One of the important points that we make in our Amazonian Profit Plan ebook is that you only need a handful of pages to make money online – in fact, you really only need 1 single page! We find that many people can’t quite grasp this simple concept, and this is generally because they have been told so often that you need to build multiple sites and constantly be adding more and more content.
So often we see people on internet marketing forums who are struggling to make money online and asking for advice on what they should do. The usual responses are to keep building more and more websites. We shudder when we hear this, because there really is no need to do this. In fact, the more websites you build the more work you have to do to maintain them and the more you spread yourself too thin, resulting in more work and little or no money coming in.
Focusing on, and maintaining multiple websites is hard work – in fact, this is something we know about first hand. We have over 20 niche websites and in the past we would spend every waking moment working on them. It was tough going and ultimately it just didn’t work. We never managed to make much money while we were working all those websites at the one time. And we couldn’t understand why – surely more websites and adding heaps of content would increase our income. But no, it didn’t work like that.
Then one day we stopped and analysed what was happening with the websites and it was then that we decided to stop working on all of our websites and start to focus on just one website. And in fact, we didn’t focus on the whole website because even that took at lot of work. What we did instead was focus on just a few pages – I think it might have been three to five pages. And that’s when things really started to change for us.
Focusing on just one single solitary page is all you really need to do – you can make a fulltime income from just one product review. HOWEVER, focusing on just one page is probably not a good idea since the internet is such a fickle environment…Google may decide to change it’s algorithm, your product may suddenly become obsolete or you might get knocked off the top position in Google by a competitor.
So to ensure that you aren’t putting all your eggs in the one basket we recommend that you focus on 5 pages, although you can just go with 3 if that is more manageable for you. When you start to focus like this, good things start to happen. Just try it for a few months and you will see the difference. Simply focus on just 3 to 5 pages and nothing else. That means working on each page on a daily basis for three months.
So your next three months might look like this:
1. Spend the first two weeks choosing products (from Clickbank or Amazon) that you want to promote and write really good product reviews for them. The reviews should be long (approx 1000+ words) and be extremely helpful to your reader. Make sure you choose quality products…you don’t want to promote rubbish.
2. Spend the next 10 weeks getting backlinks/traffic to those reviews until you start seeing sales.
That’s it really!
The process is actually quite simple but what most people will do instead, is this:
1. Spend a day or two choosing products and writing reviews. The reviews will generally be made up of content copied from Amazon or the product sales page. And even if the content isn’t copied the reviews are usually short (around 300 words) and don’t really provide much value to the reader.
2. Spend the next few days getting backlinks/traffic to those pages. Some might spend a couple of weeks if they are really keen.
So what happens next?
Well what invariably happens is the person gives up after a few weeks when they find that there isn’t much traffic coming into the site. They never really focus enough on getting traffic to those pages. They don’t see sales so they move on to another lot of reviews or worse yet move on to creating more websites, instead of reworking their original reviews and working at getting more traffic. Or they buy another e-book in the hope that this will be the one that saves them. This becomes a cycle whereby nothing ever happens and they never make any money … or if they do, it’s not much.
A lot of people trying to make money online follow this cycle because they don’t realise that it takes time but they never actually give anything a chance to work. They give up well before they should. It can take up to three months before you even see a trickle of money start to come in and that’s only if you have followed step 2 and worked on getting traffic every day for at least 10 weeks. Some people might have better success of course and be making money within a month – some might need longer and it could take 6 months. There are so many variables that it is impossible to say when someone will start making money online but the only way you will know is if you are consistent at what you do and focus on just a few pages until they make money.
When you start seeing sales for one of those 5 product reviews, only then should you start writing another product review. There is no point creating more product reviews if the first ones aren’t making you any money….what’s the point?! You are only going to have the same problem. If you have chosen quality products that have been known to sell then there is no reason why they shouldn’t sell for you.
So if you have been struggling for some time trying to make some decent money from your website then try something different and focus on just a few pages for the next few months. If what you are doing now isn’t working then what have you got to lose?
Fear is the real reason why people keep building and buying more affiliate products. Afraid of spending too much time on the wrong thing. This fear is really hard to conquer and eliminate.
I agree and am in this predicament after having renewed several domains. Let’s not even talk about the recent halloween season that I missed because my focus was all over the place not to mention literally not knowing which domain belonged to what domain registrar.
Thankfully, I’ve found a tool that will at least let me manage the domain and blog inventory I have at this point while maintaining my sanity.
I hope this will translate into more affiliate income.
I think you’re right…fear is a big factor. The thing is that most methods of making money online work if you stick with it long enough. But as you say, people fear spending too much time on one thing thinking it isn’t going to work.
The fear comes from the “all in one basket” cliche`.
While it is 100% true, the gurus out there pound it in with a sledge hammer until the peasants are so worked up, they don’t stop with less then 100 sites.
Good points. But, what about building a list at the same time ? Do you only focus the traffic on getting affiliate sales, or do you use an optin form on these pages also, or an exit pop-up or hover pop-up ? I’m guessing you are using buying keywords also to point at those review pages ? Thanks.
We should probably create optin lists for our site but we have never really gotten around to doing it. We just focus more on providing quality reviews and getting traffic to them.
We don’t only use buying keywords. We will do the keyword research and find keywords that relate so they may not only be ‘buying’ keywords.
Wanda, I know this might be a late response but something hit me when I read your reply. Yes, I’m now focusing on 1-3 review pages of mine. I used to build dozens of them with not so useful content. And yes, fear holds me for quite a long time but now I know I’m stronger than it. I finally forget the rest and take focus.
