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.

hubpagesexample

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.

bakuganexample

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

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