Amazon affiliate marketing GUIDE

Any site that makes the majority of its income via affiliate marketing is called an amazon niche site.

In this post we are going to look at several ways you can market and drive traffic to your Amazon niche site.

Building links and bringing targeted traffic to an Amazon niche site isn’t easy work by any means. But it’s possible if you do the work. This post is all about that.

Niche selection

There are high competition niches that everyone is writing content on. You’d better avoid those niches. These are saturated and already has tons of reviews from the topmost sites.

Without a big budget and plenty of time it’s not possible to outrank these sites.

Instead, you can either focus on medium or low competition niches. It’s possible to rank your site in these niches but need good investment or time to create the content and build backlinks. This means the investment amount goes up before you see any returns.

There are low competition niches because almost anyone can create posts and rank here/ There are only a few such niches available and even in these there will be few sites that are already ranking well. So keep that in mind before you start.

With low competition niches sometimes the biggest question mark is the low potential of earnings you get. Most months or throughout you are going to be making in the ballpark of just $1000.

However, if you can start two to three such sites you can multiply your earnings and start earning more.

Finding Product Ideas

Once you are aware of the competition in a niche and all the factors that go with you the next step is gathering product ideas and researching all that you are going to review.

To do this;

Browse Amazon Product Categories

Go through product categories and subcategories on Amazon. No time wasting is required and filter out all the niches that don’t interest you.

The product should cost 50 dollars or more

The average rating should be more than 3

At least 500 or so searches in US in the terms best of review etc.

You can also go through the category pages or the sitemap of blogs reviewing products. They may be ranking for some product name reviews purely on the basis of their domain authority and even though big ticket items are out of the question competing on these smaller niche terms especially if you have an entire site around the subject is going to be much easier for you as a beginner. You could be tracking sub niches of printers or scanners and ranking for them.

These narrowed down small niches are bread and honey.

Use SEMRush to Get Niche Ideas from Top Sites

In addition SEMrush can help you discover a veritable goldmine of ideas by applying a few simple filters to sort out the best keywords and see the list of keywords that are driving the most traffic for them.

You can set the filter as best or include the keyword review as a filter so you get all the review and best of pages that the site covers and also ranks and brings traffic with.

So that saves you a bunch of time.

Analysing the Competition/Difficulty of a Niche

It’s also important that you go through and analyze the competition of a niche by analyzing the individual difficulty of keywords. Analyzing serps to find keyword difficulty is one of the best things you can do and gets you an accurate view of the keyword and its traffic potential. You can see the time consuming it can be to check for these keywords manually.

You get the monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, average cpc and the competitiveness with the kD score.

This can help you understand how deep you need to cut your teeth ihto it to understand how to rank well.

KC determines the competitiveness of the keyword.

Which are the kinds of articles you need to think of publishing?

So, keeping that in mind, here are a few types of content that you can publish on your niche sites:

Informative articles – these articles provide information around the general niche. These can be long form content covering a subject in detail.
Answer-type articles – these target queries that help people get answers from the site around a subject. Your article can answer questions like this vs that or something of that nature.
List type posts – List articles are a splendid way to generate traffic and keep them highly engaged.
‘Best [Product]’ Roundups – Product roundups are generally 3000 to 10000 words long or even longer and contain everything you need to make money of the product. List the top ten products and review them online.
Individual product reviews – The individual product review should be 1000 to 2000 words long. Reviewing lots of products can result in tiny trickles of traffic that convert into paying customers at the end.

How to find content ideas

It’s going to be a difficult task researching topics for the niche site. This is a good part of the strategy and with every keyword there are some eays to rank and some not.

Do a primary keyword research to find out the list of the few keywords on which you can write content around.
Once you have chosen the niche and the site starts ranking for a few keywords move on to other topic ideas by analyzing difficulty and other things and filter them based on these.
As you put the urls to semrush you get a bunch of keywords you can include in your content.
Google the competitor url to get an idea of the pages and keywords the site ranks for.
The tool can get you a bunch of different keywords to choose from all within the same niche.
With alltop and similar sites you can find the top sites in that particular niche.

Analysing Content Competiveness

Analyzing the best way to rank the pages means you need to look at the length of the content and see what’s already ranking on Google for the terms.

