Can a domain recover from a penalty over time?

I wrote a post last year saying that aaronchua.com is no more because it seems to be under a penalty. I drew this conclusion based on (i) it has lost its sitelinks and (ii) it has lost rankings for many of its keywords.  After a year of non activity, I was surprised that this penalty seems to be lifted by itself. If you do a search for aaronchua.com, you can see that it has regained back its sitelinks.

Click the image for a bigger view

Hence, I decided to continue blogging here again. No point wasting an aged domain that has real content on it in case I need to channel its PR to a new site. More importantly, I have learned quite a bit during the past year and this is a good place to share some of these lessons and insights. 

How to make an Amazon niche site for 2014 and beyond

I never quite making amazon niche sites. However, these site look very different from the first batch that I made last year during the 50 Amazon site challenge.  Most of the these early sites were filled with buying keywords. The articles were mainly concerned with terms such as 'best product', 'product review', product under XX dollars" etc. These kind of articles do bring in buying traffic that converts very well but the problem they create is making your whole site looks like a spammy site, regardless how good your articles are. 

Since then, my affiliate sites have gotten a lot more diversify. Each of them now has an information and an product review component. The informational aspect has no monetisation embedded and their purpose is to serve the user which hopefully can attract some real links which can be channeled to the product review page through onsite linking.  I found this model to be working very well and most of my sites do receive natural links from search traffic visitors who found them useful. 

Is building links necessary to get search traffic?

None of my affiliate links have gotten into any penalities. One of the reason is that I don't build any links to them. None what so ever.  I focus on identifying a good niche and focus on writing all the content to answer the problems for that niche. It works very well and my sites can gather search traffic in a matter of months with no manipulative linking on my part. Below is a screenshot for one of new sites that was built in May this year.

Click the image for a bigger view

Sorry I can't reveal the site at the moment but I might do so when it gets a bit stronger as a public case study. The bigger point here is that you don't need links to get search engine traffic, especially in 2013. Google has been ruthless in rolling out their algorithm updates and it actually makes it easier for proper sites to have a shot at claiming the first page for many keywords.

Conclusion

This site proves that some domains do recover over time especially if you know you have not done anything that might trigger a penalty. Sometime, you just have to let the search engine sort itself out and hope for the best.

It feels good to blog here again and I will be writing some stuff that you guys who still want to make some money online will appreciate.

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Amazon Challenge #8 When do you gave up on your site?

August is not a great month in terms of Amazon earnings. From the chart below, you can see that only 3 sites made money so far. Fortunately, site #23 earned its first 2 sales and surprising, broken even immediately as one of the items sold was over USD300.  Site #4 and #11 continue to made consistent sales even though their traffic is low.

Click to enlarge

The question I am thinking about today is this: when do you give up on your site? I was prompted when I looked at the chart last night. If I had dropped site #23 earlier, I will never have earned back its set up cost of USD14. In fact, a similar thing fact to site #5 last month when it made its first sale after 7 months of waiting, although the revenue was not enough to cover the cost. 

However, will things always turn out this way? Will they all make sales eventually? That is the question I am asking myself as I looked at site #2 and site #7, which had never made any sales. Site #2 was especially disappointing even that it was the second site that I built for the challenge. 

I would like to hear your opinions about this issue. For me, IM has taught me this: as long as you have something out there, you will make some money eventually. It might not be a lot of money but there will be income coming in. Hence, never give up on your projects. Even though things might look all doom and glommy now, persist and you shall be rewarded.

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Choosing Amazon keywords based on unqiue selling proposition for your niche sites

Most of us choose keywords based on search numbers, level of competition and commercially viability. With the onslaught of Panda and Penguin, most of us will need to step on our game. The easiest way is to create interesting content that will be shared. So,should that be one of our keyword selection criteria when we decide on what niches to choose?

I don't believe in passion sites because it seriously limits what markets we go to. Most offline businesses are not really passionate about their business's core subjects anyway. Instead, I proposed that we choose niches based on whether we can create interesting content that can be shared so that we can get both traffic and links.

So, what are the kind of unique selling propositions that we can create for our amazon sites? Many will say real reviews but I don't that is enough anymore. No matter how real your reviews are, you are never going to beat Amazon itself for the sheer number of reviews it has. We need to add other values to our amazon sites. Below are a few examples:

Unique selling proposition #1: curate modern products

People like to share the new and the interesting. For products, that means finding the latest and the interesting products in our niches, rather than just showcasing what they can buy from Amazon.

