How to earn USD500 with Amazon affilitate program

In august, I have set myself a target of reaching USD500 with the Amazon affiliate programme by Dec. You can read about it here in my post called how to earn USD500 with Amazon as well as my initial plan in my how to build authority site post.

Well, I am happy to say that I have achieved my goal much earlier than expected. Below is a screenshot of my amazon earnings for the month of Nov. Although the month has not ended, my earnings is only a few cents away from the USD500 mark.

So, what is the secret? WORK.

That is it. If you know the basic of doing keyword research and getting keyword anchored backlinks then you already know what to do. The next step is to pound the site with content and backlinks in the ratio of 10:90. For every article you wrote on your site, you need at least 9 backlinks to make it rank. Most of the time, 9 will not be sufficient and you need lots more.

Let me give you a perspective with my own Amazon site. This site has around 30 articles and 500 backlinks (in total) pointing to each of the articles. That is the kind of work that is needed to be successfully.

While it may seems like a lot of work, the payoff can be very rewarding.

First, let's talk about the growth. Last month, my amazon earnings was only USD39. Yes, you read that right. Only USD39. In a single month, it grew to what you saw above. That is the magic of internet marketing. The earnings will really start to roll in once you finished all the work. Best of all, the growth will continue even after you stop now. Which job can give you such a huge jump in increment after a couple of month?

Second, it is totally passive. I can stop tomorrow and my Amazon earnings will still continue day after day. I don't need any boss or annoying staff to bother me while I am earning my money. Isn't that great?

I hope this shows you that with determination, anything is possible. I started with nothing in August in terms of my Amazon earnings and within a few months, I am starting to see real money coming in. While it is not full time income yet, it will be after a couple of months more.

So, in this year, I have master both adsense and amazon. It is not really difficult at all. If you are willing to put in the work, you have lead a very different life. A life where you have enough money to pursue your dreams. We don't have to work for corporates for the rest of our life you know?

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Picking the right niches for Amazon

The biggest difference I found between Amazon and Adsense is in the niche selection. For adsense, we tend to pick unknown niches in the beginning to avoid competition. However, for amazon, I go for the best selling items. Amazon requires sales and not clicks but the best seller list is the best guide. If you pick an unknown niche, it might be difficult to get sales even though you might get clicks.

In terms of keyword selection, I pick product names that have lots of reviews and have prices that range between USD25 and USD150. The former is because of what I called social validation. People need product reviews to assure them of their purchases. The latter is important because that is the range of prices that I think people are comfortable in paying online.

Be in mind though that some niches just plain suck. The hardest thing for making online with amazon is not in doing your SEO for ranking but in finding out what converts. More often than not, you will find that most niches do not convert well.

I tested at least 30 niches with long tails before finding 2 that converts well. The rest just stinks. If you trust me, you can send me you niche and I will see if I have tackled that before.

Have fun in find the right niches for Amazon!

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How to target buying keywords for Amazon products and earn passive income

This is how I have built up my Amazon supersite. I have mentioned in my previous post on how to make 500 with Amazon that I want to hit this revenue by end of this year. Well, I am happy to say I will definitely hit it In fact, I will go past it quite easily.

Here is what I have learned. Although I have no problems in sharing what I do, do bear in mind I am not THE expert on amazon. It is just that I am starting to get it as I am seeing large increase in my traffic and earnings over the past 2 months. Also bear in mind that this stragety is applied to a 6 month old site so I am not sure how well it will work for a brand new site. I will break down what I do in terms of keyword research, article writing and backlinking.


Keyword research

When it comes to amazon keywords, I don't use google keyword tool that much. One reason is because I am targeting primarily new products so the tool is not very useful. This is what I did:

I always look for new hot products. This is because there is very little competition and you can always rank easily.

I look for these in 2 sections of Amazon: (i) one is in the hot upcoming release and (ii)the other place is in the best seller list. However, I don't go for products that have already stayed more than 50 days in the best seller and that might mean more competition for me.

One of the challenges for product keywords is knowing exactly what keyword to target. For example, I took this product name from the toy section a while ago: "Alex Toys Friends 4 Ever Bracelet Making Kit". So, what do you target? The full model name? How about only "Ever Bracelet Making Kit" or "Alex Toy Bracelet Making Kit" or "Bracelet Making Kit Alex toys" or blah, blah, blah. I solve this issue by using Google insight and Google suggests. I start with the broadest term and see what Google recommends. Insight is good in terms of comparing relative keywords.