You say you’re not targeting only buying keywords but related ones. So I can see how this goes. You write a review page. Pack it with useful content and a good product. Then you go and build backlinks. And you will target many keywords. Then your page will rank for multiple keywords at the same time. That results in traffic and sales? Am I right?
Duy.
What we normally do is build a list of keywords first. So they might be specific buying keywords or brand specific or generic keywords. In other words, we have a variety of related keywords.
Then from that list we might focus on say 3 to 5 keywords at any one time. We focus on them until they rank.
So it works in a similar way to how we focus on our product reviews. We only focus on a few of those at a time so we apply the same thinking to keywords. If you work on backlinking to too many keywords at once then you start to spread yourself too thin and it takes longer to rank.
Thanks for your advices Paula! I think I will go with 3 keywords in the next 3 months. I know this can be done!
Everything you say makes sense. I would add that another reason people jump from new site to new site is the boredom factor. It is hard to stay motivated to keep writing about the same topic day in day out especially when you think you have discovered a brand new keyword that you feel will bring in even more cash within a shorter space of time.
I am trying to be good am am returning to work on the sites that I already have. Trying not to be tempted by shiny new domain names.:)
That’s definitely true. I suffer from the ‘boredom factor’ hence why we ended up building over 20 websites in the past. I love building sites but I am out of that habit now. We started building another couple of websites about a month or so ago to test a couple of Amazon plugins but we ended up even tossing those aside because we realized that they would just take work. It’s very easy to get caught up in creating more and more instead of focusing on what we already have.
Paula, I totally agree. I also was thinking about building more and more websites. Already with 5 different domains and WP installed on it makes hard to manage (updates, writing etc.) Building more websites may be good, but at the moment it`s better to focus what we have. Let me write short story. My current website supposed to be a blog, but I`m not blogger type, even though I posted a few articles. Then I left for couple of months. Later I decided to flip it, but before that I got an idea. I decided to try and…I still keep my website, because it started to convert. I did almost nothing, I didn`t expect anything out of it. So, again, let`s make the best of what we have, before we start building more and more. Thanks to your articles, I will totally re-make my website. Not design, but all posts with articles will be gone and only reviews will be left.
You don’t need to remove your article posts. Articles are good to have on a blog as they help to build up your site. So leave them there and just start adding product reviews. You only need to write up 3 to 5 really good product reviews and then focus the majority of your time getting backlinks and traffic to those pages. In the meantime you can add more articles to help build up your site even more.
Thank you Paula so much for your advice. When I trashed all posts (not yet deleted permanently) I felt like something is missing. What I did was, to change software reviews from posts to pages. Today after I read your reply I restored all posts with articles. I think now it looks better. Changes I made remain as they were. I mean reviews are now Full Pages without sidebar.
Let`s see how it will work now.
I bought long time ago Market Samurai, but kind of cannot get into it yet. I know they have some tool to make this easier.
Now you just need to work on getting traffic to those reviews. That should be your main job at least for the next three months.
Paula Thank You :-) I wish there was someone honest (company?) and help me with that. I know that some of them charge $100/month! I will try MS to find good place for backlinks. Manually is the best way I guess. I`ve heard about scrapebox, but it`s automat which probably spamm as many other auto backlinking software. I may be mistaken though.
Very sound advice! It’s hard to break the cycle of trying to always create THE website that will make you money, and it takes an immense amount of discipline not to buy the next big “product” that “guarantees” you’ll make money.
Dogged persistance pays off every time. Keep working on the sites that are working, let the others sit idly, or (gasp!) let the ones that aren’t making money go!
If a site is already making money then it can make even more money. There is no limit to what a website can make but yes most people can’t help but think that the next website will be the one that makes the big money.
We know that thinking exactly because we went through it ourselves. We kept thinking that we weren’t choosing the right niche so kept moving to the next website. Ultimately it wasn’t about the niche at all because every niche has products that will sell. We just didn’t spend enough time on the first website to make it work.
Really good points. Focus is so tough for newbies, and even for oldies! :) And I agree, fear that all that focus will be wasted is huge. But having too many irons in the fire isn’t going to get you anywhere either.
That’s right. I had an email from someone this morning that said pretty much the same thing. He feared spending 10 weeks focusing on just a few pages and not seeing them work. The thing is, you could spend the next 10 weeks focusing on building website after website and have them not work.
Making money on the internet is a risky business so you have to be prepared to take risks. All I know is that when we stopped building websites and start focusing on just a few pages things started to change for us.
Everything you said, was me when I started back in April, and it still is for the most part. I had a tag line underneath my title of “Follow Me on My Journey to 1,000 Niche Sites” after a couple of months I changed it to “Follow Me on My Journey to 15k a Month!”, this one I like a lot more!
When everyone first starts in this they do not realize how much work is actually involved and they want the easiest pass to the top, but only work or extremely good luck will get them there!
I love that Kelly…by changing your tag line you have really hit the nail on the head. You don’t need hundreds or thousands of sites to make this work.
I can’t even imagine have a thousand sites – we have trouble managing the 20 we have. In fact, we don’t really manage them at all – most are sitting doing nothing. We just focus on a few pages at a time now.
I have done this and I have 4 new (~2 month old) sites that are now in the google sand box. They all four had been ranking on the first page of google and two had just hit the #3 spot! In early October they disappeared from google all together, still indexed but not anywhere on top 10 pages. This is very frustrating!!! Have you guys had any issues like this? I’ve read that I should keep building links and content, but it’s scary because I don’t know if I’m just wasting my time continuing to work on these sites. I want to quit my full time job so bad I’ve been getting up at 4:30-5am before work and working all the time my wife will let me after my full time job (only 1hr). Even without these sites for most of last month I hit $525 on amazon. It’s hard enough getting these sites up and ranking and then to have google cut me down at the knees is crushing my dreams/hope ;(
This happens to just about everyone Gabe. My brother rang me the other day because he suddenly lost his rankings. His site is about a couple of months old as well.