Example: I have a camping Amazon site (site 25 in our list of amazon sites featured in the Amazon Challenge update #7). It is a boring site: http://4seasontent.org/.

For a while, I couldn't think of anything to write until I bumped into this: fieldcandy.com. Then it stuck me. I can curate all those unique and contemporary tents and post them to the site. They might not result in sales but they have a chance to bring in real traffic and maybe even links.

You can extend this concept to virtually any product based niche sites. Use one portion for reviews and the other to curate interesting new products in the niche.

Unique selling proposition #2: adding tutorials or guides

Another way to differentiate your amazon sites is to add a tutorial or guides section. These are purely informational content to help readers of that niche. You can see how this work in digital-photography-school.com/. There are 3 sections in the site: photography tips, camera reviews and post production tutorials. Only the reviews section is monetized with affiliate links.

 

Example: I am thinking of doing this for my minicupakemaker.org site, where I will introduce 1 section on making mini cupcake and another on how to decorate them.

Readers:

• do you select niches based on whether you can create interesting content?
• do you have any ideas on how to create interesting content for Amazon sites?

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Can you make money with Amazon after Penguin and Panda

Did everybody just gave up on making money online now that Panda and Penguin has arrived? I hope not because things are actual much easier now. With Penguin, it is now quite possible to rank sites without ever requiring a single backlink. Just keep your site to 50% natural articles and 50% keyword focus and you will start to see traffic. Seriously.

Anyway, the point of this post is to show you guys that despite my amazon sites being penalised, I still manage to squeeze out nearly  USD100 on them despite not touching them for several months. This strengthens my belief that the online model still works out and any investment you made is still going to make you money.

Let me share some of my stats with you:

For the Amazon challenge, I invested a total of USD804. Out of that, 50% goes into buying 40 domain names while the rest of the USD400 goes into buying content and backlinks. Currently, I have earned about USD582, leaving me with about USD220 to go before breaking even for my investments. After that, it is all pure profits.

The best thing is that out of the 40 domains I bought, only about 18 have been built, even though all will be paid for within 2-3 months. I have about 22 domains which I have not done any work which means they have not been penalised which means I can still build them out properly in the future. 

So, even though it might not be big money, it still shows that investing in making money online still works, despite all the setbacks.

Below is a screenshot showing my amazon sites.

Click to enlarge

My plan going forward is to purchase another set of domains that relates to the best sellers according to the table above. This time around, how I build these sites will be slightly different:

• Content: Mixed up the content. 70% will be news or list type of content that can potentially be shared while 30% will be product reviews
• Links: No more ordering of fiverr backlink services. Just maybe 2-3 links from my own network of sites. Only 1 will contain anchor text. 

My final advice is this: don't sit around and wait for penguin update to turn around your penalised site. It probably will not happen. Just start a new set of sites and watch out for over optimisation and you will be fine. Hey, if I can make money even with penalised sites, I am sure there is much more opportunity out there. 

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How much money can you make online - Income report 3

You might think that this is going to be my absolute worst income reports given that my amazon account was banned. Well, turns out that things might not be as bad as you thought. Continue to read on to get all the juicy details! LOL

You can keep your amazon earnings even if you are banned

It turns out that I might be able to keep the amazon earnings that I have earned before the ban. Initially, I thought all my amazon earnings will be gone, based on my experience with adsense. However, after looking at the payment table, it seems like I might still be getting a cheque for my dec earnings. Here is the screenshot that I saw:

I haven't received the cheque but the above gives me hope that I will be. This means that all my previous income reports are still valid. Thank god!

I am also going to include a new income item called private advertisers. It is cutting out Google and going straight to the advertisers who might have an interest to advertise on your site. It is quite commonly practiced for big sites but I thought I can have a go at this income stream as well.

Below are the numbers

Adsense Income Report: USD699

A sharp fall from the the USD948 in Jan. This is mainly due to 2 reasons. First, one of the adsense accounts were banned which means a reduction of USD100. Second, there were less days in Feb so the earnings were affected as well.

The good thing is that I have switched this site that has the banned adsense to media.net, which is a new CPC based advertising network similar to adsense. The surprising thing is that their ads are surpassing adsense for this site and I expect it to earn much more.  I will not include media.net earnings in this report but I might do so for the next one. Depends on how comfortable I am with disclosing another earning source.

