main targeted keyword. Any input on this would be greatly appreciated.

Some sites the main focus is one keyword, while others are like 2 or 5 of 1k each.

I never attempt to rank for the actual model number, as I've had low success with it. I always find that I rank for multiple long tail keywords without even trying.

Of course I fully agree it depends on your niche, I stated that in the OP. What I am trying to say is you can make a much larger amount of money with a smaller amount of traffic with Amazon Aff than you can with AdSense. How many unique visitors a day do you get to make $60-$80 on AdSense? Comparably, I make that on three sites with only 30 uniques a day each. Granted you may have struck gold with a very high CPC, but those are usually much harder to rank for. I'm able to rank the sites that I do with a pretty light back link profile using these untapped niche keywords I discover, which I've found is a much easier than targeting a 10k exact search term for an AdSense site with over a $2 cpc.

Thanks - I don't have any internet marketing blog - besides my basic one on my website design/seo company site, and that's more or less just basic information.

I do intend to eventually package all the information I provided here into a simple PDF and will most likely just release it was a free package for all War Room members - but no time frame or estimate when that will happen.


No problem! It cost me around $800 for all the domains initially (but I bought these over time). It's around $500 each year to renew them. Hosting runs me quite a bit - I think its something like $300 a month combined. But because I am able to rank most of my sites so easily with it I feel it's completely worth it since I make it all back in a day or two.

I didn't learn anywhere specific. I've never actually purchased any WSO, besides software itself. Just from reading around, other peoples experiences, and Google. In my entire time of having my network I've only had ONE site de indexed and I still have no idea why.

Ashera, you made more money in 1 day than I did for 2011 for Amazon associates program.... lol

Good work

Nigel

Every site I make is done using the Weaver II Theme customized to my liking (free version in Wordpress theme directory works fine ), and the free plugin Amazon Product In a Post, with simple css customization to make it work for my needs.

I'm not familiar with that plugin, but what I use works perfectly if you are building these sites manually like they should be built.

I think the exact number of domains in my network is 53 at the moment.

Though I do have access to a friends network of another 30 something domains as long as my sites fills some of the niche categories.

We both don't just throw random unrelated stuff on a page to protect the integrity of it, which is why I choose to focus on about 6 different niches, though I do expand occasionally out of my bubbles.


I think you might be able to if you don't link to Amazon from the home page, but I'm not 100 percent sure. AdWords is not my forte.

Organic traffic accounts for 90 percent of my traffic while 10 percent comes in from videos, articles, and random places.

No problem, I don't mind. Don't have dinner plans for a couple hours.

I do link to a maximum of 3 random sites from each site, as long as they are in the same or similar general category. Obviously I wouldn't link to my vacuum site from my school supplies site - but I might link to my curtains site from my vacuum site, since they are both in the category of home improvement.


No reason to send a link, Google themselves told me why.

" As you know, we are deeply committed to providing a high-quality user experience for search results, both organic and paid. To that end, we regularly review sites and landing pages to ensure they adhere to our advertising policies.

We noticed that one of your URLs was recently flagged as against policy, and as a result we are not displaying ads for that site. Please note that the affected URL will not receive ad traffic and all new ads pointing to this URL will be disapproved.

The name of the policy is: Bridge page
More information about this policy, including how to correct problems: http://support.google.com/adwordspol...&answer=190435 "

What I find most interesting is that AdWords policies consider my site to be unuseful, yet I rank organically just fine.

I do think they do absolute wonders for SEO if done correctly. I know there are some WSO's about building one- find a trusted and reputable Warrior and grab one of them. It's a lot of work, but worth it.

No problem! If you do use it - make sure to go to options, and once you've filled out all the info put a checkmark next to "Open Product Link in New Window?" and "Use My Custom Styles?:"

Add these two lines of CSS above all the CSS they have already there.


td.amazon-used { display: none !important; }

td.amazon-used-label { display: none !important; }


It get rids of the "used" pricing option which looks very tacky and confuses buyers in my opinion.

Do it! It's so exciting waking up to see the power of that "cookie." I think maybe 50 percent of the products I receive commission on are products that I've actually reviewed. The rest are just random products from people on my cookie who have clicked my link.

In regards to backlinks - very few to be honest. The majority of my sites have an average of 100-500 backlinks, but they are 80 percent really high quality. I honestly don't link build for weeks at a time for certain sites because my profile is so strong due to my blog network and manual web 2.0s.

6.31% in the last month - but I get between 600-900 clicks every day.

Hi Bryan - I do only target the root domain and randomly deep link just for the sake of link profile. I've never really had success in ranking product names, and I'm not the type of person who goes after 10-20 different keywords that each get 20-100 searches - though I know that practice does work.

When I do bump it up to 500 (which is only on my sites that I've had since the beginning) it's a variety of web 2.0 profiles, manual social bookmarks, manual blog comments, and some guest posting.

