How to make money by buying sites with passive income

It has been an exciting April as I achieved one of the highest earnings so far in my IM career. Sorry for the lack of posting as I was so busy with starting new projects. I decided this month to slow it down a bit as I have enough on the plate for the entire year .

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I mentioned about site investing in my previous articles and I will talk more about it this time. However, I am still learning some of the nuts and bolts of buying sites so don’t take my word as the holy bible. It is just my learning points so far in this investment journey. I am sure there will be more in the coming months.

What to look for when buying a site for passive income

• Search traffic: I don’t invest in sites that have majority of their traffic from twitter, youtube and what’snot. I only look for sites that have at least 75% of their traffic from search. This is because search is passive and doesn’t require too much work unless you want to grow. One of the earlier site I bought was a social site and the things you need to do maintain the traffic is just too much work.

What keywords are driving the search traffic: It is not sufficient to just look for sites with good search traffic. Go down deeper to see what keywords are driving the traffic. Be aware of sites that used trend keywords such as events or news. These kind of sites will not have substainable search traffic once the trend dies off.

What you should do is to use a spreadsheet to analyse the top keywords the site is bringing in. See where the site is ranking for these keywords so that you know whether there is any upside to the site. For example, if a keyword is number 8 and is driving a few hundred people per month, you know that by bringing this keyword to the top 3, you can potentially enjoy a few thousands.

In addition, I go a layer deeper and see what big traffic keywords the site may be ranking for but is not showing in the analytics because they are buried in page 3 or 4. For example, a site might be ranking for cheap white ipad accessories. I will take a look to see if it is ranking for ‘white ipad accessories’ or even ‘ipad accessories’. If that site is ranking for these higher keywords, it will be a good push for me to buy the site as I can push these keywords to page one and enjoy.

• Source of backlinks: Check to see if the backlinks can be removed by the site owner. Certain site owners have multiple sites and they used these to support each other. It might be likely that if you buy such a site, the site owner might remove the links from their own network once the sale is completed. This will seriously pull the ranking of the keywords down and reduce the overall search traffic to the site.

• Check the history of the domain: Make sure the domain has not been used to do anything that Google might frown upon such as sex, gambling, drugs etc. You want to buy a site that has a clean history so that you have a good foundation to work on.

• Authority site: This is a personal preference. I like to buy sites that are recognised as authority. This means sites with indented listing such as this example http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword+academy&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a. I like authority sites because they are legitimate and are also easy to introduce new keywords to expand its potential.

• Diversified income streams: It is also a good practice to buy sites that have a different monetisation model. Rather than adsense, you can diversify your income base by buying sites that make money off affiliates such as Amazon or Commission Junction. I bought one recently that is selling software products and I have found that the margins are much much higher than what you will get for adsense.

Where to buy sites from

Most people tend to use flippa to buy sites but this is not where I have gotten the best deals. Hence, this will not be a post about how to buy sites from flippa. This is because there is too much competition and the good sites tend to have over valued prices. The best deals I have gotten come from private sources. This includes hanging out in forum as well as using innovative ways to find good sites. Below is one strategy I used.

I look at the sites listing in the buysellads site and contact those that have good authority but are charging about USD10-30 dollars for their ads. The lowly priced ads means the site owners are not making much money and you have a chance to buy them at a much better valuation than sites that are listed in flippa.

How much do pay for sites

The average norm for me is around 15-24 months range. I never have the luck to buy sites that can break even in 10-12 months. Fortunately, I was always able to push the ranking of the keyword higher than the original owners, which fastens my breakeven.

I find that for higher quality sites, they tend to command a much higher premium than the 10 times industry norm. I agree with such pricing because it is much difficult to build a site that brings in 500 per month than a site that brings in 100 or less a month. This scaling factor is where I think the premium is and is something I am willing to pay.

How to negotiate with site owners

When talking about the price, always stick to revenue as the basis for valuation. Don’t consider potential of the site or how much it cost the previous owner to build it. All these are irrelevant. You are buying the site for its current benefit, not for what it could be or to cover the expenses of the previous original. If you stick to this principle, then the negotiation will be much quicker and the results tend to be more favourable to you.

What are the logistics of site buying

After the deal has been agreed, there are a couple of things you need to do before the whole transaction is completed.

First you need to pay for the site. The most secure way is through an escrow service. It is not complex to use but you might some time to navigate it if you are doing it for the first time. The most irrating thing is that you need to go to the bank and wire transfer some funds from your bank account to the escrow account. Once that is done, the rest can be completed via an online platform.