I am not sure why Google does this to relatively new sites but they do. You’ve been given good advice to stick with building backlinks.
The only other reason Google may have done this is if you have done something they don’t like. If that is the case, it is going to be hard to get those sites ranked again.
But if you have been doing everything above board then you shouldn’t have any problems. Just stick with the backlinks and the rankings will return.
You’re doing extremely well by making $525 on Amazon especially considering you don’t have much time to work on your sites. You should be extremely proud of yourself.
You are extremely lucky because you have a drive to get this to work. Not many people would get up at 4.30 to work on their websites.
Just don’t give up! This will really be the test for you. If you can continue on despite this you will make it.
Hi Gabe, I know how you feel. I have had this happen to me twice and it’s really scary. I had several keywords ranking on pages 1, 2 and 3 and they just disappeared. There was nothing I could do but wait and carry on as if everything was alright. Both times mine went missing for about 4-5 weeks then they showed up again.
I know its human nature to keep checking morning and night and maybe in between to see if they are back but it can drive you crazy. If possible its best if you can let it go and check once in a while. I’m sure everything will work out fine.
I had 4 of my sites bounce back Monday and Tuesday and were covering the top 5-1 spots in google and I made $113 from amazon during those two days…but today all 4 of the sites dropped to page 4 plus :( hard to imagine how nice it would be to have all my sites where they belong (at the top) all the time.
You are in a great position Gabe. At least you know that when those sites get into those top positions on a permanent basis you have the potential to make some good money. And they will get into those top spots if you keep at it.
Sometimes building too many links too quickly can get your site thrown in the google sand box. Slow and steady wins the game.
I totally agree with too fast on links, no good. I’ve never made more than $77 on amazon, and I have a site that is on page one for over a year, along with a few others. Conversion is my problem I believe. I have 19 sites and will probably end up leaving most of them at renewal time. I know I’m doing something wrong, just cannot figure it out. I’ve taken your course, read it over and over and still cannot get myself to create this type of site, even though it looks pretty simple. I just don’t have any ideas, and if not inspired, nothing gets done with me, hate that! Would it be adviseable to take one of my sites and completely convert it into a review site? Enjoying your blog as always, continued success to you both!
How much traffic are you getting to those pages on page 1 of Google? You can be on page 1 and still not get much traffic. It depends on the keywords you are ranked for.
Have you checked Google Analytics to see what people are typing in to get to those pages? If your page is about dog beds but people are typing in dog collars then they are just going to click the back button.
You don’t need to specifically have a review site to make money with Amazon products. Remember that it is all about the pages, not the site. So you can add a review to any website and it can work. You just need to focus on getting back links to your review pages in order to rank well in Google which in turn will get you more traffic.
I’m really glad you posted this, and I am most appreciative that you broke down the “what to do” into choosing and promoting. So many of the “how to be an affiliate marketer” courses & e-books sell the idea that if you buy their book/plan/course/coaching that you can put up a site and start seeing money in minutes and that you can walk away and leave your little money pumping robot doing all the work while you go off and party hearty.
I saw an interesting thread in a popular internet marketing watering hole the other day, where a person asked the question about how many hours a day internet marketers actually worked. The results were astonishing in light of the sales copy so often touted in that very place. Most who responded were working well over the normal 40 hrs a week, yet this is not something you will ever see in a sales letter, I suspect.
What you say here makes perfect sense to me. Do one thing, do it well, and stick to it. Then you can scale it if you like.
I’m not in the market for your course at this moment, but if I decide to pursue this avenue, I do believe it will be your product I come back to buy.
We used to work very long hours when we were focusing on all our websites. I really don’t want to go back to that again. We used to both work full-time and then spend just about all of our remaining time on the websites. It took around 4 years of this sort of lifestyle before it finally dawned on us that it just wasn’t working.
Now that we focus on only a handful of product reviews at any one time we have so much more time in the day. We still work just about every day but it’s only because we really love it.
Our working day normally starts at around 10am and finishes at around 4pm. In the middle of that we will do a meditation or listen to a self help tape of some sort or go for a walk or go shopping or even see a movie. At the moment we have started doing QiGong so that takes an hour of that time.
Nothing is ever really planned so we can take off if we want. Last week we spent 4 days on the south coast (here in Australia) so we could plan what we wanted to work on for the next few months.
And some of you may be thinking that since we make a full time income from this it means that we can afford to relax and that’s partly true. But we know of internet marketers making around the same amount of money that we do and they are working very long hours.
It’s just more relaxed when you only have to focus on a few things instead of multiple things.
That is fantastic news, good for you, you deserve it!
Timely advise I keep spreading myself to thin with too many sites on the go at once.
And I’m just in the throes of starting another one. A market that I just couldn’t pass by! How many times have you heard that one!
I do try to work every day on my main site because it is my main income earner, but just can’t resist adding another niche every now and then. I’m trying to really settle with what I have and, as you say, work consistently on just a few pages at a time.
Great advise and I shall try even harder to stick with it!
LOL, I think we’ve all heard that one Dawn. It’s hard not to keep moving on to something else but I think for anyone wanting to create a full-time income, they really needed to stick to one thing until it works.
When you say just work on 3 – 5 pages, are you saying 3 – 5 pages on one blog or spread out over several?
Also, if you are working on them daily what does that entail, adding articles to support the review or doing the tedious process of backlinking? How muchw work goes into 1 page?
