Colin answered my previous post and wanted to know how to get started, or rather how to find a niche to begin with.

Now there are numerous ways to go about this, but in this post I’ll talk about how I do this with Amazon products (since they are my favourite affiliate program).

Now while sometimes I’ll get ideas for products to promote by watching tv or reading magazines, usually my first step is to head over to amazon.com and look at their bestseller lists. They have them in nearly every department, and often you can drill down quite well too.

So for example, here is the bestseller list for Air Purifiers (Home & Garden, Vacuums, Air Purifiers). I just chose that list totally at random as it sounded cool (and let it be known that I know nothing about air purifiers LOL). http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/home-garden/267554011/ref=pd_ts_hg_nav (not an aff link).

As you can see, there are lots of different types of air purifiers to choose from, so the next thing I usually do is pick one at random. I usually like to pick something that has been in the top 100 for more than 60 days, have at least 10 customer reviews, and a four or more star rating.

Just from a quick glance, the Honeywell Air Purifiers seem very popular (lots of reviews), are a good price (so your commission will be decent) and have been around awhile (most of them more than 900 days in the top 100).

So I’d probably pick one of them (again at random) and write a unique hubpage around it.

Don’t worry too much about how much the item costs, many people will tell you to choose only products that are high priced, but I’ve promoted things as low as $10 before and still made good money (because I can sell more, and people always put more stuff in their carts at Amazon).

Then I’d repeat that for 9 other products (all in totally different categories and lists – so your next one might be a baby product, and other might be a garden chair etc) and write hubs around those too until I have 10 new hubs written.

With my hubpages, I’ll write a 300-400 unique post usually review style just talking about the product. I often will read customer reviews and reword this when writing my hub. Add a picture of the product top left and underneath it place your affiliate link directly to Amazon in a link capsule. Also in the first paragraph of the article, as a text link, I’ll also place a link to the product on Amazon. (You are only allowed two links – so keep it as one in the first para of the article, and the other under the picture in a link capsule).

At the end of the article I’ll also place a hubpage Amazon capsule too (you only get revenue share with hubpages with the capsule, so don’t put it at the top).

Once you’ve done all 10, sit back and wait a week.

At the end of one week you need to identify which hub got the most views, was ranked the highest and (fingers crossed) made you some sales. (Although to be realistic, most hubs don’t start earning until after a month or two).

Once you’ve identified your best item, this is what you are going to build a site around. Buy a generic domain name and get some hosting. I like using wordpress blogs, but you can use static hmtl sites too – makes absolutely no difference in ranking in my experience.

Let’s say your best performing product was about a lawnmower. Don’t think mini site, think authority site, with lots of different reviews and articles about lawnmowers. So perhaps you want to buy lawnmowerblog.com (no idea if it’s available). Try and get your main generic keyword in there if you can (it’ll be hard to get exact match so be creative – toplawnmowerreviews.com, thelawnmowerwebsite.com, ilovelawnmowers.com – you get the idea).

For the next 30 days write one post/review to your blog every day, and write one article to submit to ezinearticles.com (you can also add the eza article to your blog as well if you like).

Within a month you’ll be earning some sweet sweet cash. Most of your traffic at this time will be coming from ezinearticles, but over time your backlinks will build up too and you’ll get google traffic as well.

Oh and don’t forget to add a link to your new blog from that old hubpage as well. Once your site is established, then you can go and get some more backlinks for it if you like. Or you can repeat the above steps with a new site.

Hope that’s helped!

Tracey

Well it’s about time I wrote another post here, even though I still have limited time online these days. (Oh by the way, I had the baby – she is now 2 weeks old and very cute).

But lately many of my online friends have had their sites deindexed due to what Google has called Made For Adsense (MFA) sites or thin affiliate sites. Of course some of these are not thin at all, they just happened to be hosted on Blogger which if you didn’t know already is going through a major cleanup right now.

I still have all of my Blogger sites for now, but then I never really developed any of them substantially and most of them are just sites I played around with, so it would be no huge loss if I did lose them (although I’d rather they stayed as most of them are true blogs about my experiences of certain life experiences). I didn’t develop them to make money – which is probably why they haven’t been touched.