Next, you need to receive the domain from the buyer. Depending on where the current domain name is registered, the process for domain transfer will be different. This is again a learning process but it is not difficult.

At the same time, you should start to move the site to your own hosting account. If neither the seller or yourself know how to do this, it is better to engage a technical person to do it. I have no technical skills what so ever and I always a freelancer to help me do it to prevent any mishaps from happening due to site transfer issues.

Once the site has been transferred to your hosting account and you have also received the domain names, remember to change the name servers on your domain to your new hosting account. If not, your domain will show a parking page rather the site. Do not drag this for too long as you never know whether Google will penalise the site for having no content and you can potentially lose all your rankings. To avoid this issue, it is always better to transfer the site first, then change the name servers once the content is up for hosting account.

That is all for site buying. I am sure I missed out some points. Please feel free to ask me questions via the comments.

What is next making money experiment

I also want to talk about a new experiment in my next post. I want to see how to make money with a general article directory site, rather than a site that is focus on a niche. There are reasons why I want to do this and I will outline them in more detail in my next post.

Thanks for reading and have fun in learning how to make money online.

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How to earn 1000 with adsense-final money making lesson

This post will conclude my step by step guide to making USD1000 with adsense with a new site. I have not achieved it but looking at the trend, I will hit it by next month. For those who might be new to this site, my goal was to take a site from USD0 to USD1000 within 9 months. The experiment started in Oct 2010 and should conclude by June 2011. However, looking at the data, I will get there in 6 months, rather than 9.

Here are the first two posts in this adsense experiment:
How to make USD1000 with adsense
How to make USD1000 with adsense - money making lesson 2

Ok, for those who wants some evidence of my earnings, here is Feb income

Click to enlarge image

As a reminder, here is my earnings for the previous three months:

Dec: USD87
Jan:USD470
Feb:USD780

So, I have shown that you can hit USD1000 with just one site, within 6 months. It all comes down to picking low competition keywords and knowing how to promote them via backlinks.

Let me state here that this site that is pulling in this amount is not a spam site by any means. All the content are high quality articles that have been written after considerable research. I believe in building assets that will last, rather than writing crap and getting the ban from Google.

Again, this is not the only site that I am working on so it is not even a 100% effort. If you repeat this process 10 times, the 10k per month income is not a dream. Question is do you have what it takes to pull through the earlier days to enjoy the fruits for your labor.

In fact, to show you that the results can be duplicated, I am starting a new site in the same market as this site. My goal is to hit USD500 with this new adsense site by June 2011 and USD1000 by Sept 2011. If I can accomplish this, it should be proof that making money online is a real possibility.

I am currently busy with building 2 big authority sites in the makeup and watches niches. I found some good writers who are passionate about these topics and formed a partnership to create these two sites. I want these 2 sites to be leaders and recognised in their niches so that they can another powerful source of income for me. These are currently not ready yet but once they are, I am more than happy to show them to you.

In terms of site investment, I made one this month in the wine industry. Again, domain investment is very new to me so I am taking it real easy and learning the steps. In my next article, I will focus on how to make money by buying sites that are already established.

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How to earn 1000 with adsense-money making lesson two

Time to post an update on my experiment to reach USD1000 per month with an adsense site. For those who might have missed the post on how to create passive income with adsense, the link will take you to the first post. In summary, I have begin working on a site that has been dormant for a number of months. I started working seriously on it since Oct 2010 and my goal is to hit 1k in adsense by June 2011 (a total of nine months). What I did from Oct-Dec was to add 100 backlinks from postrunner and to add about 25 articles on my sites that target new keywords (new products). In my first update, I also reported on what the site is earning in Dec. Since there was a few days remaining in Dec in that update, the full income is shown below:

(Click on the image to enlarge)

So, USD83 for Dec from a site that I worked on for 3 months. Not too bad. I still remember my first 100 per month took me about 5 months and comes from 5-6 sites. To have this result in a shorter time and with just one site assures me that I am moving in the right direction.

So, what I did I do in Jan? I added 25 additional articles to the site that target new terms. I also started to backlink keywords that are beginning to show promise using buildmyrank. It was a lot of work but the results have, quite frankly, improved beyond my expectations. I initially expect about 150-200 in Jan. The results kind of flew past that:

(Click on the image to enlarge)

USD467 in Jan, from USD89 in Dec. That is a jump of about 500%, which is quite an astonishing growth. So, what did I really do to have this result?

