Welcome to aaron chua make money blog

Hi, welcome to my blog. In this part of my world, I talked about how to achieve financial freedom by learning how to make money online through creating sites and earning from them.

Below are some current and past make money projects that details my learning journey.

My current experiment in making 50 amazon site niches. If you have not been following this challenge, best place to start is this resource page for the amazon challenge, that lists all the articles that I have written so far.

My experiment in making 1000 a month through adsense in 9 months.

If you came here looking for low cost startup ideas, here are 140 startup ideas that you can browse through.


Friday, 18 November 2011

50 amazon niche sites challenge to make money

I am starting a 50 Amazon niche site challenge. As the title implies, I am going to create 50 amazon sites with an intention of making USD2500 from them by end of Dec 2012. In this article, I will going to set the rules of the challenge as well as to give my reasons for doing this.


For older readers, you will know that I made nearly USD1k in amazon last Dec. You can read the post here on how to make money with amazon. In case you are lazy to click on the link, here is the screenshot of my earning last Dec.

Unfortunately, after the Google Panda, most of my amazon sites were destroyed in the ranking, resulting in the fall of my amazon income to its current level.
 So, why would I want to do this 50 amazon niche sites challenge?
  • Make serious money: Amazon can make you serious money if you do it right. By choosing the right products to promote, your earnings can take you past adsense very easily. My past approach was too spammy. For this challenge, I intend to create quality amazon sites. In a upcoming post, I will talk about different amazon niches and how you can add value to them through a combination of different types of content. (Updated: you can read this post now on how to make quality niche sites)
  • Diversify:  This past year has been quite a roller coaster ride for me. Going though Google Panda, banning of my various adsense accounts, etc, I need to diversify. If you reply on search engine traffic and you use adsense, it is a double exposure. Your income can go down if either the algorithm change or the adsense team doesn't like what they see. Doing amazon at least takes care of one risk. In the future, I need to diversify my traffic source as well but one step at a time. 
  • Market research: Nothing beats building sites in many niches to learn about their conversion rates and ranking difficulty. You can do all the keyword analysis or competitive analysis you want but Google has over 200 factors in its ranking algorithm so you can never get it right. I rather learn from building the site and looking at actual numbers. Every niche I got into, I always learn something that can be applied to other sites. 
So, enough of the reasons. How will I do this 50 amazon niche sites challenge. 

I intend to create 4 sites per month, starting from Dec 2011 and ending in Dec 2012. This is will give me plenty of time to build the sites up. This is how I will build them:
  • 2 niches sites per month will be created through outsourcing. Each site will have 5 articles that cost around USD10 each. Another USD20 will be spent on buying backlinks and another USD10 for the domain. In total, each site will cost me USD80 to create. More backlinks and content will be added if the sites perform.
  • 1 niche site per month will be created by me personally. I will write the articles and do the backlinks myself.
  • 1 niche site per month will be bought. I like buying websites to make money because they shorten the process. I will be buying small niche sites that target a product keyword from Amazon. Specifically, I will be looking for sites that have product keywords but monetized with adsense. There is a chance that earnings for such sites to increase if I manage to turn the adsense into amazon earnings since product commissions are always higher than ad clicks.
In terms of earnings, this is my expectation. Each site is targeted to earn at least USD50 per month. To do that, you need specific product selection strategies. In my next post on how to make USD100 with amazon, I will cover this topic in more details, including estimating how much traffic you need to make that money per month per site.

If you are interested in this challenge, why not you create your own challenge and I will link to your site on your progress?

Before I go, here are some topics that will become my regular monthly posts. The reason I don't post regularly is because I have no topics to do a monthly update. Now I have : )

  • Income report on my earnings from buying websites: There are many income reports on the web but few deal with earnings only from websites that they purchased. It is almost like an investment report but the investment vehicle of websites should make the monthly update interesting.
  • Income report from this 50 amazon niche site challenge. I will giving a progress report on how things are for this challenge. I might even reveal a couple of sites as examples : )
  • Income report from another challenge that I will be announcing soon. This is with regards to learning how to make money with Infolinks, a google adsense alternative. 
See you guys soon and work hard to make money online. 





7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am in with you from jan 2012. I will create 50 amazon sites i hope ill make $1k from them or more.

James said...

Hi Aaron:

This is James. I have several questions after reading.

1. For the second chart, the amazon ad clicking is 24k, 250% more than that in 2010 Dec 3. But the ordered items is less 78% than that in 2010 Dec. We can find out that the conversion rate is significantly drop. It is very hard to say the drop is because of the Panda. I think it will make more scenes to compare two chart between panda and after panda.

2. I have another thing I don't understand. For outsourcing sites, you will create 5 pages and $20 for backlinks. For an average cost of bmr link, I will get 20 backlinks for 5 pages. So what's your backlinks strategy for one site? all 20 backlinks for the sites or 4 backlinks for each pages? or you have good resource to get backlinks?

3. For adsense tutorial "How to make 1000 per month in adsense with 1 site", your example is 25 posts at beginning, and 100 backlinks for the main site. The method is quite different from building a site for amazon. For amazon sites, you just give 5 pages with $20 backlinks. I quite wonder how it will work.

aaronchua said...

@rahulbuzz, glad to see that you are aboard. Do publish your results and I will be glad to link it here.

Good luck!

aaronchua said...

@James,

1. Last month was an odd month. One site suddenly send a lot of useful traffic to Amazon, thus creating the distortion in the conversion rates. The first screenshot should be more reflective of the kind of conversion rates you can get if you optimise your amazon sites well.

2. The 20 links will for the homepage just to give the site enough PR for the content to get indexed. I don't intend for the links to help in the ranking. As I said in my previous post, I use content and long tail keywords to get traffic. The links are there to help in the indexing.

3. 2 types of sites. The one I set up for the adsense 1k challenge is a mini authority site. These amazon sites, on the other hand, are purely targeting at only 1 keyword. If they make good money, then I will expand on the site to give it more content.

BobWesternTC said...

I want in on this too!

Joe said...

So you are spending $20 on links just to get a site indexed? What is wrong with pingfarm.com etc?

Are you also saying you plan to do no more link building after that and just rely on getting ranked on your content which will be just 5 pages?

Should be an interesting project to follow if you can pull it off.

aaronchua said...

@ Joe
The links are for 2 purposes
(i) indexing and
(ii) some PR juice

For long tails to emerge, a certain level of PR is necessary to get the article out of the supplement index and into the main index of the search engines.

However, these links are not meant to rank any keyword. It is to give the sites enough 'power' so that it can rank for certain long tails that I don't target in advance.

This already works. The mini cupcake site that I have revealed has already gotten long tail traffic through this method.