Now let’s get to the mini site issue. If you’ve been in IM for a while you’ve no doubt heard of the x-factor type micro site model where you build a site around a certain keyword, usually a physical product and then use an ugly theme and a big in your face Adsense block right at the top of your article to encourage people to click your ads so you earn money.

Now the problem for these types of sites is that Google has said enough is enough, and is deindexing them left, right and centre.

Why?

Well if you look at it from Google’s point of view, or rather the advertisers that are paying for ads on Google, then you’ll realise that these are probably not real customers but more likely just people trying to run away quickly from your ugly theme. You will earn money, but the advertiser is not likely getting a true customer. If they are unhappy then Google is unhappy. If Google is unhappy then they will kick your ass right out of its index, no questions asked.

You can read more about this at my favorite blogs:

Griz – Making Money Online in 2010
Ben – How not to make money online

So why is Amazon better?

So we have established why having Adsense can be risky, but does that mean all mini sites are useless? Well no. I have quite a few mini sites but they all have one main difference – they use Amazon on them.

Why should that make a difference?

Adsense is a pay per click program. You get paid when someone clicks an ad on your site whether they are a real customer or not.

Amazon however is a pay per sale program. The advertiser (Amazon) can’t lose out because the customer MUST make a purchase before you get paid. Therefore it’s less risky and Google won’t care about your mini site as much. (They still want to provide value to the searcher, but they won’t totally diss your site unless you blatantly do something wrong).

Any pay per sale program is going to be safer for your business and your website

Does that mean you should avoid Adsense altogether?

Of course not, I still have Adsense on many of my sites, but here’s the difference: most of these sites have good amounts of content that I personally wrote (so it’s original and written from my point of view in most cases), the topics are those that I know about, they are updated fairly frequently, all have different themes (I could never do the ugly theme thing as I’m too much of a girl and like things to look pretty) and I try and provide real value.

Now, I do need to go and ‘tone down’ the Adsense on some of these because I do use ‘above the fold’ big square Adsense blocks on them which I’m now quite nervous about, but these are definitely not crap sites.

So what do I recommend for you?

If you have been using the Adsense mini site model (less than 5 pages of real content, ugly theme, big in your face ad block) then I suggest you either add loads more content (and make it GOOD content) or swap Adsense for an affiliate program or pay per sale program like Amazon or eBay. Oh and change your theme too. Make sure it doesn’t look like every other site out there in terms of content, layout and colours.

Start to try new things and don’t follow the herd. The reason Griz and Ben are so successful is because they do their own thing, try things out. If you just follow the advice of the latest ebook then it’s likely not to work long term unless it’s built on a solid business model. If you do like a particular marketer’s strategy then add your own spin to it. Mix it up.

And the biggest lesson that I’ve learnt from Griz & Ben is that if you are in the MMO niche, then for goodness sakes, don’t stick your head out and become too popular (I’m thankful that only about 3 people online know who I am).

Gotta go and feed the baby now, catch ya next time.

t xx

I haven’t written in a while because, well, it’s making me want to throw up. Literally.

No I haven’t caught the latest computer virus . I’m pregnant. And this little bub doesn’t seem to like mummy sitting at the computer typing for long periods of time. About the most I can handle before I want to hurl is about 1/2 hour.

So my plans for creating lots of Amazon sites in time for Christmas has been diminished somewhat. But the good news is that I still made a decent income for September. That’s why I love passive income so much, you can be busy trying to explain to your toddler why mommy needs some rest time and still be earning money.

Last post I promised I’d write more about Linkwheels, but since then the creator of them has said that they don’t seem to work as well anymore I thought I’d concentrate more of different linking strategies and how to improve your sites rankings.

I must first say that I’m no expert on this however. But the good news is that you don’t have to be. In fact there isn’t any exact scientific formula that you need to use to rank your sites well.

One site might only take a handful of links from article directories to rank it on page one. Others might need a more elaborate set of supporting sites to get there.

The biggest question many people ask is ‘how many links do I need to get my site to page one in Google’.

The answer – As many as it takes.

Yes I know that’s a little vague, but there are so many factors that you need to consider here. Both on page and off page SEO.