The pages can be on one blog or more than one blog. It doesn’t matter. It’s all about the pages, not the sites.
Working on them daily means tweaking them if needed and adding articles to support them but mostly it is the tedious part of backlinking. The backlinking is going to get that page to the top of Google and it’s the part that most people don’t want to do. You have to focus on the tedious part first. If this part is ignored you may as well give internet marketing a miss. Or at the very least outsource it so you don’t have to do it yourself.
The page isn’t going to get to the number 1 spot in Google without backlinks unless the keywords you are going for have no competiton. But that usually means the keywords don’t have much traffic either.
You’re going to have to work for it to get it. We just didn’t suddenly start making money out of the blue. We worked at backlinking…mostly guest blogging. But what happens when you focus on only a few pages is that you have time for it all. Although there is still work to be done – it’s more focused and more relaxed. You don’t have to create tons of content and work on getting traffic for multiple sites and keep building more sites.
The amount of work that goes into it is all dependent on you. You can do an hour a day or 10 hours a day. Either way, you know that it will be highly focused work and that is the key. It’s not a random approach where one day you are working on building a new website and the next day working on backlinks and the next day adding content to a couple of sites and the next day building another site.
Instead you spend your day getting backlinks to those few pages. Then the next day you do the same thing and the next day the same thing and so on. And then once a week you might write a few articles to support those few reviews. And also once a week you might even reread those few product reviews to see if they could be improved with a little tweaking.
It might be tedious but I can tell you now that it works because you are highly focused.
Thanks Paula,
In terms of site set up, if you had a site with 3 reviews and a few articles for each one, would each review go on a seperate page?
Or, would the reviews all go on one “review” page and the articles on a seperate “articles” page.
One course I looked at had 3 – 5 small (300 word) reviews all on one page. This course did not add articles to the site or submit them to directories. It was all backlinking, social bookmarking and organic seo.
The reviews would go on separate pages.
The articles also go on separate pages and they link back to the review pages to give them a boost.
Curious, why don’t you outsource the backlinking? I do and get quality links too. I’m assuming a privacy issue? which makes sense, but I was given a name from Viper Chill and he is very reputable. Again, curious.
We do outsource our baclinking now. We have a VA that does most of it for us.
I’m just starting a new site to add some diversification. Google changes things up all the time and I have one page that is about 12 months old – was ranking great and for the last 2 months it has just about fallen off the map. I’ve done everything right too.
I’ve heard Google is looking for more social backlinks too which adds in a whole other dimension of work.
It’s nice to hear realistic time frame ranges. This is NOT a make money quick deal at all. Just keeping steady and knowing when to make changes or change course.
Fear is a big deal too. I am really afraid my new products won’t pan out, but it really is hit or miss. Some will and some may not. That’s just a reality and nothing we can do can fully guarantee results. This is a full time job to be taken seriously.
If you have chosen products that already sell then there is no reason why they won’t work. Amazon is great for telling you whether a product sells – you only have to look at the number of reviews.
And even for those using Clickbank, you can tell by the gravity if a product is selling.
Generally it has nothing to do with the product. If someone gives up on a website or a niche it is usually because they never really got enough traffic to the page they were trying to promote.
Once the traffic is there and the product doesn’t sell then it is simply time to tweak the page to get it to convert. And at the very least, you can easily change the product on the page to something that does convert assuming it is related.
I agree. When I started, I didn’t use Amazon. So some of my products were general and I can tell through Amazon they are not items where people write reviews.
I put your techniques into practice now for new pages and I have seen a difference.
Also, I want to make a correction. When I said this is a full time job – that suggests 40 hours a week – but this is not required. It can be done off hours, but may just take a little longer. I didn’t want to discourage anyone!
Thanks again Paula and Wanda!
I like the concept of a product based website. I have two sites that basically make their money from Google (I average about $975 per month.) Now I am ready to launch a site that features products and has visitors searching to buy. I think I will stay with the concept of building a large site of 200 plus pages. I have avoided having lots of mini-sites to have to keep up, with all my efforts given to two or three sites.
-Chaplain Paul Slater
If I were you, I wouldn’t bother building another website. Why not take advantage of the sites you already have. If you are making money from Google (and I assume you mean Google Adsense) then you must already be getting traffic to those pages.
If that’s the case then find a few pages getting the most traffic and see if it is possible to include links to Amazon products. You don’t need to write any new content. Just find keywords already on your site that relate to products on Amazon and add an Amazon link to them.
I can see you have already added links to other affiliate sites but try changing some of them to Amazon links. Amazon convert extremely well.
This post is very timely for me. I began a new site a little over a month ago. The site name and domain name is general and my plan is to write 5 product reviews on this site under the general topic.
I’ve written one review and 6 articles that link internally to the review. I’ve worked on backlinking the site and the review also and now I’m getting a trickle of traffic. At what point should I write my 2nd of the 5 reviews? Should I continue to work on this first review until I make some sales? I plan to write 10 articles linking internally to each of my reviews so I will do 4 more for this first review.
Thanks so much for your help and for the Amazonian Profit Plan.
Jerry, I have to say that you are doing things perfectly. If I were you I would finish those 4 articles first before going on to your next review. However, spend more time on backlinking than anything else.
Then if you can, stick with those two reviews until they make sales before moving on to a third one. A lot of people can’t do this because they have a fear that they won’t work so they want to continually add more reviews. If you can be brave enough to stick with those two then go for it.
Hi Wanda & Paula,
I’ve taken your advice and am trying to just focus on this one new site with reviews per your Amazonian Profit Plan (worth every penny, by the way!), but this backlinking thing is so messy. I tried to keep track of my linking efforts in an excel spreadsheet but easier said than done.