The main driver is learning how to use emering products in your niche. For me, I managed to find 2 TV shows in my niche that talks about new products in every show. What I did was to look at the symbiosis for the show in advance and write new articles that review these products. Because the keywords had very little competition, my site managed to obtain first page rankings for almost all the new keywords that I target. When the showed aired, my traffic jumped and adsense clicks increased significantly. If you hit a really popular product, then you will see the spike as shown in the image above. That day alone, I got USD60 in adsense.

The good thing about targeting new product keywords, rather than news, is that some of them will proven to be long term traffic drivers as consumers begin accepting the products. That is how my site continue to enjoy the increased traffic even after the shows have aired, although the traffic levels will not be as high as when the products just aired.

All this points to an important lesson that I want to highlight here. You need to have processes for your online business. These processes must aim at your highest value adding activities. For this site, the highest value adding activities is new keywords discovery. I know that the more new keywords I target, the more revenue the site can generate. So, I created a routine whereby I will watch the symbiosis at certain nights and force myself to write articles that target these new keywords. Once this process has been established, it becomes a sureway fire to make more money. Without this process, I could have become lazy and the site might not make as much as it does now.

Of course, I intend to hand this process over to my outsourcer once I created a process for her to duplicate what I did. That is how you can scale your business. Do one thing yourself and once you know how it works, formulate a process to hand it over so that you can continue to do other higher value adding activities.

The above points to the fact that most online marketers don't have a business process. That is something I want to talk more in this blog because I feel that most IM blogs do not talk about the business management side of IM. However, to be successful, you need to apply management techniques to really grow your business. It is all about formulating business processes which gives you the biggest value and that recruiting outside help to scale these processes.

One of the thing that I am will be doing more this year is investment into established sites. I know how to make money now so for me, i am willing to buy sites that have traffic so that I can apply my current processes and resources to these sites and grow them. Through this approach, I will definitely hit my 10k a month goal this year and 30k a month goal next year. I have already bought 2 sites and in future posts, I will detailed how I select sites to buy and what to do with them once you have bought them over.

So you find this useful. Do leave a comment as it gets lonely here without them : )

Until my next update, go forth and make more passive income!

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Why am I not making money with adsense

Here is an email response I wrote to a reader who emailed me about why he is not making money with adsense even though he knows the basic. I outlined two possible reasons below, which I thought I would share it with the rest of the 2 readers that I have for this blog (LOL). Btw, I am preparing my next post on how to make 1000 with adsense. I must say, the results have surprised me and you will be too!

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Given that you know the basics, there are always 2 main problems that I have seen for people who have been at it for a period of time and not seeing success.

First, you need to fix your work ethics. How many articles can you do a day to get the backlinks? If you don't have a constant rate, it is very hard to be successfully. When I was at the USD100 per month level, I wrote 5 articles per day without fail. No outsourcing, no games and tv after work etc. I just lock myself in the room and start typing. I kept this up for 4 months before I broke the USD500 per month. When you are at this level, then think about outsource. You need to know what to outsource before spending the money.

You need to understand that making money is a mental game. You need to win the mental game before being able to see any success. I have coached over 15 people during the past one year and only one has not given up. The rest of them cannot maintain this work ethic for long.

Once you are mentally prepared to put this much effort, then you need to look at your writing process. You should not take more than 15 mins to produce 1 300 word article that makes sense. This is the productivity part of the business where you need to be as efficient as possible given that you have a full time job. The one student who is continuing used to take 2 hours to write one article. I told him that is too long. I forced him to take a timer and keep the article to within 30 minutes. Now, he can produce them within 15. That is a HUGE leap. This means on a per hour basis, you are getting more links than ever.

Second, know what keywords to backlink. (see related post on how to backlink longtail keywords) A lot of people make the mistake of spreading their backlinks too thin. 5 backlinks for this keyword, 15 backlinks for another keyword. Worst of all, these keywords are spread among too many sites, meaning that there is no one site that accumulates enough backlink to become an authority.

What you need to do is to find out which site and which keywords on that site has the most potential to give you money. You need to link your adsense to your analytics to get this data. Then I chose Content -> AdSense -> Top Adsense Content. This will list the top 10 earning URLs on your site. Then I'd click on the first URL and from there I'd choose from the drop down box that has "AdSense Performance" in it, I'd choose "Entrance Keywords". Now at this point you have a list (and you might have to exapand it to see all the kws) of your top referring kws to that URL. Using some commonsense in determining if those are kws that seem likely to be used, you then check them through Scroogle (or other rank checking tool) and see where you're ranking and whether chasing those kws might be worth the effort.