I’ve already talked a bit about onpage SEO in this blog before – you know the drill – try and get your keyword in your domain name, use it in the headers tags and text and even the image alt tags and so forth. Also add related words and phrases in your text as well. And the big one – make it original. (Yes I know people will argue that you can get duplicate content ranked – and yes you can but it takes lots more work so save yourself some time and just write an original post).

Ok so now to off page SEO or more importantly BACKLINKS.

The real key to ranking well is to get as many natural looking anchored backlinks to your site from good quality related sites. Quality links will always win out over quantity, but they are much harder to get (and Google knows this). So how do you get them?

Getting Backlinks
1. Check out the current sites for your target keyword and see if they have link exchanges. Most do not – but every now and then you’ll get lucky. A blog roll link isn’t as great as an inpost link – but it does all add up.

You may even be lucky enough to get a big site to link to you naturally. Do a happy dance if this happens.

2. Write articles and submit them to places like ezinearticles and infobarrel. Especially ezine – Google loves them. Plus you can usually get some bonus traffic as well. I have one article that I wrote at the beginning of the year that has had nearly 30,000 views and over 5,000 clickthroughs.

That’s pretty rare though, most of my articles only get a few hundred views but even so, while the extra traffic is great, the main reason I write articles is for the backlinks to my site. With EA you can give two links. I usually link to the home page and an internal page with each article. Over time this really ads up.

3. Create support sites. I’ve started creating a lot of support sites to my money sites and it has really helped improve rankings. I mainly use web 2.0 sites for my support sites. So hubpages, wordpress.com blogs, sometimes squidoo (although not so much as squidoo tends to rank poorly these days), blog.com, blogsome.com, blogger.com, weebly, wetpaint .. the list goes on. You really can find a lot of great places to start a free website or blog that will help support your main sites.

p.s. I’ve also noticed that hubpages has lost some of it’s google love lately – so I now only use them as support sites, not money sites themselves.

With all of my sites, I try and create good quality original content. I experimented with spun & auto generated content a few months back and it didn’t help at all. It’s worth your time to build up your support sites properly (and send links to them as well) so your money sites get stronger.

Think of it like a pyramid. The more strong support sites you have propping up your top point (your money page) the higher you should rank.

Really that’s it. No big secret – but it does take work.

Some of my support sites are linked to each other, some not. I don’t have a linking pattern – it’s quite random. If I think a link works then I’ll add one, if not I don’t.

Some support sites are monetized, some aren’t. Again I will only monetise a support site if it makes sense to.

All the support sites are related to the money site, but not necessarily exactly the same. For example. Let’s say my main niche was exercise equipment. One support site might have fitness tips, another might be specific exercise machines. Other’s might only be somewhat related in the health and fitness industry.

I do target specific keywords in the support sites though, they are not just random posts. Often times the support sites will rank really well on their own anyway. That’s good. I don’t even mind if they get higher than my money site – it will all even itself out eventually.

I no longer bother bookmarking or digging my sites or submitting rss feeds anywhere.

I now just focus on content and backlinks and that’s pretty much it.

Keep it original, keep in random and keep at it.

See you at the top

I had such a great response to my last post about how to make money with Amazon that I thought I’d go into a bit more detail about creating your own Amazon sites.

Oh and by the way, my mission to get a link from Griz was successful. Yippee! So over the next few weeks I’ll be paying it forward and providing a few links to some other blogs that I’ve read over the weeks that I thought were funny, informative or caught my eye in some way.

One such blog was from Roland who has written a great little post about how to make money on eBay. I just found the title of his blog rather amusing (losing the rat race) even though the picture of that mouse kind of creeps me out! LOL

So back to creating your own Amazon sites.

First you are going to need a domain name and hosting. Buy a domain name with your keyword in it if you can (being aware of certain trademarked terms). I have a hosting account where I can have unlimited websites on it so it’s very cheap to host all my sites. Many places do this so look around. You shouldn’t pay more than about $10 a month for hosting for all your sites (unless you want to spread out your sites over a few different hosting accounts for diversified IP addresses – something I plan to do in the future).

And you are going to have to know some HTML. Don’t ask me any complicated HTML questions, because I’m not a big tech person. I create my sites in Dreamweaver and while I know the basics (how to place links on images, create tables and align text) I have no idea about complicated html or anything.