Do you have any tips to stay organized on what you need to do next and how to keep track of it all? Do you keep track by the page, by the keyword, or by the site?
Thanks for a great blog.
Robert
We actually created a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. What we might do is send out our Excel template to the APP email list. So you should see that within the next couple of days Robert.
Did you send out a template? If so I’d like to obtain it, if possible. I did purchase the amazonian profit course, so please let me know, thanks!
We are in Vegas at the moment and won’t be back in Australia until the 22nd Feb. Unfortunately the spreadsheet is on my computer at home so I won’t be able to send it to you until then. If you can send an email to the Amazonian Profit Plan email address as soon as I get home I will send it to you. Sorry about that Lisa.
I have a question. If I wanted to start a generic shopping blog covering a variety of different niches how would I setup the layout? I’m a bit confused on this. I was also wondering how to link one domain’s (specific) content in another domain (generic)? Hope that makes sense.
All you need to do is set it up as WordPress blog and create categories for each niche. The product reviews would simply go up as blog posts and you would place each one into the relevant category on your blog.
We don’t get caught up in the structure of a site because we simply focus on pages.
Let’s put it this way, say you have a generic shopping site and one of your review pages is about a dog bed. If someone was searching for dog beds in Google and clicked through to your site they would be directed to your dog bed product review page. They won’t see your home page or any of the other pages on your site since your goal is to get them to read your review and get them to click through to Amazon. You probably won’t ever see them again after that.
So who cares how your site is structured and what your home page looks like. You got them to your dog bed review and sent them to Amazon…that’s all you need to do.
As for your second question I’m not too sure what you are getting at so you may need to clarify.
If I had 2 websites, 1 that is generic and 1 that is more targeted, is there a way I could link the more targeted website content to the generic one’s content?
You might not want to link within your websites. Google banned a lot of sites years ago because of this. It’s probably okay to link between your sites by adding a link on the home page of each but interlinking within the sites pages is probably not a good idea.
Ok thank you for your advice. I do have one more question…lol I’m full of them. I hope this is not too personal but how long did it take for you to reach the income from Amazon that you are making now and is it a combined income from both of you? I hope I wasn’t too forward.
We spent around 6 years building and maintaining websites and never made much more than a $1000 a month, give or take.
Then we decided that we needed to do things differently if we were going to make it all work. So we did a few things – the main things were making our reviews longer and more helpful, adding Amazon links to all our reviews and focusing on only a few pages at a time. That was the turning point for us. At that point it took about a year and a half for the money to reach the 10k mark.
The income is combined. We share the workload and everything we make online 50-50.
Backup a sec here Paula,
I’ve done it a lot and plan to more with the new network.
Example: “remember when I wrote about…..”with a link to the other blog.
This is bad??
You just need to be a little careful with it Dennis. I was around way back when Google banned a lot of sites for doing this so I just don’t cross link much at all only because I remember the impact it had. You might want to read this:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014381.html
Hey Paula,
I remember that as well. That was when all the link-wheeling crap and what not first started; the cross links were so blatantly phony they deserved what they got.
The article appears all about relevancy, which is the only way I’d do it. :)
Well said! Like many people I am guilty of creating one site after another and never having the time to properly finishing anything.
It hit me a couple of weeks ago and I decided to focus on 4 sites only and let the rest just “sit” there until I am making enough money with the 4 sites. This is already working out for me and your post confirms it. No need to crank out dozens of sites!
Looking forward to the Excel template!
We did the same thing Daisy. We narrowed it down to a few sites first but we realized that was still way too much. That’s when we decided to focus on just one site and then only a few pages on that site.
So you might find that 4 is still too many.
Hi Paula and Wanda,
This is a fantastic post. But I have some reservations on this and I think I know why people are frantically creating more reviews.
While I totally understand the reasoning behind this post, I feel that there is a flaw to just concentrating on 3 product reviews.
By doing this we are hoping that the products we choose to promote are going to be good sellers but as we all know, some products just do not sell better than others despite all the research we have done.
I think the reason why people go out and create more reviews is because they feel that their chosen product is not going to sell as well as they predicted. But most people have this kind of mentality even before committing at least a significant amount of time to getting traffic.
I think all in all, a balance should be strived for when creating product reviews. If a product review still gets few or no sales after much time spent on getting traffic, I would create a new one.
What you say is correct…if a product review gets no sales then you have to let it go. However, most people never get to that point. They never work on getting enough traffic to that page to know whether the product is worth it or not. And when they do get traffic to that page they never test and tweak and rework the review until it does convert. That’s why we give our pages at least 3 months and in fact, we give them much longer than that.
Making money online is risky. You have to be a risk taker to make it online and taking 3 months out to focus on a few pages is risky. But for anyone who has been around for a while and still isn’t making any money and is not likely to make any more in the next 3 months, then it is definitely worth taking the risk.
I like this article however one part that’s missing from this is doing the right research. I meam there’s no point working your butt off to find at #1 on Google you only get 20 clicks a day for a review as it would take many years to get to a full time income. It can be tough to pick the right niche / keywords. What are your thoughts? I know you say go for multiple keywords etc but can be hard to rank for too many. Your thoughts?
Definitely right Manny. I was waiting for someone to bring this up because we made an assumption in our post that our readers would know how to do their keyword research.
For us, the most important part is choosing quality products. We do this first before even looking at niches. Then we do the keyword research to see if those products will get enough traffic.
As you say, there is not point getting to no.1 in Google if you don’t get the traffic.