Amazon Income Report: USD324

I am going to include what I have earned from amazon in feb given that there is a chance I will still be paid. The amount is not large but it makes for a nice meal.

I have not given up on amazon yet. I have already created another account and am using it on 2 new sites. For the amazon niche sites with my old code, I am using skim links. So far, it is already tracking my revenue in March so I will probably use that.

Private Ads Income Report: USD800

This is going to be tricky to prove because all the advertisers pay me directly through paypal. Taking this part from all my paypal transactions will be a pain so I am not going to do it. Either you trust me on this or you don't.

This USD800 came from 3 advertisers. You can compare this to adsense and you know how getting private advertisers can be lucrative. To get these advertisers, you will need which niches have them in abundance. Finance for example is one. Furniture can be another.

To be attractive to private advertisers, your blog needs to have a certain level of PR and traffic. It also has to be look real and not like a spammy site. I am not an expert on this yet but I am learning the ropes. So far, it has been quite productive for me : ).

Total Income: USD1823

Again, not really near my target of 5k but this is a full time income now, especially when you convert it to Singapore dollars, which is around SGD2296.  It is a low income but I know folks who made less than that here in Singapore.

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How much money can you make online - Income report #2

Welcome to super late income report for Jan 2012. Nothing much happens as the income for Jan has maintained on the same level as Dec although the composition has changed. Let's take a look shall we:

 (in case you are not aware of what kind of earnings I am tracking for this income report, please refer to the explanation here: income report #1)

Adsense Income Report: USD948

Almost made it to 1k last month with adsense. Remember that my 2012 make money goal for adsense was to hit 1k for 2012.  Looks like I can achieve that without doing anything else. This will leave more time for amazon which I am still struggling with.

That being said, I did order a new homepage backlink service for site 1 that you see below. In Feb, this site seems to be coming back from Panda and I want to see if the addition of new powerful links can help to bring this site back to its USD400 per month record.

Yes, I am not always supportive of using backlinks but in a competitive industry such as cosmetic surgery, the competition leaves me with very little choice. I will report back on how effective this homepage backlink service is once it has passed a month.

Click all images to enlarge

Amazon Income Report: USD412

As expected, amazon earnings fell after Christmas. In January, the income dropped from USD630 to USD412. Ouch! The good thing is that the composition of the amazon earnings has changed from being concentrated in a few sites to a larger base of sites due to my 50 amazon niche site challenge. With time, I am confident that this new network of amazon sites will make serious money as I have not seen money coming in so fast with such new sites.  Give them a year and see what happens : )

Click the image to enlarge

Total Income: USD1360

So,  not much happening. This is how it is my friends. There is a delay effect in making money online and my results show this.

During the Oct-Nov period, I basically did nothing due to the panda update affecting my motivation.  As a result, nothing happen in Jan as there was no work done before that. Conversely, all the stuff I am doing now will only reflect in the results in the coming months.

If you are stuck in the same siutation of not seeing results even though you are putting in the hard work, then be patient, The results will come!

Have fun making money online.

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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!

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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. 

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SEO metrics to track for making money

A big part of why so many people failed to make money online is not knowing which part of the equation did they get wrong. Besides visitors and revenue, I don't see much discussion on what other metrics or indicators a beginner should track to assess their performance. It is easy to say: "just do all the work and you will make money eventually. Behind this statement is the implicit assumption that you will learn your mistakes, correct them and then become successful. However, without seeing any positive results, it is hard to keep going to realise this learning cycle.

In this short post, I am going to talk about two important SEO metrics you should use to track your progress as you learn how to make money with amazon or any other niche sites. This post is not meant for those who want to build authority sites. It is targeted at those who are starting out, learning to build a few mini sites and wants to know whether they are on the right track. As I said in my post on one vs many sites to make money, you need to know your market first before going in 100% to build a large site.

Let's get on with the program.

Making money with amazon boils down to a couple of steps:

• Finding low competition keywords that can monetise well
• Laying out your site and content to maximise conversion (not the expense of the user though)
  
• Increasing the traffic from search engines to your site

It sounds simple enough but there is a lot of details within each of the steps. The last metric is easy to track and one that I will not talk about. The first two steps, however can be cruical during the early stages of your niche site building.