Your last question is a great one. Probably the most important thing I've learned is something I shared about in another post - just because I'm ranking doesn't mean I will have high conversions.

One of my sites in the beginning was getting something like 75 uniques a day - and only 1-2 clicks to Amazon. Why? My product reviews were boring, dull, and generic.

Nowadays my secret is this: I do is what I call taking on a "persona". I tell my writer what type of personality to take on.

For instance on my site that is focused mainly on vacuum cleaners I'm a mom with two kids and a dog. In the product reviews I will say things like "this is great for cleaning up those bowls of cereal and all that pet hair on the couch." or "this vacuum is so quiet I can use it in the same room when my infant is sleeping."

If I'm selling different types of tools, I would take on the role of a mechanic or something similar. I would say things like "this things great whether the wife wants me to fix our broken sink or if I'm working on my truck."

Adding personality and a human voice to the site and to the products increases my conversion tenfold.

Missed this post earlier - but looks like I happened to cover product reviews in your other question.

The home page has at least 6 product reviews (excerpts and images) on it after I have the links to read review - I think this helps my bounce rate stay around 35 percent and avg time on site above 4 minutes for nearly all my sites.

I really can't tell you the exact amount of percentages of converting on homepage vs review pages - if I were to guess I'd say 25-30 percent homepage - thats just based on a brief glance of my Piwik Analytics for one site.

Chris you make some good points - but in my opinion I don't see a huge difficulty difference between writing 600 words for an AdSense site (where you'll be researching something and putting it in your own words) or writing a 600 word Amazon Product review (where you'll be researching the Amazon page and other sites to write a product review in your own words).

That's just my opinion though. I've done both from the start - and before I outsourced my articles I wrote them all myself. I actually found writing compelling Amazon reviews easier than writing a boring 600 word rant on acne or the latest dental fad.

Thanks Jodie, that's my entire goal. Get people motivated.

I do tend to take images off Amazon - I'm really not sure the legality of that to be honest but haven't had an issue as of yet.

I do not do any email marketing or list building on any of my sites - for that exact reason. Plus I don't the opt in rate would be anything above like .01 percent. Why would anyone who's looking to buy a vacuum cleaner want to get a mailing list? I know I wouldn't. What am I gona do, offer them a free ebook on best cleaning methods? Haha, I just don't see a way to make it work, though I'm sure a more creative mind than me could.

I had an empty site when I first registered with Amazon Affiliates and built the first one from there.


Hi Duy!

I'm so glad you find it helpful. I just noticed I had another PM from you that I didn't respond to, it must have gotten marked as read and I never saw it - I will check it in a minute and make sure if I haven't answered anything to respond to it.

Someone right before this post mentioned- you just use the read more button (which is to the left of the spell check button) and place it after the 150-200 words and it will automatically generate the excerpt on the home page.

My product reviews are usually structured like this:

• Intro to the product
• Description of product
• Benefits of product
• Comparison to other products I reviewed or other products in its niche
• More Features of product
• Call to action

If I do write something negative about it it's usually trivial. I'm not a fan of doing pros and cons- plus every product I choose to write about already has at least a 4 star review on Amazon so I let that do the selling for me!


Competing pages in Google means absolutely nothing to me. I've seen keywords with like 300k competing pages with absolutely difficult competition. All that matters to me is how difficult it is to get top 3.

I've never been able to use AdWords for my Amazon sites as they are all rejected for being bridge pages.

I personally don't bother with any high competition keywords because of the level of work needed to rank for top 3. With so many sites to take care of I need to be able to rank with the most minimal amount of work possible.

I don't use any software for my tier 1 links. They are done manually, at least nowadays. Some of my older sites I did more automated SEO, but as things change so do I. I usually do 2-3 posts per Web 2.0 of 400-600 words each. At least 1 of them usually has no links at all.


I have a total of two links that point to Amazon per post. My images are not linked to Amazon but self hosted and when clicked just enlarge using WP-JQuery plugin. The two links are the "Buy now" button and a call to action at the end, like "click to read more", or "find more info here".

I do not cloak any links.


It depends. If the EMD is available I'll take it majority of the time, but I'm not stressed by having them. I never do anything but .com or .net. I don't like ranking .orgs, and would never even consider a .info or a country version - but that's just my opinion


Hi, strong detective skills That's a network of a few sites I've built recently that I'm actually testing different methods of SEO on - I'm using a few public blog networks and some more grey hat methods and seeing how they work. Actually decent so far - but I know it won't last.


The call to action is at the end of the post, show it doesn't show up on the homepage since I have excerpts.


1. The blog network is on separate hosts in order to increase its value. 50 backlinks from 1 IP is nowhere near as powerful as 50 backlinks from 50 ips.

