Amazon affiliate Sites have always been a hot topic among Affiliate Marketers. They have been profitable since the beginning of time. I decided to do this guide to show the readers exact steps of making these sites. Just the way Pros do it.
Don’t worry if you are new to amazon affiliate sites or even making a website. This guide has been made to answer all your queries. If at any point you think you need a question answered, please send it my way through comments.
Here is what all will you learn in this guide:
- Why should you build amazon affiliate sites
- Choosing a profitable niche and doing Keyword Research.
- Building The Sites
- Search Engine Optimization of amazon affiliate sites
Why should you build amazon affiliate sites
Profitability can be awesomely high
The first and the most compelling reason I would prefer an amazon site over any other is because the CPM (earnings per thousand views) is usually very high. The main reason behind this high CPM is that instead of earning cents and pennies from AdSense or any other ad network clicks, you are going for actual product sells.
Even though tangible products can’t give you much commission rate, if you promote more expensive products you will get good earnings. Of course, you can’t expect high earnings by promoting a $10 product but selling a $150 product will earn you $6 (at 4% commission rate of Amazon. See this to know more about their commission rates). Think about selling a $1000 camera…. Yippee! $40. Which is very lucrative if scaled up.
You earn equally well from upsells and other sells
How many times has it happened that you went to buy only one thing from a store and you found yourself coming back with a bag full of things?
That is the beauty of a supermarket. You also buy things that you didn’t plan to.
To make use of that human psychology Amazon uses “Cookies”. Once somebody lands on amazon after clicking on your affiliate link, a cookie is inserted in their systems that makes sure commission of whatever they buy in the next 24 hours is paid to you. Not only the product that you promoted but also any other thing they buy in the next 24 hours.
Awesome! isn’t it?
I remember when I started my first Amazon affiliate site about a certain niche of beauty products, I was amazed to see commissions for things like ice creams and a few other edibles and what not in my reports. I never promoted those but got good share of earnings. These women….
They are really simple
You can generate your affiliate link for any product you choose. Go to the sales page of the product and on the top menu bar click on any of the 3 options under “Get Link”. Here is a quick look:
It has pretty decent tracking system as well. The company itself is reliable and pays on time. You do not have to worry about your commissions being shaved off. Unlike Adsense, they have simple and lenient rules and don’t like banning accounts very often.
It gives you inner peace
Internet Marketing world is full of products that are only created for the sake of profit. They don’t offer any value to customers. Get rich WSOs, Business in a box scams, software that have super hyped sales pages but offer no value and even low-quality physical products etc.
But when you are an amazon affiliate, you know you are not doing fraud with your customers. You are satisfied that they are getting a real product that offers good value.
Choosing a profitable niche and doing Keyword Research
The idea here is to select a Niche or Product:
- That sells a lot
- Is profitable
- Has good amount of products with good customer reviews
- Is easy to rank in google.
The niche you are going to build amazon affiliate website around must have a good number of monthly searches. The number of monthly searches shows that people are looking for it and that the product sells a lot.
Try to target products that have higher prices. If you promote a product that sells for $25, you will only earn $1 as commission on every sale. But if you promote a $100 product, you will earn $4. Higher the price, greater the profit.
If your niche has low quality products listed on amazon with bad reviews, don’t expect success. People are only looking to buy the best with their money. Once they click on your link and find a low rated product, they are gone from your website for ever.
Most importantly, you must be able to rank on the first page for the keywords related to the product. In SEO, the winner takes it all. If you do everything perfectly and fail to rank on the first page of google search results, all your efforts go in vain.
Choosing A Niche
Remember following points when choosing a Niche:
- Choose a niche that is evergreen instead of choosing seasonal ones. Unless of course it earns you more in a season than an evergreen one earns in a whole year.
- Choose a less competitive niche. This makes your chances of ranking higher easier.
- Choose a niche that has high price products.
- Prefer the one you know more about and in which can produce lots of content.
Amazon Keyword Research
This is where most beginners get wrong and later can’t find out what their mistake was. Things can be done manually but it can literally take weeks here. Here is how this process goes:
- Finding out a list of keywords, long tails and LSIs in your selected niche
- checking and filtering those with less searches per month
- finding out competitors for each of the remaining keyword
- checking dozens of factors for all the results (Competitors for each KWs, number of results and much more) to determine which keyword has low competition and is easy to rank
- Moving to next steps once a winner Niche is found OR repeating everything if the niche is not good enough.
These five steps can take forever if done manually. Here you are dealing with hundreds of keywords and then investigating numerous factors for each one of them. I prefer using tools that make things easy. Following are the tools I use.
- Google Keyword Planner (Free)
- Niche Genetics (Paid) (My Review Here)
- Keyword Revealer (Free/Paid)
Who does not know GKP (Google Keyword Planner)?
Once I have selected a Niche, I pop it into GKP to get more ideas. I go through whole list that GKP comes up with and then choose those with a good amount of searches.
Another way of gathering more and more Keywords is using product name with different terms that people search them with. For example, if I am looking for keywords in electric shaver niche, I would use following combinations:
Brand + Product + Reviews
- Braun Electric Shaver Reviews
- Toshiba Electric Shaver Reviews
- Panasonic Electric Shaver Reviews
- Philips Electric Shaver Reviews
Product + For + Category
- Electric Shaver For Men
- Electric Shaver For Women
- Electric Shaver For Thick Hair
Possibilities are endless. You can come up with your own combination as long as you think people are searching for it. Here are a few more:
- Best + Product + For + Category/Reason
- Best + Product + 2022(year)
- Top + Product + For + Category/Reason
- Best + Adjective + Product (Best Cordless Electric Shaver)
And so on…..