So if you don’t know html or don’t want to know it, get a html editor like Dreamweaver, Frontpage or the million other ones out there to make life easier (don’t use Word to create a html page as it messes up the code and looks crap).

Ok, having said that, my sites are very simple. It’s basically a big table with 4 rows. One for the header image, one for the navigation (which is just text), one for the main content and one at the bottom for another small navigation bar.

I create all my own images in Photoshop.

I grab pictures from Amazon itself, the product pages or from the manufacturers pages. Be careful about copyright. Amazon is pretty cool about you using their images as long as you are sending traffic to them. (Don’t grab an Amazon image and send traffic to Toys R Us!)

Then I just play around with text to make my headers and add some complimentary colours. As long as they look decent I’m happy. I’m not trying to win any design awards.

Most of my mini sites have around 5 pages. 3 pages that talk about the product, a links page and a privacy policy page.

On the links page I link out to authority sites like Wikipedia or the Manufacturer of the product. I used to add links to my own sites, but notice that the sites I did that on crashed in the rankings (I’m guessing Google thought they were link farms or something). I’ve been taking all of those links off now and voila – within a month they bounce back in the serps.

The privacy policy page is just a page that Google likes to see. Don’t worry too much about what to put on this page. You can generate your own privacy policy page by going to a generator site like this one: privacy policy generator

I put these links at the bottom of the page because I don’t really want people visiting them – they are only there so Google thinks my site is legit.

Now for the main content of the site.

Practically all of my sites look like this Bakugan site. A Header, some text and big click me buttons.

The content is basically rewritten content about the product that I’ve got from Amazon or the manufacturers site. My early sites do have a lot of the same duplicate content as Amazon but I’ve found that if I do this they don’t rank as well. I’m in the process of cleaning up the text into original content across all my Amazon mini sites. I’m hoping to get that finished by the end of October.

I also like to add images and a video if I can find one. Go to YouTube and search for the product name. You’ll be surprised how many videos about specific products you can find. Try to choose one that doesn’t have some random URL from someone else in it. Having a video on your site seems to make it more like an authority site which the search engines like.

The click me images are self explanatory. They have a picture of the product and something like ‘save today at Amazon’, or ‘get today’s price from Amazon’.

Don’t try and trick people – tell them you are sending them to Amazon (or whatever site you are sending them to). You’ll have a much better CTR. Besides people trust Amazon – if you tell them you are sending them there they’ll feel much safer than if you have some obscure button that they don’t know where they will end up.

Sure you’ll get the odd person who will not click your button and type in the Amazon address instead and you won’t get any commission – but that doesn’t happen as often as you think. Most people click the buttons.

Now because I try and beef up the content of my sites, I’ll usually try and create a couple more pages of content as well. If it’s a game – perhaps I’ll have a page with the instructions on how to play it. Or if it’s a kitchen product perhaps I’ll have a recipe that you can use with it. Or sometimes I just write more text with some reviews.

The more you have written on your site the more long tail traffic you’ll get until you can start climbing the serps.

By the way if you need help with rankings and SEO, then Ben from Make Money with SEO has some great tips.

After you’ve finished your site and uploaded it, it’s time to start building traffic to it. Next week I’ll talk more about how to improve the rankings of your site and climb the serps.

Until then, take care
Tracey

About a week ago Griz from Make Money for Beginners wrote a post saying that he wanted to provide links to quality posts to people. So since I’m always up for a challenge and would never say no to more incoming links, I decided to try to see if I could find out how to get a backlink from Griz.

And this post is it.

Now Griz fans would know that he is an Adsense boy. But since I prefer the Amazon affiliate program I’ll be writing my post on that. But the strategies and techniques are basically the same with both programs (with a few minor differences in choosing keywords).

By the way, if you don’t know who Griz is, he holds the top spots in the serps for terms like ‘make money’ and ‘make money online’ with a blogger blog. Ahh gotta love that boy. Anyway …

So in true Griz fashion, and to try and show up what I’ve learnt over the past 6 or 7 months reading his blog (and what you’ll be able to learn by seeing what I’m doing with this post) I need some backlinks using anchored keyword text this post so that it ranks better. After all, Google or the other search engines will never know it’s about how to make money with Amazon unless I tell them right? (Yes that was my first link).