2. Don't take my word on this- but from what I understand people in other countries can use Amazon.com affiliates, with a few stipulations on payouts. Theres another guy on here who I think knows a bit more about technicalities of Amazon "Gaz Cooper" or something similar. Might want to find a post by him and send him a PM.

1. Pretty much , I mean if I find a search with higher volume than 4k and it's low/medium competition by all means I'll go after it - but I haven't found one of them with a high online commercial intent. If I do go after a search with 1k searches per month, I need to know I have at least another keyword with 1k searches as well. Ultimately I won't go after a site unless I have a combined total of keywords that I think I can rank for of 2k searches+ a month.

2. Usually something more specific, but some are generic - people just never thought to build sites around them.

3. Everything you said here is what I take into account- your spot on in how I evaluate.

4. On top of the header is a navigation menu to different categories - sometimes they are just price ranges and other times more specific categories if the site isn't a small niche. Under the header I have a navigation which links to every single post, with a shortened title.

On the widget I use the same custom menu I did for the one under my header - so all my posts are again listed right there.

I also, on the homepage, AGAIN manually categorize and link to each individual post with a short description.

It's a bit overkill, but you have to be absolutely computer deficient to not know how to navigate around my site. My mother who can barely use Google, is able to navigate around it pretty easily.

Also after each single post I use Ajax Random Posts which gives another 4 posts automatically for people to look at. I seriously have tons of people going through 7-15 pages on a review site, with multiple Amazon clicks per person sometimes.

There's really no set number of backlinks because it all depends on the quality of them and the quality of their onsite SEO.

PR means absolutely nothing to me. I have new sites that are PR0 outranking Pr6 pages.

I may have misunderstood question 4 as I thought I answered it. Are you talking about how I interlink my different sites?

Totally forgot about question 5 and 6, my bad.

5. It's 15-30 different web 2.0 properties that will point to no more than 2 of my sites, with 2+ posts each. 1 of them usually has no link in it. I use about 70 different Web 2.0's. Every property has it's own unique account with its own unique email adress and unique IP using HMA VPN and private proxies.

6. It consists of probably 35 aged domains with PR and 15 or so of my sites that gained PR that I decided to scratch as money sites since they were performing poorly, I felt the PR and backlinks I had gained were better off used as part of my blog network.

I do want to build some of them to 50 post sites - but the problem is I only write reviews for products 4 stars or over on Amazon. For many of the niches it's hard to find 10-15 products that even fit this category.

What you have here, Ashera, is a brilliant ebook. This is one of the most inspiring threads. I tire of the usual 'Make $100,000 in 2 days' where there is no proof the person actually knows what they're talking about, just a vague promise and a link in their signature.

After reading through this thread, I feel I have enough information to get started and many others have asked the questions rattling around in my head!

I'll certainly be buying your ebook!

Thank you - I don't sell or build sites but I provided almost all the tools and info necessary right here in this thread. Best of luck.

Very true- but the theme I recommend throughout this thread "Weaver II" works brilliantly with them and is highly customizable.

Jodie I really appreciate it. Nothing for sale here and no false promises, just my own experience! I really do want to compile all this info together, but I really need to find the motivation and time to do it so I have no idea when and if that will be.

Hi I answered all these questions within the thread, the OP covers your first question - and I do 8-20 reviews for each site.

I was not thank goodness.


All reviews.


I can't see the picture, it's not working. I'd have to actually see the keyword to know.


Just the standard: H1 tag and H2 tags, well structured pages, solid interlinking, decent use of keyword density, good text/html ratio.


I normally just do it in paragraphs. Sometimes I will bold "Product Features" or some other part on certain sites- but for some niches it wouldn't make sense.


That's the main point I'm trying to get across. Obviously some keywords won't work for Amazon ~ but if you find a good one 60 unique visitors a day can easily make you $15-$30 a day -whereas its rare that the same amount of visitors could make that via the majority of AdSense sites.

Ashera, in post# 144 of this thread, you list different sections you use in structuring your product reviews, beginning with "intro to the product."

Do you actually have these as sections set out with bolded titles with h tags, or does the information just flow in one article with just regular paragraphs?

Catherine

I love CDM - no mansion yet, but working towards it.

I don't. Once I buy a domain I usually post 1 review to get the site indexed- then drop feed them over a month or two - then add a new review every month or two to get it as fresh in the eyes of Google.

Thank you for the great thread!

Question on your blog network. You mentioned that you get links from sites that are relevant to your niche. But i'm curious how you found PR2+ blogs on vacuum cleaners (for example) to add to your network? For instance if I wanted to create my own network is it ok to pick up random Pr domains and place content related to my niche on them instead?

I get between 7.5%-8% commission due to performance structure and how many items I sell (makes a huge difference). I haven't considered this cause I have no idea what I'd write about and how I would market it.

I am also curious about this.