50 amazon sites challenge progress report #5

Welcome to the 5th progressive report on my 50 amazon niche sites challenge.

Quite a bit of update for this progress report so get ready for a long read and lots of ramblings.

Number of amazon niche sites created: I created 7 new sites and revised 1 aged site for the challenge. Quite proud of myself actually for doing so much work.

Getting traffic early: If you worked through the stats below, you will noticed how fast some of them are getting traffic. This is what I have mentioned in my previous post on how well your site should indexed if you get the right keywords. Low competition keywords plus an exact domain number will get you ranked and some long tail traffic even if your site is just 1-2 weeks old.

Site 13 is especially impressive. 139 unique visitors for a 2 week old site is quite good and shows that I have found a uncompetitive niche. Problem is there is no sales. If I have had adsense on this site, it would have generated a few clicks already.

Money earned with amazon sites: This month has seen a slow down as expected. Currently, these sites generated about USD50. Not a big amount but I am happy to see more new sites earning.

I mentioned in my previous progress report that I am disappointed with Site 8 because it did not generate any sales with the amount of traffic it is getting. Well, it finally got a sale so I am a happy man : ). Site 4 continues to earn while site 11 surprised me. It was a new site created in January and already had a sale.

If you want details, take a look at the table below.

Site	Niche	Created	Total Cost	Monthly Earnings	Monthly Visitors	Type
1	Toy	Jun 2011	155	NA	184	Purchased
2	Appliance	Nov 2011	25	NA	5	New
3	Wine	Nov 2011	67	26	269	Aged
4	Appliance	Nov 2011	30	4	157	New
5	Bicycle	Dec  2011	30	NA	44	New
6	Storage	Dec 2011	20	NA	78	New
7	Appliance	Dec 2011	30	NA	118	New
8	Bedding	Dec 2011	34	11	593	New
9	Wine	Dec 2011	25	NA	66	New
10	Gardening	Dec 2011	25	NA	6	New
11	Storage	Jan 2012	35	13	14	New
12	Window	Jan 2012	9	NA	2	Aged
13	Appliance	Jan 2012	25	NA	139	New
14	Strange	Jan 2012	9	NA	NA	New
15	Gardening	Jan 2012	19	NA	12	New
16	Appliance	Jan 2012	29	NA	15	New
17	Storage	Jan 2012	24	NA	30	New
18	Bedding	Jan 2012	14	NA	25	New

Now, some learnings that I have accumulated for the challenge so far:

• You need to be patient with the sales. Affiliate sales do not work like adsense. You can make lots of sales in one day and then go dry for a few weeks. This is how affiliate sales work and you need to be prepared for that mentally. New sites take a while to get revenue so if you are not seeing any money, be patient and continue to work on it. Track the two metrics that I have mentioned in my previous post to make sure you are on the right track. 

• You need to try lots of niches to find the right ones: If I have stopped at 4-5 sites, I would not get the sales from site 8 and 11. You really need to keep going until you hit upon something that makes money. You can set up lots of sites like what I have done or you can use article directories such as Squidoo to experiment with new niches. 

• You need to set up a process if you want to scale up fast. I can do 7 sites within 2 weeks because I have set up a process that I just go through each day. If you want to create more niche sites, getting that process up is cruical. It can be in the form of an outsourced process or through software. It doesn't matter how you do it but you need to build a process that can scale. 

• There are some really good service providers in Fiverr that produces good quality articles or effective backlinks. I try a dozen and finally found a couple that I now work with regularly. They are cheap and their quality is good. 

• I try to use different themes for each site. This became a headache because I had to hack and slash my way through the codes to get the look that I want for each site. Being a non technical person, it became a very time consuming process for me. I don't mind my sites looking ugly but they need to at least look like a store with some kind of catelogue on the homepage so that visitors will click on them. Presenting a blog format to your product searchers is not a good idea.  

Overall, creating so many sites without any software and virtual assistants have been quite challenging although it has its rewards in terms of lessons learned. I looked forward to hear your amazon niche site building experiences. 

Posted in: How to make money with amazon