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
30 Responses to More Amazon Affiliate Marketing Tips
Leave a Reply
Social Me
Me on Google +
Do you advertise these sites on Adwords? They’re not getting slapped?
Thanks so much for the follow up. I am planning on using your technique very soon.
How many marketing articles/different sites to place articles to you use to connect to these site?
Thanks, Stephanie
Great post once again. I like the call to action at the bottom. It has the look and feel of a genuine offer and you’ve built up trust in the body.
Thanks Tracey.
Des.
Is there a site hostng provider that you can recommend, Tracey.
Great post by the way. Thanks
Thanks Tracy – another great post full of useful info.
I can recommend Hostgator for unlimited hosting ($9.95 a month) or if you want a total package of unlimited hosting plus autoresponder, lead capture, video producer & hosting, conferencing plus much more …. established and popular Kiosk is rebranding and launching on Sept 15 as GVO gvoinfo.com. It has a $1 14-day trial then the fee is $44.95. Both use C-panel which you sometimes don’t get with other hosts.
Hi Tracey
I love the site and all in great info that you give out.
Can you help me as am very new to all this how can i get more people to visit my blog and leave comments as i have just pinged it
cheers
Tracey,
Do you know if using subdomains would be as effective? Say I’m targeting toys… toy1.MainDomainAboutToys.com, toy2.MainDomainAboutToys.com, etc.
I’ve been reading Griz, Vic and Court for a while now, but was never motivated to do the tremendous amount of article writing needed. But you really inspired me to try this with Amazon niche sites! Seems it would be easier (not easy, but easier) to write about products and toys.
Do you use Unique Article Wizard or other tools for backlinks?
Hi Jamie,
Nope I don’t use Adwords. They all get organic search engine traffic.
Hi 3bagsfull,
I would say that the ones that rank well usually have about 5 or 6 supporting sites. That could be hubs, lens, blogs and so forth all pointing a link to them. Using a linkwheel seems to work well for these amazon sites too.
Hi Des,
Thanks again. Hey how are you going with your ebook?
Hi Dave,
Hmm. I’m with 1&1, but they aren’t that newbie friendly. I think if I had to start from scratch I’d probably go with hostgator perhaps.
Hi Sandra,
Thanks for your post.
Hi Des Cash,
Thanks for visiting. I don’t ping this blog or submit it to social bookmarking sites. The majority of traffic I get is from current subscribers, articles I’ve written and friends recommending me.
Hi Eric,
I haven’t used subdomains myself, but I could see how it could work (and it would be cheaper than buying all those domains – LOL)
I used to use UAW after recommendations from Court but found it was too expensive compared to the results I got (if a product doesn’t pay for itself within 2 months I’m outta there). So don’t use it anymore.
Most of my backlinks are either from articles or from support sites I’ve built. Luckily I’ve found that you don’t need too many backlinks to get a product focused site to rank well.
Hope that helps
Tracey
Hi Tracey, Some great tips here for the Amazon niche site building…I’m curious about how you go about making a linkwheel? You mentioned it on the earlier post as well, but I’m not familiar with that form of SEO…thanks for any further insight you can provide…
Hi MC,
Ok I’ll go over a linkwheel in more detail next post (probably Monday).
Tracey
Hi Tracey,
Of all of the link love spread by Griz in his last post, your blog is the my new gem. I was focusing on an AdSense strategy until you showed me that Amazon was a viable alternative. But a couple of questions:
1. I notice your screenshot shows 3 affiliate links, but I seem to remember reading an earlier post where you said that Hubpages allows a maximum of 2. Is this why you’re using a self-hosted site for that promotion instead of Hubpages? How do you decide between whether to run a campaign on Hubpages or on your own?
2. Hubpages lets you install Google Analytics, but I can’t tell if they’ll let you install Google Website Optimizer to test different copy and layout strategies. Not being able to split test different ideas might tip the balance in self-hosting’s favor. Do you do any testing besides looking at changes?
Thanks for all of your great info!
Amendment to question #2: Do you do any testing besides looking at bottom line changes in revenue? I.E., do you split test CTRs on tweaking different page elements?
Hi Andre,
Thanks so much for your kind words. I’m a big Griz fan so it meant a lot when he gave me a link.
Now to your questions.
I use both hubpages and self hosted sites. Hubpages does only allow 2 links, but you can have as many as you like with your own sites.
It depends on the the length of the page (how much text I’ve written) as to how many aff links I put on my own sites. It’s usually around two per page, but sometimes I’ll put three if the page is long.
I prefer using my own sites, but often I’ll use hubpages to test a few products. Whichever one seems to do the best – I’ll then purchase a domain and create a site around it.
I don’t do any testing. Yeah I probably should, but at the moment I’m very time poor and would rather spend my time getting more sites up then tweaking my current ones.
I do go back to some of my old sites and add more text or keywords if I find I’m getting traffic for certain terms though.
Hope that helps
Tracey
Hi Tracey,
Great advice on how to do the Amazon sites. I really like how you have described how you set it all up.
The only amazon links I have used at this stage are to books on my blog. I will have to look more into it.
Have you found your mini sites to be a nice little earn?
Currently I am concentrating on John’s masterclass program, but his program finishes in a few weeks and I know I don’t want to rely on my book making me money.
I hope everything is going well.
Kind Regards
Jacinta
(Another fellow Aussie!)