Picking low competition keywords
Learning how to pick low competition keywords will solve half of your problems in making money. If you don't get this part down, you will find it hard to draw traffic later on to monetise your site. To master this aspect, you need to know two things:

• Where to find seed ideas that have no competition: I have said this many times but you need to know how to look at a keyword and research on whether there are new products or markets within that niche. Don't just reply on google adwords because the fact that the keywords appear in the tool means somebody might already be competiting with you on that keywords. Learn to expand your source for seed ideas and you will see that opportunity is all around you. 

• How to evaluate the keyword competitiveness of your niche: I covered this in my post on how to check keyword competition. Check that out. 

How do you know you got this part right?

First metric to track is how well you indexed. If your site indexed on page 1-3 without any serious backlink effort, you are picking the right low competition keywords. If most of your sites don't ranked well when they are first indexed. you are probably picking something that is too competitive for a niche site.


Laying out your site
Once you have the keywords and they ranked well when indexed, you need to learn how to layout your site. No point getting your site ranked well when the visitors are not clicking on your amazon clicks. The first rule of thumb is not to layout your site like a blog. Your amazon sites should look like ecommerce stores. Your visitor's first impression should be that this is a site where I can browse for the products that I am searching for. I will give concrete examples in my future post on this topic.


To know if you are laying out your site correctly, track your visitors to amazon clicks ratios. Anything less than 50% should be improved. Believe me when I say that it is easier to improve your conversion ratio than to get more visitors to your site. Maximise each and every visitor so you do less work in terms of traffic generation.


In summary, these are the metrics you should track when you have very little revenue or traffic:

• How highly ranked are your sites when they first index
• What is the ratio between your visitors and those that click on the amazon link

They will help you to know whether you are on the right track when starting out. Try not to build too many sites until you get these two metrics right with the first few that you have.

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How much money can you make online - Income report #1

Welcome to the first income report on aaronchua.com. I had to think through this carefully before revealing how much I am earning. I am not comfortable disclosing all my income but I want to track my earnings goals in public for greater accountability. In the end, I decided to disclose only the income source that is relevant to my 2012 make money targets.

This is what will be included:

• adsense earnings from my cosmetic surgery niche
• all my amazon earnings
• proceeds from sale of websites

These will be excluded

• adsense from non cosmetic surgery niches
• other ad networks such as infolinks, contextweb, media.net etc
• other affiliate networks such as the wordpress theme affiliates
  
• private advertising

I hope that disclosing the earnings will keep me focused on achieving my 5k income target through the 3 income sources that I mentioned above.

Ok, so without any further ramblings, here is my income report for Dec 2011.

Adsense: USD680
I currently have 3 sites making this amount from two different adsense accounts. The first screenshot shows the adsense earnings from an account that belongs to my friend while the second screenshot is my own account. No surprise here as I have already mentioned that my adsense income from the cosmetic surgery niche has fallen from USD5k to about USD600.

Amazon: USD630
Dec was a good month for amazon in general so I expect this number to drop in Jan. From this amount, about USD149 came from the amazon niche site challenge.

Total: USD1,310
Well, not exactly a full time income yet as I still have some way to go before hitting the 5k mark. Sometimes, it is hard to motivate yourself with such low earnings but you know you need to put in the work first before seeing any concrete results. Saw another 2 good domains today that I will probably buy and create a site on.

Love to hear your thoughts and your progress, my beloved 5 readers!

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How to find low competition keywords

The easiest way to find low competition keywords is to know how to find trending keywords or new keywords of products that are just coming into the market. I have repeated this many times in my posts but I realise a concrete example might be needed to show what I really mean. So, in this post, I will talk about finding low competition keywords by learning how to spot new markets and going through some thinking process to get easy keywords from them.

The first thing you need to do when picking any niches is to look for new markets or products. There are a couple of ways to do it but generally you need to listen to news or to use Google News in your market research stage. This stage is hard for me to put out any concrete ideas because finding seed keywords is about keeping your ears and eyes open to new ideas. Of course, you can increase your chance if you read more from technology and trend sites but sometimes, luck plays a part as well.

Anyway, one of the biggest thing you must know about is the iPad. Let take this as a seed keyword. It is perfect example of a popular product being introduced into the market and creates opportunities to mine low competition keywords related to this new niche.

For ipad, the market we targeting is the tablet market. Do not target the ipad name itself. Always aim for the product category that it is in. Once we know the seed keyword is tablet, it is time to drill into the market to find those low competition keywords.

