50 amazon sites challenge progress report #6 Why I am not making money with Amazon

Here comes the 6th progress report on my 50 amazon niche sites challenge. If you want to see the breakdown in the number, please visit this Amazon earnings page. I will only post the summary here.

Number of amazon sites created: 2 more new sites have been created since update #5. This makes a total of 20 amazon sites created so far. I will stop making new sites in Feb and focus on getting some of the current sites to rank better and hopefully to start making more money.

How much money was made in Amazon
Nov 2011: Revenue =  USD29, Cost = USD227
Dec 2011: Revenue = USD149, Cost = USD412
Jan 2012 : Revenue = USD86, Cost = USD40

Net Profit: -USD416

This month netted only USD86. The drop was expected given that the buying season is over. January has almost been a slow month and let's see if Feb will be better.

Highlights in January

• 3 sites started making money. Good sign : ) 

• Site 3 (the wine site) got a good bump in its ranking. It was already ranking #1 for a three word term and now, the 2 term keyword has appeared on page 1, #8. This had lead to a nice increase in daily traffic.

• Site 4 continues to have consistent income despite not bringing the highest traffic. I will be focusing more on this site and bringing my SEO strategy to play. If you have noticed, each of this site was built with minimal resources and effort. When I see a promising site like this, it will be time to bring out my big guns. This means full onsite seo, deeper keyword research and leveraging on my network of high PR sites to boast this baby up. I do have a arsenal of SEO weapons at my disposal. Believe me when I say that when I can rank in the ultra competitive cosmetic surgery niche, I have built up quite a bit of seo resources. 

•  I came up with a good content strategy for several of these niche sites. I do hope these mini site can last and that only happen if your site has interesting and relevant content. I will created a separate post on how to build quality niche sites after Panda so watch out for it if you are interested in this topic.

The stuff that is making me sad :( in Janaury

The dreaded Google Dance is happening to some of my sites. Either the fresh content bonus has disappeared or I did something that did not impress the algorithm. Anyway, the end result was that some sites have disappeared from the SERPs. In particular, sites 5, 7 and 11 have lost the ranking for their main keywords : (

Other than that, I had a happy Jan : )

One particular happy event was that aaronchua.com dropped below the 200k mark in alexa. I know, I know. This means nothing but I still feel a sense of false achievement : ).

Why I am not making money from Amazon

Back to serious stuff. I am going through my stats to see why some of my sites are not making money despite getting the traffic. I hope that listing these reasons out can let you know why sometimes traffic does not equal sales.

• The source of traffic is not from US. Sometimes, your site will get ranked in .ca or .uk even though you might target these countries. In such cases, your conversion will be low because non US folks are not buying as much as stuff online as the Americans. 

• You need more traffic. There is a saying in the making money online world that if traffic comes too easily, you are not likely to make money from it. This stems from the fact that the market in search is quite efficient. People will drift to the keywords that make money, thus making them harder to compete in. Conversely, this means that keywords which do get traffic easily are those that might not convert very well. This does not mean zero sales but you do need a much larger volume of traffic than other sites to see conversions. I think my site 10 (the bedding site) suffers from this problem. 

• Not targeting buying terms. I have been stressing that you need to rank for buying keywords but I seems to be making this mistake for my amazon niche sites. Rather than trying to rank for keywords such  as item X for sale or cheap item X or item X under 100 dollars, I have been ranking these sites for their main keywords which might be too general. So, for the next batch of new domains, I will be buying domains that have stronger buying intentions.  

Niche site revealed

After thinking though this, I decided finally to reveal my sites for 2 reasons.

• I find that when I read the blogs from other make money folks, I enjoyed those that revealed the niche. It just sounds more exciting and cool to be able to look at the real site and relate that to what the author is talking about. 

• It makes it easier for me to demo my money making techniques if there are sites that I can show you. 

So, for this progressive, the niche I am revealing is site #13. The niche is mini cupcake maker. I chose this niche because it fulfills my criteria of having very little competitiors. (See the post on my unqiue take on how to check keyword competitiveness). The price is not very ideal though as these mini cupcake makers cost than USD50. In the coming weeks, I will be updating this site to show you how I can make this site earn some passive income for me!

Posted in: How to make money with amazon