If you have affiliate sites ranking with 3000 words always aim to go beyond that word range. Make it more indepth.

Content length is given more and more importance and is a top ranking factor.

Tone of Your Content

Creating the content means you need to think about the real purpose of the article. You need to really review the product for all the claims its making. That’s the reason people search for reviews in the first place. They are close to buying and need expert recommendations before they purchase the buy button.

This validation is what your article should be about. The article should be friendly and should also carry and air of authority regarding the claims you are making. Pros and cons make the review sond genuine.

Research should go into writing the article and this is something that helps you create great content.

Format of My Typical Round-up Post

This is a standard format I’ve put together that you can use for all of your round-up style posts which are the main earners of a site.

A title

A comparison table or an image

An intro on the different sections being covered

A brief section showcasing the top picks or selection

Further information on the products

Conclusion

When creating articles its essential to link out to other sites in the niche. Back up the claims you make, the stats you quote and other useful data.
Don’t use product pricing, rating or time sensitive info as this can lead to your account being banned.
Use some seo plugin to optimize page and meta titles, page url and descriptions
Place a clear call to action and link to the landing page.
Use a table with tablepress to cover the important points as the scannable table saves a lot of time for readers.
With a small budget you are also writing your own articles. You can get weary of that soon. However outsourcing a bunch of your articles can be really helpful. Rope in freelancers or even big agencies that can help you in this regard.

Content is the stepping block to access, create 20000 to 30000 words of content for the niche site. Writing it all alone can spine a lot of time especially when you hire plenty of good writers.

You need to do things on time and getting a write for 4 to 5 cents per word is great.

Or you can go lower for 2 cents per word. Niche site writers generally work around at this range.

Building links to the site

You can have all the content in the world but none of it is going to rank with some great links.

Learning how to build links and what kind of links you can build will help you improve the process and gain a lot of clarity on what needs to be done.

If you are going for low competition niches as suggested throughout the article, then you can generally get away with easy to build links.

For high competition niches, link building is way more complicated and it requires several years of effort not to mention a serious cache of cash to build that kind of extremely powerful links.

To mimic 2000 to 3000 strong links that the top tech domains have is no mean feat and you might quickly find yourselves throwing up your hands in sheer frustration.

Instead focusing on low competition niches is way better.

Few link types such as creating links from web 2.0 sites or from profile sites or comments or forum posting generally don’t require any approvals or quality checks and are super-easy to create to any site. They are not very powerful. But given that your site is in an easy to rank niche you wouldn’t face too much trouble ranking your site with such easy links.

That’s for one.

Then again there are more opportunities awaiting you in the form of guest posts too.

Web 2.0 pages

Creating and posting on web 2.0s is one of the best things to do to quickly create backlinks.

Web 2.0s are free sites where you can create a page. For instance blogspot is a web 2.0. Simply start a blog called yourname.blogspot.com or the nichename.blogspot.com.

Once that’s done you can post an article or post 2 to 3 articles and link out to your blog. Note that linking out to external high-authority sites is also a great practice to follow.

There are dozens and dozens of web 2.0s with high domain and page authority where you can post content and get link juice back to your domain.

Niche relevant forums

When forum posting its important that you choose the most relevant forums to do this right. If you blog about blogging there are hundreds of relevant forums. WickedFire, webmaster forums, making money online forums, forums on hosting, on affiliate programs on blogging to say a few. Most forums give you a space for a signature link and also a link to add on the profile. So that’s something worth noting because it helps your link acquisition efforts.

In addition when there are meaningful discussions happening around your niche topic contribute an answer of value and perhaps you get an opportunity to drop a link as well.

Don’t contribute for the sake of adding links because most forum members can see through the flimsy attempt. In most cases that doesn’t end well either.

Profile sites

There are several image posting sites where you can add a profile and you can get a space for adding a link in the bio in all such places.

Once you do that’s generally a do follow link back to your site. For under $5 dollars you can get a list of 100 mail.ru accounts. I generally use one of these accounts to create accounts on profile sites. Once I do I can switch up and create another account for another of my sites with another mail id and go on this process almost endlessly.

Comment links

I don’t generally recommend comment links because most of them are no-follow by nature.