First thing is to ignore the google keyword tool. That is always the first destination for every IM folks and believe me when I say almost all the longtail keywords that appear in the tool when you type in tablet will be targeted by other IMmers. See the list below for keywords to avoid!!

click to enlarge

Since you cannot use google keyword tool, what do you use? How about the thing between your ears? : )

Learn how to take that seed keyword and segment it according to different customer types.

Here are a few examples:

Customers who are on a budget or going for deals: Tablet under XX price, tablet deals, tablet for cheap....

Customers who use tablets for only certain functions: Gaming tablet,   kids tablet.....

Customers who have design preference: White tablet,  7 inch tablet....

The important lesson here is to use your brain a bit more and the keyword tool a bit less. Once you have the above longer tail keywords, put them into the keyword tool to see what kind of traffic they have. If you don't do a bit of brainstorming, it will be hard to come up with long tail keywords that are not attacked by everyone else using the google keyword tool.

If you see the numbers are small, try using a similar product category that has a good history. In the case of the tablet, I might use laptops as a proxy. So, I will key in keywords such as laptops under 200 to see what kind of volume they have relative to the keyword volume for the single generic keyword, 'laptop'. This ratio can help you to know how big your potential market is if the new market to grow and expand.

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50 amazon sites challenge progress report #4

Welcome to the 50 amazon niche site challenge 4th progressive report.  This is a regular report where I report my crazy idea of making 50 amazon sites that hopefully make USD50 each month. If you are new, check out this resource page that documents all the materials related to the this amazon niche site challenge.

I made a minor change to the reporting  table below. Specificially, in the 'type' column, I merged the cateogry of 'self written'  and 'outsourced' to 'new'. This is because I find that I am adding content to sites that need more work even though they might have outsourced articles. I find it easier to just call them 'new' sites in the sense that I have just registered the domains and created the sites for this challenge.

Now, on to the progress report. First, the bad.

• No new sites made money since progress report #3. It is still the same 3 sites creating the revenue. That sucks for motivation but my other half says this is still early stage. So, what can I do but to suck it all up like the man that I am!

• I thought I can create more site during this holiday seasons but I end up spending more time with friends. Well, there goes the productivity although I am still ahead in terms of my site creation schedule. 

• Site 8 has seen the greatest increase in traffic. For a new site to have 192 unique visitors in its first month is a good sign. The bad thing is the conversion. No sales at 192 visitors means either the product is a stinker or my landing page sucks. I get the feeling it might be the former because people are clicking through my amazon links. It is just they don't buy anything after landing in amazon. Sheez!

The good:

• Revenue jumped since the last report. Total revenue since the challenge started is USD178. Total expense is USD739. So, I still making a loss of -USD561.  Since it is still early days, I am not too bothered by the loss. In this game, you need to put in the investment first before you see the passive income streams month after month. I already paid for 33 domains but have not put the site up which explains for the cost difference between the USD739 and the table below.

• All sites saw increase in ranking and traffic. I think they will continue to gain steam in 2012 and I look forward to making more money with them!

• Site 3 has break even!  Maybe people buy more wine for Christmas but earnings for this site jumped from USD20+ in Nov to USD80+ in Dec. This site has been live since 2010 but not really used.  I hope the rest of the new sites become better earners once they have aged as well.

Site	Niche	Created	Cost	Monthly Earnings	Monthly Visitors	Type
1	Toy	Jun 2011	155	53	900	Purchased
2	Appliance	Nov 2011	25	NA	45	New
3	Wine	Nov 2011	67	83	458	Aged
4	Appliance	Nov 2011	30	13	146	New
5	Bicycle	Dec 2011	25	NA	10	New
6	Storage	Dec 2011	20	NA	62	New
7	Appliance	Dec 2011	30	NA	59	New
8	Bedding	Dec 2011	34	NA	192	New
9	Wine	Dec 2011	25	NA	3	New
10	Gardening	Dec 2011	40	NA	0	New

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50 amazon sites challenge progress report #3

Want to learn how to make money with amazon? Follow my updates on the 50 amazon niche sites challenge resource page.

Since the last update, things have been moving along quite nicely. First, the progress!

• I have added two more amazon sites, making the total to 8. 42 more to go!

• I got my FIRST sale from the first batch of newly created sites (site 4). These domains were registered 2 weeks ago with no content and backlinks. Now, it is making sales. Who says you can't make money with new sites?

• I have spotted another 2 niches. Domains have been purchased but the sites are not built yet so I didn't put them here in the table below.