And of course I’m going to have to write an epic post. Much more than my usual 1000 or so words. Griz has been known to write up to 10,000 words or more. I’m not sure I’ll be handle that much but I need to write much more than I usually do. I might be able to do it, or I might fail miserably. But I must try and keep typing until I can type no more .. LOL

Anyway, back to the topic at hand – making money with Amazon.

Since I’ve been rabbiting on about hubpages I’ll show you how you can set up an Amazon Affiliate hub, and also how you can create your own Amazon sites as well.

Personally I prefer having my own sites, but I do think that starting with HubPages is perfectly acceptable for beginners.

And since the Christmas selling season is about to heat up in a few weeks I think the timing of getting your sites up now is very important.

How to Choose an Amazon product to promote

Let’s get down to your very first step of choosing a product to promote. A lot of people get hung up on this but it really doesn’t have to be that difficult. There are hundreds (thousands) of products on Amazon that you can make a commission from.

Don’t necessarily think you have to stick with a high priced item either. It’s a mistake to choose a product based on the commission level that you might make.

You instead need to choose a product based on its demand and the competition. You want to promote the hot selling items. The ones that everyone just has to have this Christmas or they’ll die.

If you have kids then this might be a bit easier because they’ll already be asking you for the latest must have toy.

But if you need a bit of guidance then just head over to Amazon and check out their bestselling items, or the movers and shakers list to see what is gaining in popularity.

I’ll show you want I mean and I won’t choose an electronic product to try and prove my point.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve probably heard about the latest teen movie and book sensation Twilight. (Personally I don’t see what the fuss is about, it just seemed like a typical moody teenager movie to me, but that’s not important).

Type Twilight into Amazon search and you’ll get books, apparel, DVD’s, toys, and more.

I’m guessing the books and the DVD’s are going to huge this Christmas as they are an easy gift. Let’s just look at the DVD’s.

If you go to the DVD section and sort by Bestselling items you’ll see that the Twilight DVD is in position #9 (as of writing this). So my hunch was right. It’s definitely popular.

If you look at more information on it you’ll see that it’s been in the Top 100 products for over 235 days and that according to the Movers & Shakers section (which you can find by clicking on Bestsellers, and then Movers & Shakers under More in Movies & TV) it’s been slowly gaining in popularity and is up 31% from yesterday.

So overall I can see that this is a hot product. This is the type of product that you can make Amazon commissions from. It doesn’t matter that it only costs $16. If you can get massive traffic to your website – which you’ll be able to do if you choose a product that is in high demand – then you could easily make many sales of it per day.

And of course another thing I love about the Amazon affiliate program is that you also get credit for whatever else someone puts in their shopping cart. And at Christmas time people put a lot of stuff in their shopping carts so I might as well earn money from it.

Ok so we’ve chosen our Amazon product now what.

Let’s look at some keywords and their competition. After all there is no use trying to promote something if you don’t have a chance of getting on the first page.

First keywords.

I usually use two keyword tools. The free Wordtracker suggestion box and Google’s own Adwords Keyword Tool.

Type a few variations in that you think people will be searching for. You’ll get some other suggestion from Google as well to help you out.

I put Twilight movie and Twilight DVD into the Google Tool and got a large list of possible keywords – some with huge monthly search volume and other’s with smaller volume.

Make sure you change the Match Type to Exact. I like to then sort by Global Monthly Search Volume as well.

I get a large list of over 150 keywords that I could possibly use. Of course I probably couldn’t rank with all of them unless I did some major work, so let’s look at those that I think I can rank for.

As you know I like to put intitle:”keyword” into Google when searching for competition. That’s just how I do it. You may have a different way. I don’t want to get into a discussion on the best way to determine your competition because there are many ways to do it – this is just how I do it.

Although if you want to get down to it, you really only have 10 other competing sites. Those 10 on the first page of Google – since they are the pages you want to beat.

But I digress. Let’s just use intitle to keep things simple.

I usually like to find intitle results of less than 1000 but because it’s such a hot item, I couldn’t find many that low so you could use but here are a few you could use:

[twilight the movie 2008] – 480 month search – intitle results 152
[twilight film 2008] – 320 month search – intitle results 317
[twilight dvd movie] – 284 month search – intitle results 284

So should you break the rules and go for something that has lots more monthly searches but higher competition?