Another method I used is to use past info to guide me. For example, there might a "Alex toy product Y" last year. I will use google insight to see what kind of keywords people used to search this past product and apply them to the newly launched one.

Article writing

Every new article I wrote targets a hot new product using the keywords process I mentioned above. In terms of the actual article, I always target buying such as "Alex toy bracklet kit For sale Where to buy alex toy ever bracket making kit".

My article titles are typically long because they do affect how well you rank. The more keywords you have in there, the more long tails you are going to pick up. Notice how i squeeze two different possibile way to search for the product in the above example i.e. ""Alex toy bracklet kit" and "alex toy ever bracket making kit"

Backlinks

My new post I made received at least 10 backlinks from either Postrunner or BuildMyRank. The latter is especially potent for my site. Every keyword I hit with their backlinks will see a rise in SERPs within days, not weeks. However, I made no gurantees here so it is up to you to decide if you want to give that service a try.

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How to target higher paying keywords for Adsense

I just thought to share something that has helped me to increase my adsense earnings over the past months. Again, this is just my experience so please feel free to add your comments.

This realisation came about because I linked my adsense and my analytics during late July. I wished I had done it sooner!

When looking at the data, one thing that really stuck me is the range of payout that I was getting. Some were really low such (0.5>3 dollar range). I began to analyse the data and realise there were root words that can trigger the higher paying ads. I began to use more of these root words and then magic! I began to get the higher ads.

An example:

Normally, I would target something like tummy tuck. The traffic is high and the payout is decent but it was not the highest paying keywords. I then realise by adding roots words such as price + location (imaginary example, NOT REAL), the higher paying ads begin to come. So something like:

tummy tuck cost in London

OR

cheap tummy tuck prices

I noted down all the different root word combination and analyse which combination can yield the highest paying ads. I then use these combinations in my post titles and find that not only do they trigger better paying ads but they are easier to rank as well. This is how my income jumped even though there was little movements in my main keywords.

Result: can you say USD12 click baby : )

http://bit.ly/cvZc6B

I find that this approach works for every niche. I tried it in my furniture niche as well and find that I can raise the average paying click from the typical 0.5-0.8 range to my current 1.2-1.5 range, just by targeting the right root words.

All these targeting will raise your eCPM and makes it easier for you to earn more money without having large amounts of traffic. For example, an eCPM of USD20 will mean that you need 5000 visitors per day to cross the USD100 mark. If your eCPM is USD50, then you will need 2000. What we are doing then is sacrificing more traffic with higher paying traffic.

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How to earn USD500 with Amazon

Another update on my money making or passive income journey. In my last post, I talked about how to find hot niches and have shown my eclipse clothing line. Since that time, my site is now ranked no 2 within a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, this is s dud keyword, meaning that there is little traffic to it. As a result, income from this site is minimal, about USD15 per month. Compared to my new moon site, this eclipse site earns much less and might a sign that the trend of twilight is dying down.

However, I do not regret doing that experiment as I have gained another site for linking in the future,

This couple of months, i am targeting Amazon and have set up a number of sniper Amazon sites. These are smaller site that are laser target to the keywords. I will show you one example, white melamine shelving. The aim is to get a couple of these sites up and you should see USD500 within 3-6 months of work.

The best way to find buying keyowrds for Amazon is to look at hot products in Amazon and then using Google keyword tool to dig deeper into what keywords should you consider. Using this approach, I have found a goldmine of keywords that has large number , and very little competition.

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How to target hot niches

This is an experiment to show you how I target hot niches that can generate you some money in the short run. These types of sites can be set up quickly and are meant to target some short term trends. The good thing about such trend niches is that they typically don't have existing authority sites to compete against, meaning you will have a much easier time to rank for them. This experiment is a demonstration of what Grizzly has been showing us in his American Idol and Blinkweb review posts.

For this experiment, I am going to target a keyword and report its earnings and ranking for about 2 months. We will see how much effort is needed and for what kind of returns can I achieved. In this experiment, I am targeting eclipse clothing line to capitalise on the latest Twilight craze. The site has already been set up and is now ranking on page two to three, depending on where your data centre is. This out of the box ranking can be achieved through the exact domain bonus as well as the non competitiveness of the keyword itself.