Hi Wanda & Paula
Thanks for the timely post. I was just about to start planning a new site, but I think I’ll postpone that till I’ve really got somewhere with my 2 current sites.
Robert, I know what you mean about keeping organized. My head’s been swimming and I only have 2 sites going. I’m using 2 apps to help me get organized. One is a free app called Grindstone where you can time your work and set tasks. The other is called Autoblog Commander which allows you to keep track of your sites – I’ve only just purchased this ($27), so I’m still checking it out really, but so far it looks good. Not sure if helps with backlinks though – I’ll have to check that out.
Definitely stick with what you have Bev. There’s no point creating more and more sites if the ones you have aren’t making any money yet.
Hi Paula,
I have 175 niche websites but I’m putting them on the backburner to follow your APP. But … everything I’m reading these days indicates Google is favoring large authority sites for product keywords, making it hard for the little guy to rank. Have you seen changes in your rankings since May Day? If not, what do you think differentiates APP pages from other product keyword pages that have fallen out of favor in the SERPS?
Barb
It seems that we’re not on a level playing field, but I do believe you can compete with the right keywords. I just found that one of my pages is no 1 for a brand name which I was very surprised at because it doesn’t even have any great content, it’s just optimised for one keyword phrase. We just have to plug away at it I guess.
We haven’t seen any changes in our rankings.
It’s hard to say what Google is thinking. Has Google themselves come out and said that they favor large authority sites? We have small websites and large websites full of content but we haven’t found that product reviews sitting on our large websites do any better or worse than those on the smaller websites.
Actually yes, Matt Cutts has mentioned it…..a strong hint and nudge anyway, which is about the best you can expect. lol
Do you have the actual interview for that Dennis? I would love to hear exactly what Matt said.
It would be great to do an experiment on this and create a one page website and see if we can get it ranking.
Google just wants to see good quality content so you can’t tell me that they will rank a huge site full of poorly developed content over a site with only say 20 pages of really well written content.
When it comes down to it, Google ranks pages, not websites. If they ranked websites, every page on our sites would do well. That’s obviously not the case. The reason why some pages do better than others is the amount of good quality backlinks coming into that page. Other factors can help of course but the back links are the most important….at least at this point in time.
Ack I knew you were gonna ask, lol. I went looking then got called away. If I recall, it was one of his videos, if you can find his youtube channel, it might be among them.
I dunno if he responds via his blog, but you can try there also.
Thanks Dennis. I will have a look around for it.
It’s actually harder to focus on just a few pages instead of many. For one of my best-producing pages, I steadily built a couple of links every single day for about six months before I saw profits.
It was tedious in the extreme. I was fed-up of it. It’s hard to think of something original to write when you are writing your 50th article on your subject. I felt like screaming in the end. I can see why people either give up or are tempted to copy other people’s work.
It definitely is tedious. We’ve started to outsource more and more of that work just for that reason alone. But in the past, we did it all ourselves but it was definitely worth it. We wouldn’t be where we are today without the work we put into backlinking. I’d still be at my 9 to 5 job.
I will second Paula’s comment on outsourcing….I would not have made it out of the 1st gear without discovering outsourcing as I hate the minute tedious work….Although I love to learn SEO and be up to date and plan seo strategy I have no intention or interest in executing it. You can get a Filipino with good experience for $500 F/t or $300 P/t per month. I would still recommend knowing what to do first so doing it yourself or reading alot until you felt you had intermediate to advanced knowledge as you still have to be responsible for deciding the best SEO tactics and tasks for staff. Why not share a F/T person with someone?
Here are 2 places 1.John Jonas Blog (direct employment) 2.Time to outsource (costs a little more managed by them)
Regards Manny
Google seems so fickle. I have a TV authority site with 10 products and 5 buying guides. One item will rank in the top 10, another is 150. They both have similar backlinks and content and competition. I think site age is VERY BIG factor too. One of my buying guides is #1 in google and brings in some fish. I going out on a limb (not that I had conversions) but a general buying guide with a keyword rich title brings in visitors.
I wonder if electronics and TVs are a good choice. Even with original reviews, you are swimming in a sea of so many competitive reviews that nothing you could do will make you stand out. There are always the 6 authority sites (the cnets, amazon, walmart, etc) then there are the “reviewers.” I guess I could just keep throwing backlinks so it creeps up. I’m not writing any more reviews for that site.
I have another site with printers, I added one review but it sits at position 100 for the item. I should probably backlink it, but I’m wondering if it will help.
I think picking something with less competition is critical. Someone put a site up with [some movie]+[halloween costume] and ranked in two days. It was a $50 costume. The completion was almost non existent.
I get a few amazon clickthrus here and there from the tv site. Also, I’m starting to believe exact domain names are very important too.
Electronics and tvs can be quite competitive niches. Also, they can go out of fashion really quickly so you constantly need to add new products to your site. You could spend months getting backlinks for a tv product review and then they update the model.
For this reason, if it were me, I would be focusing on backlinks for generic keywords rather than product specific keywords. For instance I would be going for keywords like “tv product reviews” or “Sony tv reviews” rather than keywords like “Sony Bravia XYZ TV”.
Paula,
Are you saying if I have a tv site, I should be adding other products to that site also that are just electronics not related to TVs? Shouldn’t a site be based on one product only? Please clarify. Thanks!
There is no right or wrong way to build a website. We have sites related to one particular niche and also sites on totally unrelated products. It’s really up to you which way you want to go.
We dont build websites on one particular product only. In other words I wouldn’t build a website for a Panasonic XYZ Cordless Drill for instance. It can work of course but the only reason I wouldn’t is that you never know whether the XYZ cordless drill will become outdated. Instead I would create a website on cordless drills so I could add a variety of different cordless drills. Or I might build a website on home handyman products which covers cordless drills, electric saws, hammers, tool sheds and so on.