And no follow links don’t pass link juice. Still, if you want to diversify the link profile and raise your chances of ranking well comment links are something to think about.

Only do-follow links help you rank. Period.

Most bloggers don’t know this and build a boatload of no follow comment links. Also I follow popular SEOs and marketers and one of those—Matt Diggity suggested that these are the links that Google uses to see whether to penalize a website or not.

So be careful and never over do comment links.

Guest posting

The right step-by-step process of guest blogging will require a guide unto itself. But suffice to say, those who say that guest blogging doesn’t work are more of paper SEOs and don’t know the reality.

They read something somewhere and proceed to dole out advice on what they don’t know anything about.

So that’s generally a problem. I’m breaking the myth here. Guest blogging works. And here’s a short guide on taking care of the most important pointers around creating guest post articles.

Find a target list of sites to pitch to

Guest blogging is pointless if you don’t have a list of sites to target. So start by using a few search terms like

Niche+write for us

Niche+ guest post

Niche+ contribute

This gives you a list of sites that accept guest posts. Even though they have a page that states they accept guest articles not all of them are going to respond to your request. You’re lucky if you get 5 responses when you send 10 to 15 pitches.

At other times, they simply miss the email you sent them so send again.

This is just one of the ways to find out a target list of sites to pitch to. Another technique I generally use is find out the backlink profile of the competitors.

Just make a list of your competitors and run these sites through Ahrefs or SEMrush. Once you do you get a list of backlinks. Click through to the links and find out how many of those are guest posts. Ahrefs has a text preview of the surrounding text and that makes it easier to guesstimate if the links are guest posts or not.

Now save all these guest post sites to a csv file and pitch them. You have a ready proven list of sites to contact and build links out from. Isn’t that great?

So these are two ways for you to discover guest blogging opportunities and send out pitches you can use. Guest blogging requires a lot of patience and is harder than the other methods outlined above. However when you do land guest posts, the links are way better and only few of these links can help you rank.

A problem with niche sites is because they are so profit-oriented you may witness a high rate of disapprovals with people choosing not to work with you simply because you run a niche site.

That’s something to be aware of and its something that adds to the difficulty of landing guest posts for niche sites.

Another method I’ve heard of late is building out a niche site as an authority site that covers all manner of topics. Next instead of pitching and getting links, wait for links to arrive at their own pace by creating loads of content. Something to the tune of 3 to 4 articles a day. Some of these articles will pick up links and go on doing that for several years. This takes a long time say 4 to 5 years but is bound to work. However the foot needs to be always on the gas so that you are primed for the opportunity of acquiring all possible links.

However to increase the odds of the guest posting gods favoring you, make sure you have a good looking site, premium design and at least a few dozen articles before you start approaching strangers. This gives you an air of authority that makes your request much harder to ignore.

Optimize your site for more traffic and earnings

Once your site is on the steady road for decent earnings you need a plan to scale those earnings. This is only possible if you focus on few big things.

First is you need to post more content on the site to grow it.

Make it the core focus of the site by covering relevant products that weren’t on the focus earlier. Run the site through SEMrush and get a site audit report that will help you understand what you can improve and if there are metrics that are currently decaying.

Scale up focus on link building and do much more outreach to pace the growth of the stie. Improve the site design so that it earns more links and gets more shares.

When the site is older then it usually starts to perform better on Google serps. A site that is young about 6 months of age generally has trouble covering rankings. So with age you get more traffic and the odds of ranking well also improve.

With pretty decent earnings in the first few months you can do nothing to improve traffic or rankings in the time the site starts.

Once these sites are on the ballpark of 1000 dollars or more per month, check the analytics and see the SERP rankings and see which pages are outside of page or at the bottom of page and see if you can do something with link building or adding more content to get these pages to rank.

Tools like SEMrush can also track the overall rankings and performance of your site on the SERPs.

Once you hit the earning limits. You can add more content and build more links to get them to rank higher.

Create more content based on secondary keywords as well.

Cover more niche relevant topics and expand the focus on your brand.

Get an idea of the most popular earning pages of competitors as well if you can.

The difference between smaller niche sites and high earning sites is they tend to reinvest most of what they earn back into their own business. By outreching and creating better looking design you improve the chances of building more links to the site.

Focus on page conversion rate optimization tactics to earn more.