That’s up to you. Personally I would but I’m willing to go and find backlinks to help me rank better. If you are willing to do the work to find backlinks then sure go for something that has more competition and more searches, but if you are just going to stick up a hubpage and leave it, then stay with the rules.

Ok, what’s the next step?

Building your site!

If you are going to build a hubpage then make sure you get your keyword into your url name. So something like hubpages.com/hub/twilight-the-movie-2008 (that hub doesn’t exist right now, but I’m betting it will pretty soon after I post this article on making money with amazon – so first in best dressed readers – get a free link by taking action!)

Next is layout. You’ll need at least 500 words of original content if you want your hub to rank well. Go to Amazon or to the Twilight site and in your own words, write about the movie (if you’ve seen it then go ahead and write your own review if you like).

Add your Amazon affiliate links directly to the hub. I like to add one at the top of the page in the page text and around the middle of the page as a link that says Buy Product Here.

You can only have two links to the same domain in a hub so think carefully about where you will place your links.

I also use the hubpages Amazon capsule as well, but it’s usually down the page a bit as I’d rather people use my links first.

Add other things you’d like, video’s, images – they all help with your hubscore. (Even though hubscore doesn’t make any difference to how well you rank or not).

Here’s an example of one of my hubs for a book I promoted earlier in the year when it was hot.

Creating your own sites.

What if you’d rather create your own sites and have full control over layout, earnings and more. Then you’ll need to buy your own domain name and hosting. I’m not going to recommend which company to join as there a lots of good ones – do a search. If you are a cheapskate like me, look for a web hosting company that allows you to host as many domains on the one account as you like for no extra cost. Then the only extra cost you’ll have is buying domain names.

Again you want to get your keywords into your domain name if possible, but you’ll need to be a bit more careful here as some terms are trademarked and companies get all upset if you use their name in your domain. So of the big ones to avoid are Lego, Harley Davidson, and Amazon. (that doesn’t apply to folders, post names, hubpages, webpages which you can call what you like – just the top level domain name).

It’s a judgement call. I sometimes use brand names in my domain name, sometimes I don’t. Depends on the product.

There are many ways to layout your webpage that helps promote Amazon products the best, but the method I use is the one I was taught with IPK (with a few tweaks of my own). It’s basically a simple html site (not a wordpress blog – but I hear they are moving into that direction now) with a big ‘click me’ image and again some original text.

This is basically what all my Amazon sites look like. Lots of text for Google and lots of big images that scream ‘click me’ for people who land on the page.

So now you’ve got your site up and you can just sit back and wait for your Amazon account to fill up with sales right?

Er, not quite.

While you may be luckily enough to rank well with just all your onpage SEO you probably will need backlinks to help rank your site high. Anchored backlinks using your keyword that is, not just any old link.

You probably need less backlinks than you think you do depending on your competition. Most of the competition, even if they have backlinks are not usually targetted to the term they want to rank for. They instead rank highly on factors such as age, authority (in Google’s eyes), and relevance (again in Google’s eyes).

While you won’t be able to compete with age, you can make yourself look more authoritative or relevant to that term by getting backlinks to your site.

So how do you get backlinks?

There are many ways:

• You can create your own backlinks from other sites that you own.
• You can write articles and submit them to directories such as ezinearticles and goarticles with anchored links in the resource box back to your site
• You can ask people for blogroll links
• You can comment on dofollow blogs
• You can make hubpages, squidoo lens and other web 2.0 sites with links back to site.
• You can try and get the attention of the big boys (like Griz) by linking to them in the hopes that they’ll link back to you.
• You can create profile pages on high PR sites such as what I do with Angela & Paul’s backlinks

Be creative. There are actually many ways to get backlinks, and yes even social bookmarking will give you backlinks even though I tend not to waste my time because they give low quality juice.

So that’s it. That’s how to make money with Amazon.

I think that’s enough from me today. Not quite a Griz epic, but over 2,000 words so it’s my longest post so far.

Hope everyone learnt a few things about making money online.  (And I hope it caught the attention of that Canadian Bear).

Until next week
Tracey xx