Boy, is that the truth. I really agree with the person at the top who cited fear as the biggest reason for people to jump around. It really was for me, when I first started. Now that I have more experience, I’m spending less time creating sites and much more time working on getting traffic to the sites I have.
Excellent Kelly. Many people spend most of their time on adding content and building more websites. If instead they focused most of their time on getting traffic things would be a lot different.
Paula, your comments are very helpful…and sobering! Concentrating on only one or a handful of pages for 10 weeks would take real commitment! And I guess that’s what you’re saying: you’re not describing a get-rich-quick scheme.
I wonder if you could supply a link to one of your one-page product review sites — or a site with 5 or so pages — that you and Wanda have been operating with some success. It would be great to have an example of the work you’re doing to underscore the points in your post.
Thank you.
There really are no ‘get rich quick’ ways for making money online. Someone might have the secret to making money overnight but if they do they probably wouldn’t tell anyone anyway.
It actually took us 4 years before we started to see some decent money come in and the only reason it took so long was that we kept moving from one thing to the next. If we had focused from the start, things would have been a lot different.
You also might want to take a look at this post:
http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/2010/08/07/can-i-see-an-example-of-your-website/
I skimmed to see if anyone mentioned it already.
I don’t know how old you are in ‘net years, but I’d say with a pretty good confidence level that the whole multiple sites thing started with the ill-fated lunacy of the MFA (made for adsense) fiasco some years back.
The more ambitious (see: dumber then most) had hundreds running at any one time…..I don’t mean a mere 1-200 either.
Once Google brought the largest smack-down on net history, they picked themselves up and changed the model to niche affiliate sites.
Still not the brightest bunch. They switched from adsense to affiliate products, but still had/have thin crappy sites.
Yes indeed, the authority site is the way to go unless you have the mojo; i.e APP. ;)
I don’t think these people were dumb…just desperate. We all just want to make a living online and we want to trust the so-called gurus who tell us that building multiple websites is the answer.
We never did get caught up in the ‘made for Adsense’ type sites but we just as easily could have if we didn’t know any better.
Many of them were the guru’s of the time. They in-particular were not desperate, but greedy.
Similar to black-hatters it was largely a case of, “we know it won’t last, just grab what ya can”.
I just want to thank you for this wonderful website. I stumbled upon it today and am so happy I did! I have been working online for 2 months now without making money yet, I know it is a slow process and your stories help motivate me to keep going!
One question – when setting up your WordPress sites do you put your reviews/articles as posts or pages? Or does it matter? I have heard conflicting ideas about which is best and just wondering if you have a preference.
Thanks! :)
We generally use Pages but the only reason we do that is that we use the Flexsqueeze theme and it allows us to remove the sidebar. Removing the sidebar means there are no distractions for the reader and the are more likely to click through to the merchant.
Thanks for the great reminder.
I had a question, do you use any wordpress plugin to cloak your affiliate links to Amazon?
We don’t really bother too much about cloaking Amazon links only because most people like shopping at Amazon and if they see the link they are generally happy to click on it.
However for a lot of our other links we use the Ninja Affiliate plugin.
Love your content!
That advice really helped me when I first bought Amazonian Profit Plan
You see, last holiday season, right when Amazon came out with their 2009 hot Christmas Toy list, I found a TON of buyer keywords that got really good searches…
So I went out an bought quite a few domains with the product names in them(probably about 7 or so) and went about building the sites
This was on Nov 6, 2009…I totally remember that day because I was really excited
I think you know where I am going with this…
I spread myself too thin because I couldn’t get all of those sites ranked in time.
So that part of your course really hit home for me so I am very happy with your course and I highly recommmend it
-Mark
Thanks Mark – so glad you like the course. And so glad that you are actually implementing it. You will notice a difference when you focus your efforts on just one thing at at time.
Hi Paula and Wanda,
Another timely post for me.
I have been away in the UK for almost 3 months as my mother was very ill and passed away a few weeks ago. I put everything else on hold during that time. Now I’m back home feeling confused, unsettled and wondering what on earth I was doing before I went away, and where to start again.
I have decided the best place to start is right here and follow this format at least for the next 10-12 weeks and work on just a couple of pages with Amazon products reviews. I needed this clarity!
Thanks again
Shirley
So sorry to hear about your mother Shirley. I can see why you are feeling a little unsettled.
Having some time away from your online business may have been a good thing even though it wasn’t for the best of reasons. We tend to work solidly on our businesses without taking time out to see what is working and what isn’t and a break from it can do wonders.
In a general sense, if I were to write an article a day and submit to ezine articles, would that be an effective link building strategy?
We don’t really do much article marketing in terms of submitting to Ezine and other article directories. What we do instead is submit articles to other bloggers and website owners. You don’t get much traffic from this however the backlinks are very strong.
But if you’ve had success with submitting to Ezine in the past then by all means do that. One article a day sounds good to me.
I’m so glad that you beautiful ladies tell it like it is. I have been preaching those same ideas to my brother for the last year. I have told him in the past to stop reaching for the next best thing and focus on one thing and make it a success before moving on. Now I can show him your blog post to read for himself.
That should be tattooed onto to anyone who wants to make money online so they never forget it….”focus on one thing and make it a success before moving on”.
Thanks for this wonderful post Paula. Can you explain to me a little bit here? Lets say I’m creating a Product review called “Ultimate Dog Secrets” (just an example). Should I target the keyword “ultimate dog secrets” for SEO purposes or should I target 2 or 3 more keywords that are related to the product like “dog training”, “how to take good care of dog”. etc.