• Good news is 7 out of the 8 sites have started to receive search engine traffic. That is quite nice given that most sites are less than 2 to 1 week ago. Anyway, you can check out the numbers below. 

Note: The traffic stats are for the month of Dec only while the cost and earnings are accumulated across months.

Site	Niche	Created	Cost	Monthly Earnings	Monthly Visitors	Type
1	Toy	Jun 2011	155	45	567	Purchased
2	Appliance	Nov 2011	25	NA	37	Self Written
3	Wine	Nov 2011	67	43	216	Aged
4	Appliance	Nov 2011	30	6	74	Self Written
5	Bicycle	Dec 2011	25	NA	NA	Outsourced
6	Storage	Dec 2011	20	NA	21	Outsourced
7	Appliance	Dec 2011	10	NA	8	Outsourced
8	Bedding	Dec 2011	34	NA	6	Outsourced

How many backlinks to rank a niche site
I will have a separate post on this topic but I want to note here that I have been experimenting wtih different backlink services to see what is the minimal to start getting search engine traffic. I don't care which keyword I am ranking for. As long as the backlinks can give the site enough PR to start drawing search engine traffic, I am good.

This is why you see different cost of building the sites above. This is mainly due to the different backlink services I am trying. Some are more expensive than others hence the price differentiation.

Once I have more data, I will create a post on the different backlinking services you can consider for your amazon sites. 

Future posts on how to make money with amazon
I am learning a lot of how to set up these amazon niche sites. These lessons will of course be shared but I want to share what readers want to read first. Below is a list of possible topics that I can write about. YOU tell me what you want to read.

• 5 new ways to generate ideas for amazon keywords. I am not be using amazon.com, google keyword tool or other tools that have been fully exploited by other marketers

• Achieve better conversion with the right site layout. I have experiment with a few themes and layout and have a sense of how to layout a site to achieve higher conversions for amazon sales.

• How to outsource effectively so that you spend the minimum amount of cost for each site.

• A detailed case study for one of the sites above where I will REVEAL the site's url!

See you in my next amazon site challenge progress report!

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How to track amazon sales

This is a simple tutorial to show you how to track amazon revenue from the different sites that you might have. This is one of the reader’s question from my previous post about my amazon niche site challenge progress 3 report.

It is a fairly easy process but not obvious so this step by step guide with screenshots should help. For those who are not sure why we need to do this, it is to help you to know where the sales are coming along. It works in similar ways as the channels in adsense. Knowing which sites is making amazon sales can help you to know who are your winners.

The first step is to log into your amazon affiliate account. Note that this is your amazon affiliate account, not your normal amazon user account.

Once you are logged in, click on the account settings button as shown in the screenshot below:

By the way, as can seen from the screenshot, I already made USD470 this month : )

In the next screen, you need to click on the manage ID button as shown below:

Finally, you click on the 'add ID' button and choose the name you want. I always use the same keyword as the site I am tracking to make it easier for me to remember.

Once your IDs are created, you need to use them whenever you are getting the amazon links from the product page. The screenshot below shows you where to change your affiliate IDs.

I hope this tutorials is useful. I am off to make money money with amazon!

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50 amazon sites challenge progress report #2

Here is an update on my 50 amazon niche sites challenge. If you are new, you can refer to all the articles and "how to make money from amazon" guide in this resource page: amazon site challenge.

Let's look at the progress of the 4 sites that I started towards the end of November. The biggest news is that I am starting to see some money, although the amount is not signficant. In total, I earned about USD29 for these sites. Not surprising, these earnings came from sites that are either purchased or aged. It really goes to show that making money online takes time. If you are not willing to wait for your site to mature, then do what I do: start buying websites to make money, rather than building them yourselves.

In terms of cost, I am happy to  keep the cost of building a new site to under USD40. The reason why it is so cheap is that each site only has 1-2 600-1000 word articles on it, which cost me USD5 to outsource. Including USD10 for the domain and another USD5-10 for backlink packages, the total cost will be less than USD40.

The reason I am putting so little content is that I want to see which sites can give me the best ROI. My strategy is very simple. If a site that has little content and crappy backlinks can bring in traffic with its exact name domain and good onsite SEO, then it means the competition for the keyword is weak and I will can put more resources to develop it if the traffic converts. This is the most accurate way of telling whether your keywords has strong or weak competition. All other tools are just estimates and not as reliable as real data like what I have gathered for my sites.

