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.

bakuganexample

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

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