For example, let's say one of the kws I've found in this list is "blue oranges" and it is bringing me 10 uniques over this most current 30 day period, if I check it out in Scroogle and see that I'm number 13 for "blue oranges" then I'm inclined to give it a go as I'm already getting a lot of searches being only in position 13. If one the KW is "where do I buy blue oranges" and I am already ranked in the top 3. then I will pass.

Once you have a couple of potential keywords (no more than five), then it is time to backlink them. Focus on them like your life depends on it. No work on other sites. No work on other keywords. No new shining objects. Just backlink these few keywords until they are in the top three. I guarantee your income will increase.

That is the way I do it in a nutshell when I was at your stage. No automation tools, no secret ways of finding KWs. Just pick the most profitables one and backlink them until they are in the top three.

Now that I have some money, I don't write anymore as I am my outsourcers. My KW process is also more refined now but that is because I am now very familar with the niches i have and know where to get new KWs that are not in the adword tools (such as TV shows, news site etc). For you however, all these can come later. Learn how to focus on producing articles for backlinks and what keywords these backlinks should point to.

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How to make 1000 per month in adsense with 1 site

This is will be my journal as well as step by step guide on how I intend to create a new authority site and take it to USD1000 in adsense by end of June 2011. It is definitely a very realistic timeframe and I hope that whatever I have written here will help somebody who is struggling with adsene in general. That being said, I am not the expert. There are better adsense gurus out there such as Griz and Court and Mark and the xfactor guy.

I have taken sites to USD1000 using adsense programme before so this is not new to me. In fact, my passive income goals for 2011 is to take 10 such sites to 1k, which will net me a 10k per month passive income. A year ago, this target seems so far away but now, I feel that it is within reaching distance because I have the knowledge and resources now that I do not have 1 year ago. Hopefully, you can be as successful as well.

Ok, back to the topic of how to make 1k per month in adsense.

Here is how I would go back doing it. This is not the only way but is the way that I found to be effective for me.

Step 1: adsense niche selection
After dabbing in countless niches over the past year, I realise not all niches are created equal. By this, I do not mean just in terms of money making potential. Rather, some niches are just difficult to expand on as a useful adsense site.

For example, a product based site should not be an adsense site. Not only can a affilitate site make more money but is more useful for the searcher as well. If you are searching for an ipad cover, you want to go to a site that offers you the chance to buy an ipad cover. You do not want to go a site that rambles on about how useful is the cover, where can you buy it etc. I rather put an affilitate link in my ipad cover article after reviewing a couple of designs. That is what a product site should be offering. So, my criteria for choosing an adsense niche has been narowed down to the following:

• information based
• have new products being introduced constantly (will explain why later)
  
• the niche must have high CPC in general (over USD1 per click)
  

Step 2: Set up the site and post a couple of articles on it
After you have done your niche selection, pick a couple of easy keywords to start with. If you do not know how to analyse competition for your keywords, check this article on how to build authority site. In it, I described a simple way of doing so.

Step 3: Build 100+ backlinks
With the keywords selected, write the articles and post them up. The next step will be the challenging part where most will give up. It is time to build backlinks. I recommend post runner as one of the best backlink system out there. It is a network of blogs owned by different people so you get a wide diverse range of places to promote your articles. For experience, if you want a strong site, you need at least 100 links so be prepared to get busy. Write the guest post articles that promote those you have written for your site and post them to the postrunner system. This might take 1-2 months.

Step 4: New post that target new products
After the 100 links, your site should start to gain a little trust from Google. If not, you might need to wait 1-2 months more. Anyway, it is time to start writing for your site again. This time, we will write only about new products that have been introduced in our niche. The reason is simple. New products have little competition in the search engines so it is easier to rank. There are 2 benefits to doing so:

1. Once these articles start to rank on the first page, your site will gain more trust from Google. The more pages you have that is ranked, the more trust your site will be. That is how authority sites are built and is the approach that is advised by Griz.
2. You will also start to see traffic very early on if the new products can generate interest. This means that you can start to make money much faster compared to targeting lucrative keywords that have lots of competition. You can still do so but it means you will need to wait for a long time before seeing any results.

That is why in my niche selection, I only go after those niches that have new products that I can target constantly. In fact, I make sure that there is a couple of sites that will provide me with such information so that I don't get stuck on trying to find new products. I just go to these sites and write an article about whatever is new. If the new product has been featured on mass media, even better as it will likely generate traffic if you can rank for it.

