Amazon report #7 Making new niche sites after Penguin

For folks who might have missed my previous post on how to make money after penguin and panda, I have show you that some of my Amazon niche sites are still making money. Below is an updated chart that shows you my earnings.

Click on image to enlarge

First, let me take a moment to explain the chart:

• Niche: Self explanatory
• KW: keyword search volume for the main keyword
• Domain: keyword search volume for the domain keyword. Most of the time, this is the same number as KW but in the event that I couldn't buy a Exact Match Domain, I will get a slightly longer domain that still some keyword volume. For example, if I couldn't buy patiochairs.com, I will try to buy patiochairsforsale.com or buypatiochairs.com
• Price: prices of the products being promoted
• Profit: the difference between the costs and the revenue for this site. Currently, only 4 sites have managed to make profits. I expect this number to be higher as we progress further. 
• Green columns: this represents the monthly revenue for each site
• Red columns: this represents the monthly cost of each site

 Now, let me comment on some interesting observations:

• Low cost of setup: the cost of setting up one Amazon niche site is so low that sometimes, all I need is one sale to make profit. This is what happens for site 8 & 10. They were not making money when all of a sudden, a single sale for both sites means they are in the black. 
• Make money with low traffic: All of my sites have low traffic. We are talking about 1-8 per day and yet collectively, they represent a number that can still be montized.
• Item specific: Whether you make money with Amazon depends a lot on the product you are promoting. Even within the same niche, you might have products that convert well and those that don't. For example, I initially thought all appliance niches can convert well from my earlier experience with one site in this niche. This made me outweigh the niche during my product selection (as you can see from the spreadsheet above). Unfortunately, most of them didn't convert as well as my first site. Lesson learnt!

Why am I restarting the Amazon 50 sites challenge?

After the penguin update, I thought all my Amazon sites were penalised. This turns out to be a false assumption. Some of them lost traffic simply because the fresh content bonus worn off. As the time goes on, some stes started to get long tail traffic. That is how I know they are not dead. They are not getting traffic simply because they are not ranking well. This is why I decided to put more effort into them before the big Christmas season rolls around.

Niche sites that I have built after Penguin

Since July, I have been putting some resources into Site 15 which is a gardening site. You can see this quite clearly in the spreadsheet by looking at where I am spending money on in the red column during July and August. Anyway, here is my plan going forward:

• A mixture of information and review articles: This is to avoid the Panda penalty. I don't want all my articles to contain affiliate links which is what I used to do. 
• Better quality articles: I found a great write at Fiverr who has extensive experiences with the gardening niche so I hired him to put some really useless stuff on the site.
• Less spammy backlinks: I ordered some questionable backlinks from Fiverr when I was building the first batch of Amazon sites. That was a bad mistake as it mght have caused some sites to incur the Penguin Penalty. What I am doing now is to get one solid link from an aged site, either using Fiverr or to do a guest post. The rest of the links will depend on how good my content is. I am seen how somebody use Pinteret to pin some of my articles in my Amazon sites so I know I can get those natural links. 

That is for this update. Lots of keywords research tips coming up in future posts as I started my Amazon engine again.