Manually make a list of keywords this way and save them in a spreadsheet. Run them through Keyword planner to get monthly searches. Save those with a good amount of searches. Now you have those that you got directly from Google Keyword Planner and these ones.
Move on to next step only if you have a good amount of keywords with a good amount of searches.
In the next step, we will find out the competition of our keywords. To do this I use Niche Genetics and Keyword Revealer. I have a lifetime subscription of Niche Genetics that is really making my life very easy.
I login to my niche genetics keyword research tool and pop in the saved keywords one by one to determine difficulty. Here is my complete step by step process of using it to find easy to rank keywords.
Niche Genetics is jam packed with features. You can read my complete review about the tool here.
I save those that have low competition and double check them with Keyword Revealer. Keyword revealer is very accurate when it comes to determining the competition of keyword.
I am using a free account of keyword revealer that allows me to perform a very limited number of queries. These two tools coupled together give me very accurate difficulty of keywords.
These tools also come up with many new keywords that I gather on the go. This is how I gather good amount profitable KWs.
Building The Sites
I won’t discuss basic stuff like setting up a website here. If you don’t know how to start a blog/website download my guide and follow the exact steps. Download the guide below:
Here I will emphasize on website structure and content.
Content for Amazon affiliate sites
Content is king. I think this needs no explanation. Be it Amazon affiliate sites or any other type of website, content should be taken seriously. It should be:
- Unique, Both for Human and Search Engine crawlers.
- Interesting
- Lengthy. Preferably over 1000 words
- Should include pictures and other relevant multimedia
- Should include luring call to actions
- Comparisons
- and whatever it takes to make your visitors click your links
- Very well Optimized keeping in view the Onpage SEO guidelines. Please download my On page SEO guide below if you want to know exactly what to do:
Your main aim is to make every visitor click your link. This will place a 24-hour cookie on his computer. No matter then what he buys, you will get commissions for his purchases.
Website Structure
Like every other website Amazon affiliate sites should be structured to allow search engine crawlers to crawl every nook and corner of them and for people to navigate through them easily. Here is how I would structure my amazon affiliate sites:
The Home page should have a very long article around the main keyword we are targeting (Let’s say “Lawn Mower”). 2000+ words is always good. The Home page should then link to category pages that are built around a different keyword in that niche (Let’s say Motorized lawn mowers, electric lawn mowers, Manual pushed lawn mowers etc).
Normally WordPress category pages only list posts under that category but here each category page will have a long article and then it will list the posts under that category (which are also sometimes called pillar articles).
The articles on the Home and category pages should be made to maximize monetization. You can write comparison articles for these pages and put good call to actions at several locations.
The purpose of pillar articles is to link to the main article and pass relevancy and authority. In our case, if we want to rank our category page, we will write several pillar articles around long tail keywords of that category and link to the category page. Here is how our structure will look:
These pillar articles linking to the category pages will help in their SEO. If you are not primarily monetizing on your category pages, you can decide not to link from the pillar articles. Your pillar articles will then act as individual articles.
SEOing Amazon Sites
A lot has been written all over the internet about how SEO works. Gurus have their methods of ranking sites. But, the truth is no one knows when they stop working and when their sites get hit. However, following mix of white and black-hat methods have helped me and various other Internet Marketers to rank their pages in Google:
- Guest Posts
- Manually created, Niche specific, very high-quality web 2.0s
- High metrics expired web 2.0s
- Social media shares
- Backlinks from genuine websites
- Manually placed relevant comments on niche specific real websites
- Links from discussion forums
- Real stealth PBNs
Here is how I would approach. Once my site is live, I will start by building a few web 2.0s and link with naked URLs. I will then manually build some profile links from different high PR forums and other websites. Next will be manually made comments that really add value.
I also get social signals to drip feed on the go. I will try to grab a few links from relevant discussion forums. These are a bit difficult as you have to spend some time posting on the forum. You can’t post URLs until you have made a certain number of posts. Even then it is difficult to get a link as people would report it as self-promotion. But if you can grab a few, they are worth the efforts.
All of the above will have a good mix of do and no follow. I will only be using brand anchor text or naked URLs for these. Remember that SEO is now a slow process. Please allow your links to get indexed and show their effect. It may take up to 2 or 3 weeks.
Once your rankings are settled you can decide what should be done next. If some of your keywords are already making it to 1st or 2nd page, go for a few guest posts if you have time and content. If not, go for PBN links and use exact match anchors.
Another thing you can do is make some high-quality tier 2 links to the ones you have already built. I suggest going after a contextual links service.
If your Niche and Keyword research was done right, your amazon affiliate website will start to rank for different keywords you were targeting and a lot of other long tails too.
Wrapping it up
Amazon affiliate sites have been a great earner for Internet Marketers for decades and are continuously earning them more. They who have got them right, have got addicted to them. There is a lot that still needs explanation. I will leave that for the comments section. Please ask your queries through comments and I will gladly get back.