Step 5: Backlink your most profitable articles until they are number one
Once you have finished the articles, allow them the site to just sit there for a month. After that, analyse which pages generates the most traffic. That will be your winners and it is time to backlink them until their keywords reach number one.

That's it.

I am using the above step to build a new site that will give me 1k by end of June 2011. I have already selected the niche and I have already at step 4 with it. Currently, the site has 25 articles and each article makes between USD3-5 dollars on average without me doing any backlinks for them. My intention is to finish up the 100 articles first, which will net me about USD300-500 per month and analyse the data to see which keywords to backlink. Once I have backlinked my most profitable keywords, the entire site should yield me USD1k.

So, I will be reporting back here on the progress of this site every month. (Btw, this is not a main thing for me. I am starting this new site to see if my approach is sound. I have other more important projects that are making me money now so treat this as an experiment.)

Currently, here are the stats for Dec (until Dec 21). The numbers in brackets represents last month's figure.

adsense: USD55 (USD8)
adsense impressions: 1,100 (140)
articles live: 25 (5)

So, overall, the site is off to a good start. The numbers might be low now but I think the growth will be good. Let's find out if that is the case. See you in the next update on my experiment to take a new site to USD1000 in adsense by end of june 2011.

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What are long tail keywords How to backlink long tail keywords

A short post (Edit: not really short) today as one of my reader (out of 2? LOL) emailed me some questions on long tail keywords which I thought would be better answered via a post that can benefit anybody who might stumble upon my blog.

The question was "I read your blog on targetting long tail keywords which can potentially get more traffic into my website way more quickly and was wondering if you can share more on what are your traffic getting methods and giving so many different variations of long tails, how you backlink them."

So the topic at hand: long tail keywords. I have briefly mentioned them in my previous articles on how to select keywords for your blog and how to pick keywords that generates passive income, but I am not done so in a thoughtful and systematic way so here we go.

What are long tail keywords?
If you have read Chris Andersen's book on the longtail, you will know about this concept. Basically, it says that aggregating your longtail demand can add up to quite a substantial revenue given that the cost of generating these long tail demand is low in the digital age. This concept holds true for online marketing. While the main phase keyword will always generate more traffic, they are not enough to give you the 800 to 1000 visitors a day that is needed to make a significant income for any site. These numbers can only be achieved by generating lots of long tail keywords that surrounds your main keywords.

Importance of long tail keywords
Besides giving you more traffic, why is long tail keywords important? One of the main reason is that long tail keywords are usually buying keywords. For example, people searching for 'ebook reader' are not necessary buyers as they can be people looking for information about ebook readers in general. However, someone who types in "where to buy cheap ebook reader" is going to serious in buying one. So, if your site generates lots of longtail keyword searches that contains buying intentions, your income will most likely increase as well.

Another benefit is that long tail keywords are easier to rank. That will give you two bonuses. Firstly, the more pages you have that are ranked, the more trust Google has in your site, which increases your overall authority. Once you have become an authority, going for more competitive keywords will be a much simpler task. The second bonus is that you might hit upon something that brings you significant traffic even though it is a long tail. I have had instances where a 5 word long tail produces about 40-50 hits on my site.

How to generate long tail keywords
Now that you understand the importance of long tail keywords, the next thing is to generate them. This is where a lot of different strategies can be used. This is how I do it but there lots of different ways. If you have a unique approach and will like to share them, please leave a comment.

Keyword tools: I used all the usual google keywords tools: including google adword tool, google suggest and google insight. Among the three, google suggest is really useful. I like to add these operators to get more longtail keywords that have buying intention:

"for": this to get a list of keywords that tells you who is the receiving user of the keywords e.g. "ebook readers for kids"

"under": this will give you a list of prices that users are willing to buy

"in": this is a location based keyword that is really important if you targeting geo based ads

"w": this is a funny one. by adding a w and a space between the w and your keyword, google might give you a list of question based keywords such as "where to buy ebook reader" or "who sells ebook readers" etc

Long post: when you site has certain trust and age, long post such as this one can really give you keywords that you never thought of. If you are making money through adsense, then it is worthwhile to hook your analytics and adsense account so that you know which long tail keyword triggers high paying ads.

