50 amazon sites challenge progress report #1

I have been busy starting the 50 amazon niche sites challenge. I will be posting my progress regularly to update any of you who might be interested to follow the challenge. If you do, I guarantee you will learn something about making money with amazon. With the sheer volume of sites that I will be making, there will be insights that will surprise both me and you. In the worst case scenario, at least I can tell you which niches suck for amazon : )

As I mentioned in the first post of the challenge, my objective is to create 4 amazon micro sites per month. Out of the 4, 1 will be purchased, 2 will be set up with content supplied by an outsourcer and 1 will be written by me personally. However, in the course of doing the sites, I have added one more category. These are aged sites that I owned which I have done very little with. Instead of wasting them, I will be resurrecting some of them. These type of site will be called 'aged sites'

Amazon keyword research done
For the past week, I haev been spending a lot time researching on my keywords. Currently, I am happy to have around 20+ keywords, which is more than enough for the next few months. Coming up with these amazon keywords have been quite time consuming. I literally comb through many parts of amazon to see what products fits into the niche sites format that I want to create.

Having said that, I rather spend more time here at picking easy to rank and potentially profitable keywords, rather than trying to compete with other more competitive keywords in terms link building. As I mentioned in my post on how to develop a SEO strategy, your SEO resources need not be 90% allocated to backlinks if you know how to use other aspects of a SEO campaign in your traffic building.

Buying amazon sites to make money
So far, I am happy to announce that I have made my first successful acquisition. This amazon site sells rideable toys, which is a category of product that meets my amazon keyword selection criteria. This product sells for over USD100, has a number of good reviews and is not on the best seller list of Amazon. Perfect for my challenge!

The price that I paid is USD155. The nice thing is that it is currently ranking for certain keyword which reduces my SEO workload. However, the quality of the content is very weak and is something I will need to fix later on. Traffic wise, it is drawing about 30-40 visitors per day, making amazon sales a very likely possibility.

Other amazon sites
I have also secured the services of a good writer. He will start work after thanksgiving and I really look forward to his content filling up my 2 amazon sites per week. In terms of rates, we have not finalise the number but it will be USD7-15 depending on the length that I want for the reviews.

So for the time being, I am doing all the writing. I have completed site 2 with 5 articles up, of which 1 is 1000 words, 2 are 500 words and 2 are 300 words.  2 backlink packages have also been paid for at fiverr. These are meant to get the site indexed and to get some PR. It is not for ranking targeted keywords.

I have also written a 1000 word review of the 4th amazon site t. I spend about 2 hours researching on the product before writing it to make sure that the review is useful and covers all the necessary questions the user might have including warranties, prices, functionalities, safety etc. I will have a couple more articles before making the site live this weekend.

Summary
All in all, I am happy with my progress. Below is a table showing a summary of my sites. I will be updating this table every time I do a progress report. The cost incurred currently includes the price I paid for the toy site, the domains I have registered for the other 3 and some backlink packages from Fiverr.

Site	Niche	Created	Cost	Monthly Earnings	Monthly Visitors	Type
1	Toy	Jun 2011	155	NA	~1200	Purchased
2	Appliance	Nov 2011	20	NA	NA	Self Written
3	Wine	Nov 2011	10	NA	100	Aged
4	Appliance	Nov 2011	10	NA	NA	Self Written

Posted in: How to make money with amazon