Hi Tracey, I am 51 and want to retire soon, as I am a cafeteria worker working in a school system in a base kitchen. My feet hurt my back now kills me and I just want to make enough money to pay my bills if possible.
I came across your site today after reading something you wrote so then I copied your Url and entered it bringing me to this site. OMG thank you so much. I had no real idea where to start till I read your information your sharing with us all. I reread your information once again and began taking note from it all. ( lots of note) My next step is to take action, I want to put up a site and see what I can do with it. I would love for you to keep in contact if possible with me. As a newbee I will need all the help I can get. Once again thank you for this wonderful site. Yes I bookmarked it. Before I forget congrats on the little one. New site for ya.. ” WhatEveryLittleOneNeeds. just kidding of course hope your smiling now.
Hi Shirley,
Glad you like the site! I plan on putting much more detailed info on here soon, just busy with all my Amazon niche sites for Christmas right now.
Talk soon!
Tracey
Tracy I put up my blog and started my site… Yahoo its only 1 am and I have to be at work at 6 am… Oh well I will back picking your brain soon… Oh and my site is http://www.HappyHolidayGiftStore.Blogspot.com take a look I even have a few items up…
Amendment to question #2: Do you do any testing besides looking at bottom line changes in revenue? I.E., do you split test CTRs on tweaking different page elements?
I don’t split test. I think doing so is a good idea, I’m just too lazy
Hello! How are you? I’ve been reading your blog for sometime now and find it very interesting. I hope you are doing well with the baby! I have a few questions, what do you mean about “watch out for copyright”? Do you mean, I can’t use their name in my URL? I want to do some affiliate marketing with Amazon also, but how do you get the big pictures with the product that say “Save big money today” from Amazon?
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for stopping by. Some companies don’t like their name in the url, but other’s don’t seem to mind. If you are unsure do a search and see how many other sites come up with the name in the url. If you don’t see many it’s probably because the company doesn’t allow it.
I make those big ‘buy now at Amazon’ pics myself. I use photoshop and create a big oval shaped image, add the text I want, an amazon logo and a picture of the product then link that image to the amazon page (using my affiliate link of course).
Hi Tracey,
Of all of the link love spread by Griz in his last post, your blog is the my new gem. I was focusing on an AdSense strategy until you showed me that Amazon was a viable alternative. But a couple of questions:
1. I notice your screenshot shows 3 affiliate links, but I seem to remember reading an earlier post where you said that Hubpages allows a maximum of 2. Is this why you’re using a self-hosted site for that promotion instead of Hubpages? How do you decide between whether to run a campaign on Hubpages or on your own?
2. Hubpages lets you install Google Analytics, but I can’t tell if they’ll let you install Google Website Optimizer to test different copy and layout strategies. Not being able to split test different ideas might tip the balance in self-hosting’s favor. Do you do any testing besides looking at changes?
Thanks for all of your great info!
Hi Tony,
Yes hubpages allows two links. I usually use two or three on my self hosted sites. I usually use Hubpages to find good prospects and then develop my own sites on the winners.
I don’t split test on hubpages, I agree that it’s probably a good idea, I just don’t have much time online these days so never get around to it.
Hubpages is good for finding out which products will sell well before spending cash on a domain name and then later for sending backlinks to your own site.
wow. So, quick question: why not use WP? Just curious, since coding seems so intimidating and time-consuming…then again, your way’s much cheaper!…
I usually use hubpages to test out new ideas and products, if they go well and make some money there, then I usually build a site around them. Sometimes I use wordpress and other times I use static sites. No preference really – although I think my static sites do slightly better – but that could be because I spend more time on them
Hi Tracey,
I came across your site today. I am very curious about the Amazon niche sites. Sounds very interesting. You spoke about using WordPress or static sites. Is Blogger a static site? If not what is? Where do you get all the extra information to write and send to article directories about Amazon products without repeating yourself? How much can you say about a product? When I visit the manufacturer page it’s basically the same thing on Amazon.
@ Ann
Hi Ann, thanks for dropping by.
A static site is a plain html site, not a blog. Basically what websites used to be like before blogs came along. LOL
As for the articles I write it is usually based around the product, but not always the product itself. For example if I was promoting a mobile phone I might write articles about a review of the phone, different apps you could download for it, how to use the phone, how to text, comparisons with other phones etc. If you think about it, there is plenty that you could write about, or could be related. (for some of my summer products, I write articles on cool outdoor games for kids, top summer activities and so on, and then mention the product etc).
Hope that helps!
Tracey
Tracey,
Thanks a lot. I never looked at it that way. I am interested in doing the Amazon products, since I am new to this and not in the US, it’s very expensive to purchase domains. I want to use Blogger as my main website. Do you think that is okay? I also want to purchase the Info Product, it will cost me about $600.00 in my currency. Do you think it is worth it and can I use Blogger and not WordPress.
Why I ask is because I realize a lot of people who give courses, they have it designed for WordPress.
Thanks again Tracey.
Ann
I have found that a lot of people use the mini review site strategy to build their Amazon affiliate sites. While this is a way to make money by referring commissions, I have found that the conversion rates are extremely low with this method.
I typically prefer to build somewhat larger sites, although these are still sites that I’m able to build within a couple of weeks max. The result is a site that is often able to generate daily commissions and conversion rates that are 3 – 5 times the rates that I’ve achieved with mini review sites.
Hi Ryan, yeah I agree with you on this one. I’ve noticed my bigger sites are doing much better and I’ve been working to build up the smaller sites with more content and related products if they convert well.