The only major expense was a USD57 backlinks package that I bought from Warrior Forums for the wine site. I am willing to put in the investment because this site has high conversion rate as can be seen from its revenue. Hence, I felt justified to spend more money to increase the traffic for the site of which one way is through more powerful backlinks. Another will be to add more content to it.

Site	Niche	Created	Cost	Monthly Earnings	Monthly Visitors	Type
1	Toy	Jun 2011	155	8	220	Purchased
2	Appliance	Nov 2011	25	NA	8	Self Written
3	Wine	Nov 2011	67	21	299	Aged
4	Appliance	Nov 2011	30	NA	NA	Self Written
5	Bicycle	Dec 2011	25	NA	NA	Outsourced
6	Home	Dec 2011	20	NA	NA	Outsourced

Another good news is that site#2, which is a completely new site is already starting to see search engine traffic despite being only a few days old. If you are wondering what is the secret to getting traffic to your website or blog when they are new, it is all about keyword selection. All I did was to pick a very low competition amazon keyword and optimise the site around it. I paid 2 fiverr gigs for some very weak backlink packages to get them indexed.

Below is the traffic level for site #2

Click to enlarge

All the current traffic comes from long tails and goes back to my point that learning how to write good SEO copy is crucial if you want search engine traffic early. It is not always about backlnks. This site has crappy backlinks but I write the content in such a way that maximises my potential for longtail traffic. 

For Dec, I have already build 2 more sites as can be seen from the table above. Site #6 is now already on page one and I have installed analytics today to see if it has any traffic. You will get to hear more about its performance in the next report.

Overall, I am quite happy with the progress. I though I wil only start this challenge in Dec but I have already 6 sites up. The only thing now holding back is the keyword selection. It is not easy to find amazon keywords that have search volume, over USD100 products and have exact name domains. I managed to find a few but I need to get more if I am to hit my 50 amazon niche site target.

Hope you enjou reading this progress report. If you have any questions about how to have an income from amazon, please leave them in the comments.

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How much traffic to make money from Amazon

Knowing how much traffic you need to make money from Amazon can help you to forecast your earnings and the efforts you need to put. Of course, this is all useless if you only think and not do! In this post, I will give you actual stats from 2 of my amazon sites to see the kind of conversion rates that you need if you want to make money with Amazon keywords.

The first site that I am analysing is not part of the 50 Amazon challenge. It is a 2 year site with 5 posts that is ranking in the top 3 for its primary keyword. It makes around USD50 per month and is the kind of ideal size and earnings level that I hope to achieve for all my new 50 amazon sites. 

On average, this site has around 1200 unique visitors per month, which means 40 unique visitors per day. Last month, it has around 600 amazon product clicks and 30 sales. This means the conversion ratio from site visitors to amazon is around 50% and from amazon clicks to sales is around 5%. I would say these numbers are high and I will talk about how to achieve such high CTR for amazon niches in a future post.

One thing to note about this site is that the product the site is selling is not USD100. In fact, it is quite low with a price range between USD20-USD50. Hence, my per sale commission is only between USD1.20 to USD3. If you followed my advice and go for higher price product, you should earn more per site or you need less traffic to get the same earnings.

The second site I am looking at is the new site that I purchase for the 50 amazon niche sites challenge. You can read the details of how I buy this website to make money. By the way, if you interested in looking for money making websites for sale, I suggest that you bookmark my site as I be announcing more sites for sale here.

Below is the screenshot for the amount of traffic to the blog that I have recently purchased for USD155.

Click image to enlarge

On average it is receiving around 35 unique visitors per day, which is near the traffic level for the first site. In term of click through to amazon, it is around 13-15 clicks. That means the CTR for this site is around 37-40%. Again, this is quite close to the 50% that my first site has achieved.

So, in the past 4 days, I have sent around 50 visitors to Amazon and I have zero sales. If assuming my amazon clicks to sales is between 2-4%, I should have a sale for this site within this week. Let's see if the numbers hold.  My only concern is that this product is above USD150 so the sales ratio might be lower.

In summary, to make USD50 in amazon, your site needs to have at least 40-50 unique visitors a day with a CTR of around 40-50% and a sale ratio of around 3-5% if you have a low price product. For a higher price product, you need lower numbers. I hope this has show how easy it is to make USD50 for an amazon site.

By the way, I have put a resource page at the top of the site to summarize all the stuff about this 50 amazon site challenge. Check it out here. 

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