How to backlink longtails
Once you have include lots of longtail keywords in your content, it is time to watch the analytics. One of my adsense site that generated over 1k in earnings have thousands of long tail being generated every day. Trying to backlink all of them will be impossible. Here is my criteria in choosing which keywords to backlink:

High potential: if a long tail is in page two and is generating consistent clicks (1-5) or traffic (10-30) per week, it is worthwhile to backlink them until they hit number one

Containing my main keyword: if a bunch of long tails has a common keyword that I want to rank, I would give them at least 1-2 backlinks since they will help my main keyword

High CPC: if a keyword generates a high CPC such as above USD5 or even USD10 per click, I would backlink that. It might help to trigger even more of such high paying ads.

In summary, long tail keywords are really important to any SEO efforts and for making passive income. If you master this, it will be easier for you to build any site and start to earn money from it within a short timeframe.

Btw, the vacation has been great so far. My lovely wife and I have spent 3 days in Holland (Amsterdam and Den Haag) and we are now currently in Belgium. In the coming days, we will spending a couple of days in Luxembourg, Munich and Prague. It is super cold right now but I am enjoying myself. It also gave me a taste of how my dream life will be. Traveling and making money online while doing so. This is a great way to live! I did some calculation and figure out I need to make 30k a month to be able to live our dream of traveling all year around. This is a 5 year target that I have set for myself which is entirely doable.

In fact, in the coming posts, I will be talking more about how to really scale my online business models beyond adsense and amazon. If you are read the book entitled "what get you here will not get you there", you will know that jumping from one state (say making 5k a month in passive income) to another state (say making 50 or even 100k a month) requires a total shift in how you do things. If you do not change with the different states, you will probably not be able to get to a higher ground. Personally, I am used to different business models since I am from a startup background so applying that to my online business should be very interesting for anyone who wants to really grow their passive income.

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Tips to earning USD1000 with Amazon within 6 months

In my previous post on making USD500 with Amazon, I thought that my total earnings for Nov will be around that number. The good news is that it exceeded my target by quite a few hundred dollars....

What happened during the last few days is that my traffic really picked up and I was getting USD60-USD90 days. All that added up to increase my Amazon earnings quite significantly. Now, I want to set another target for myself.

USD3000 per month by end of June 2011. Let's see if I can hit that as well.

For new readers, Amazon is not my only source of online income. I started with Adsense much earlier and have already reached a full time income with that. Amazon was the new challenge I set for myself and I am happy to see that I have progressed in my understanding on how to make money with it. Once I hit the 3k target, I might move to a new form of monetization to learn new stuff. It is good to diversify your online earnings in case anything goes wrong with one particular approach. That being said, beginners should not juggle too much balls at once. My recommendation is to master one monetization method first before moving to the next.

Now, on to the new meat of the post, which is to share some of the things I have learned during my Amazon challenge.

Tip 1= Product selection is everything. Unlike adsense which pays you for every click, you need to people to buy for Amazon. Picking products that will accomplish that is the hard part. You will need to experiment with quite a number of products from different niches before finding the one that can convert. You can either do this through Hubpages or free hosted sites. I prefer the latter although it is more work because I gain another site that I can control for backlinks...

Tip 2= When testing your niches, always go for long tail first. These are easier to rank and will let you know in the fastest time possible on whether that niche is worth developing into a full site. If a long tail can bring you traffic that converts, you know that main niche will be very profitable. Why do you think Griz always target long tail first when developing any sites?

Tip 3= Amazon sites convert better when they are prettier. Unlike adsense when you need to be more ugly to draw clicks, people tend to buy more if your site looks to be more like a professional store. I tested a few themes and the better looking ones always draws more sales.

Tip 4= Authority sites can make more money in the long run. Majority of my Amazon earnings just come from 1 site. It was earnings peanuts before Nov but once it gains the all important trust from Google, the kind of growth is quite scary. Not only that, the potential for expansion seems to be limitless as you can always add in new product keywords to draw more traffic and sales.

Tip 5= When building authority sites for product niches, remember to go for both product specific keywords such as kenwood smoothie maker and general evergreen keywords such as best smoothie makers. The former can be ranked easily and helps your site to gain trust from Google through its ranking as well as to help you to make money faster. The latter is to let your site be more passive in the long run so that you don't have to worry about the buying interest for a particular product model slowing down.

Tip 6= Search out communities for your niche to fish out new product keywords even before they are on Amazon. If you are the first, the position will not be easily eroded if you have a strong site and have send some backlinks to these new product keywords.

The above is not a step by step guide to earning money from Amazon. Dave from making money on the Internet is the guru in Amazon and I suggest that you read his blog for specific instructions. What I have written are just my own personal experiences. Hope this will be useful to you and good luck in making money with Amazon.

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