As a first step, you need to have a source for finding these hot trend niches. Personally, I often use AOL hot, Amazon Hot New Release as well as all the niche forums that talk about new products and services. I used to visit Google Trends as well but all the other Internet Marketers guys are crawling over that so to be successful, you need to have your own areas to draw ideas from. The best way is to look out for new products in the forums or social networks that you are currently hanging out in. See what things are getting people in your niche excited. This is the perfect keyword to target. Most of these trends will die off but if you can earn some passive money while they are still hot, it is not a big deal. Moreover, some of these trends might turn out to have some lasting power. That is where you really hit the jackpot.

Once you have found these keywords, the next thing is to set up a site optimised for that keyword. If you want to know how to set up an optimised site, here is a basic breakdown:
- keyword in URL
- keyword in blog title
- keyword and related keywords in blog description area
- keyword in post titles

This is how a SEO optimised site will have. However, to really rank well, you need anchored backlinks. This means get backlinks from article directories such as ezine, inforbarrel, hubpages, post your articles etc. All these sites can give you good links. For non competitive keywords, they will be enough to bring your site up. If you need more sources for free backlinks, I will cover that topic in a post scheduled to be published in July.

When targeting keywords, it is always good to target related keywords as well. For example, in the eclipse experiment, my site will also target related words like eclipose fashion line, eclipse clothing, where to buy eclipse clothing line etc. All these longtail keywords will bring you more traffic than just one word. If you want to know more about these anchored keywords, click on the link to read my previous coverage for more information.

Stay tuned for the my update on this experiment. I shall be back in two weeks with income reports and other interesting facts that come up in the experiment.

Btw, this is my last day in US. I have been spending about two weeks touring the western coast with my wife. The good thing about passive income is that while I am on tour, the income doesn't let up and continues to come up. My amazon is also up meaning my authority site experiment is beginning to see some results as well. I will report on that as well once I have more data.

In the meantime, go earn some passive income. It will change your life and your perspective on what is possible : )

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How to find keywords from ezine that brings in traffic

Most of the time, beginners are advised to do keyword search using Google adword tool. While that is a good start, I find that the tool is useless for longtail keyword that beginners should target. What I am currently using now is a different approach.

This is how I do keyword research. It is a variation of the common strategy that IM folksuses. When analysing keyword competition, they look out for an ezine or hubpage or other web 2.0 properties on the first page of the SERP, because that is a strong indication that the keyword is easy to beat. However, this process is tedious and is very dependent on luck. You just need to try a lot of keywords to see which one has the result that contains these Web 2.0 in the first page.

What I do is the reverse. I first analyse which ezine article is already getting lots of views in a short time by using the following search string:

site:ezinearticles.com “This article has been viewed″ “Article Submitted On: * 2010″

The first part allows you to see the no of views directly on the SERP so saving you the trouble of clicking into individual articles. The second part is your niche. The third part will filter the articles according to date.

For me, I look for articles that have been written in the past 3-4 months and see which ones have a couple of hundred views. This tells me that the market has interest in the niche.

Then I look at the post article and try to deduce what are the keywords that the article is ranking for. I then do a search using the keyword that I have deduced. If I see that article in the first page for the keyword, it means that the keyword is easy to rank for.

The reason I look only at the past few months is to take away the age factor. If an article written in April has gather ranking and generate hundreds of views within 1-2 months, it means we can probably achieve the same result by either using an EDN or creating a page on your current site and point several Web 2.0 properties to it.

As an example, this is what I found just 15 minutes ago using the diet niche

http://ezinearticles.com/?1300-Calorie-Diet-Menu-and-Meal-Plan&id=4101617

Submitted on 13 April 2010,
455 Views
Ranking for: 1300 Calories Diet Menu

I have tried this method a couple of times and so far, the results are what I have expected. However, I need to experiment for a longer time to draw any meaningful conclusion. In fact, I have all these data in my spreadsheet. Once I have enough sample, I hope to derive some formula such that I can estimate any monthly traffic based on these few statistics that been mentioned.

If this method works, it will be interesting because I can use the same approach to data mine all article directories like ehow, associated content etc. In fact, with some alterations to the search string, you can identify a lot of big seasonal money makers : )

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