My Amazon adventure started about 12 months ago. I should have started long time ago but always thought that the commission of 4% was to low and I did not want to make product review sites. I thought this was the only way how to make money with Amazon, but I was so wrong.
About 3 years ago I had 134 websites de-indexed by Big G for making websites for adsense. It took me 18 months to build 134 websites for Adsense and was making about $1000.00 per month, increasing each month. I did not comply by the strict terms and conditions of Adsense market place and got banned. This was a big crash and burn to my internet ‘passive’ income effort and I did not think of building websites like that again. Soon after that we had Panda and Penguin update anyway. I was doing link building 24/7 with 3 desk tops using Senuke running.
Monthly income from Adwords management and referral marketing helped me survive. 🙂
I love creating and building something up that I can see grow each month. I cannot remember what the trigger to go for Amazon Associates full out, but I should have started earlier after my Adsense disaster 3 years ago. 🙂
I am not good at writing and I am not creative either. My own websites are dull. No designed headers or special designs and layout.
I found WordPress website work best for me, because of the templates and plugins you get to build websites fast and easily. You get premium themes and plugins that help you create auto blogs very fast and this helped me a lot to build up my current network of Amazon websites. I think there are about 150 blogs now.
In the beginning I used the same tracking ID for all my blogs. This was a big mistake. There are about 50 blogs that I group together today with the same ID and track. The problem is that I don’t know which of these 50 website are making money. When it comes to domain renewal time I can only check the analytics to see if there is traffic. If there is no traffic I delete the domain.
Amazon is a numbers game to me. The more traffic the more likely I will get sales. It is actually the same old story of not traffic no sale.
On my new blogs I have a unique tracking ID, so come renewal date I can see if the blog was profitable or not. Each new blog only needs to make minimum $12 per year to break even. If it does not make that in 12 months I do not renew that domain.
The low breakeven amount is one of the biggest reasons I decided to go for Amazon Associates program. I love the low risk and high return idea. If the blog makes $24 in 12 months that is 100% return on the $12 investment. How many businesses can say that they are making 100% per year ROI? Currently with income of $500pm and expenses of $1800 per year that is 28% per month or 333% per year ROI. This is a simple calculation and not fixed or 100% correct, because income from each website goes up and down from month to month, but this is to give you an idea what I have done, or what is possible.
This makes the business very low risk. Each blog is like a business on its own. The maximum I can lose on the blog or business is $12. The domain is R8.60 per year and the hosting is about $3.40 per year per blog. I have a reseller hosting account, but only use it for myself. I will be able to add another 150 blogs before I need to upgrade again. This will lower the breakeven amount to about $10 per year.
Please note that I will not be able to get these figures unless I scale my efforts. 1 Auto blog will not do it for you. The risk is too high. The reason I say that is because not every blog makes money. If you make 1 blog and that blog does not make money you on a 100% loss! The more blogs you have the less risky it will be. After 12 month you drop the losers and keep the winners.
In general 20% of my blogs make 80% of my income. So on average I have 80% of my blogs not making the $12 cut or making any money. Currently I am not doing any link building and leaving it to G to index and rank the websites.
We have little to no idea how G works. I have seen posts by G that there are more than 200 factors for ranking a website. For this reason I don’t know if a blog will work or not. I have used keyword tools, but found that it is the inner pages that rank rather than the home pages. So doing keyword research for 1 keyword is a waste of time when you have a blog with 100’s of pages that each rank for different keywords.
Remember that with the big SEO clean out the last 2-3 years the competition is very low. This makes my website pages rank more easily than before. I have also seen that the more pages you have the more likely you will be found. As soon as there is activity on your website and time on site is good and bounce rate low, you will get more visitors.
In 2-3 month you will see it get momentum. If not, the website will probably not work unless you get some link building strategy to get rankings and traffic to website. I have not found a sure fire link building strategy yet, but I am testing stuff and will post it here if it works. I am doing tests on my dead websites, but my link building budget is very limited. Remember that the more you spend on the blog the longer it will take for break even and my Amazon website don’t make $100’s each month.
Here is my progress report for last 12 months:
07/2013 Advertising Fees $18.46
08/2013 Advertising Fees $32.32
09/2013 Advertising Fees $14.95
10/2013 Advertising Fees $55.48
11/2013 Advertising Fees $35.71
12/2013 Advertising Fees $90.57
01/2014 Advertising Fees $50.85
02/2014 Advertising Fees $64.42
03/2014 Advertising Fees $139.78
04/2014 Advertising Fees $397.95
05/2014 Advertising Fees $256.30
06/2014 Advertising Fees $528.21
Total so far: $1685.00
You will see I had a big jump in April. The reason for this is that I discovered that there was a plugin that will ‘plant’ a 90 day cookie on the browsers PC instead on the usual 24 hour cookie. This plugin has helped a lot as you can see.
I also gave myself a challenge to build 90 websites in 90 days. I did it and this helped my income a lot.
Unfortunately in May I had a setback. 88 of my websites where disabled for 7 days. I was on holiday as well and took me longer than normal to sort it out. I over loaded my hosting with too many auto blog websites. These auto blogs have plugins that work a lot behind the scene and uses the hosting server a lot to do all the work. I did not upgrade fast enough so the host disabled my hosting until I upgraded my websites and hosting. They ‘forced’ me to add ‘Super Cache’ plugin on all my blogs.
June was my best month to date, so I have recovered again and hit my first $500 month.
My Strategy
1. I buy my domains from Godaddy and hosting is from Hostgator.
2. Load WordPress
3. Load your theme. Here is a post of the themes I use.
4. Load your plugins. Here is a post of all the plugins I use.
5. I will then configure the theme and plugins.
6. The premium plugins usually needs codes to activate and you need to setup your plugins to load new posts and products every day or week. Updating your website regularly keeps the bot crawlers come back to your website to index new pages. Your website looks current and fresh to the search engines.
7. I then monitor the traffic and sales in Analytics and Amazon.
So that is my Amazon Associates experience so far. I am sure I have left out some info, but will adding more to this blog.
I will do my best to keep this blog up to date with new discoveries and ideas to increase my Amazon income. Please subscribe to this blog by adding your details to form top right of this post. I will then let you know when I have news that you can use to increase your internet income.
Update: 14 May 2015
I am looking to help other people to do the same as me and better.
Contact me via email at colin@colinbrazendale.com or call me on 072 838 6854 (South Africa) to get started.
Talk to you soon. 🙂
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