What about domain name? Should we include the product name in our main domain?
But what if the product name has no searches or just a few searches per month, wouldn’t it be a waste of time doing so even though if we manage to get onto the 1st page of Google?
Since you suggest that we concentrate on a few pages, I need to do it right at the very beginning. Hopefully, you can understand my questions above.
Your questions requires more of a response than I can give in this comment but here are the basics.
If I were promoting a product about ‘ultimate dog secrets’ then I would do my keyword research to find related keywords to ensure that I would get enough traffic.
Then I would create my product review and try to get those keywords in the review BUT I wouldn’t stress too much if I couldn’t get them in the review because I would rather write a helpful review that makes sense than fill it full of unneccessary keywords.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the domain name. If I could find a domain name with the keyword ‘ultimate dog secrets’ (assuming that is a good keyword) then great…I would be happy with that. If I couldn’t find a domain name with that keyword in it then I wouldn’t worry about it and just get something related.
We have product reviews on websites with domain names that have nothing to do with the product and they make money.
Then I would spend most of my time getting backlinks to my site using the keywords that I found as the text links.
Wow, thanks Paula. Your answer really help me on my next going project. Appreciate it so much.
I can identify with this because I also have about 100 niche blogs and sites and I only make about $300/mo from all of them combined. I’ve been at this for 8 years and I have known for a long time that I am spread too thin. However, I have also been looking for what method of making money online that I like the most and suits me best. I’ve tried everything. I have found that I enjoy building blogs and d9ing keyword research. I hate the amount of time I spend online doing this though. I hate writing articles but I outsource this. But if I had it to do all over again after countless hours spent, thousands of dollars spent, and trying everything under the online sun…I would say just stick to 1 website and build it with more content and especially backlinks for several years.
I also appreciate how many replies Paula responds to. Hope you dont mind but I wanted to put this link here for help with backlinking. It is an affiliate link but I wouldn’t mention it if I didnt think it can help. It’s software that finds exact and relevant places to build backlinks according to the keywords you feed it. It saves a lot of time. You can check it out at http://myownbizniz.com/mcc.
I also started to build Amazon products using the exact product model name/number in the domain. I sold my first big ticket item this way. They rank very quickly on the 1st page but you have to build lots of these when new products come out.
Eight years is a long time to be trying to make it all work for you.
My advice for someone like you who has that many sites is to head over to Google Analytics and find your top 5 pages from all of your sites. So the ones getting the most traffic. And I don’t mean the top 5 pages from each site…just the top 5 in total.
Then rework the reviews on those 5 pages so they are long and helpful. And then just focus on getting more traffic to those 5 pages.
You don’t need to create any new product reviews. Make use of the traffic you are already getting and just rework the content you already have.
I have about 40 websites with a different topic. I have “how to” articles placed on the first page of google for certain keywords. Are these articles can be monetized with amazon products? How do I optimize those pages?
You could quite easily optimize them with Amazon.
What you want to try and do is see if you can rework the information on those pages to incorporate an Amazon product. For instance if you have a how-to on How to Train Your Dog to Heel, then whenever you refer to a dog training collar or lead in your article, simply add a link to Amazon. Or simply add a list of related recommended products at the end of the article.
Ok, after reading this now I understand the concept and also answered to my long-waited question why I can’t make much money …
Thank for sharing this, I believed I know what to do next to get more income for my family. Appreciate this post!
It used to be so frustrating when we worked so hard on all our websites, and didn’t make much money. So we would start another website to see if it would be the magic one that would bring in the money.
One day while we were discussing what was happening and what we were going to do next, we went back to basics and did a thorough analysis of our sites. It was at this point that we decided to concentrate on only one site and let the rest sit until we could get to them in the future or flip them, which is another option.
It was also at this point that we hit on our formula for promoting Amazon products, writing good quality, informative reviews and the dreaded backlinking; from there on the money just flowed.
Wishing you every success Santel.
This post was a real eye opener for me. I felt you were talking to me, as a matter this is what I had been doing for the 3 years on online marketing and only recently have I decided that I can chase em all, I need to focus and really work my market. Thank you for posting this.
I think this topic has touched a lot of people, Tony. We all seem to make the same mistakes. Multiple websites = way too much work. Focussing on one site and providing good quality reviews is certainly more manageable and more rewarding. Plus you get to actually spend some time with your family. Working on 20 sites as we once were, meant we never left the computer.
Paula and Wanda,
Firstly thanks a lot for all the info you give out to us. My opinion is that the 3-5 product review pages that you focus on must be on a trusted and old domain site. The whole website “status” does matter a lot in the eyes of Google. I agree that Google ranks pages but those pages are better to be on trusted and “content thick” websites rather than on new domains with very few pages. Thats why ezine articles rank well on their own. Its because they are on a big authority domain site.
Nobody really knows what Google is thinking. We get a few hints every now and then from people like Matt Cutts but other than that it is all pure speculation.
Old ‘trusted’ sites probably do better but its all relative really. You could have an old site but if it has nobody linking to it and it is full of poor quality content then it is not going to rank in the eyes of Google no matter how old it is.
If you have a new site with good quality backlinks and good quality content then it will rank.
Hi Paula and Wanda, I stumbled upon your blog just a few months back and get really hook with your articles and ideas. I bought your amazonian profit plan when it was launched and really glad that I bought it. I have put up a site last month based on your book and now working on to get those backlinks. I hope to see some good results from my site soon ( I don’t know how soon…)
Thanks
Shaz
Excellent Shaz. Just keep working on those backlinks. It’s not the most exciting task but it will work if you keep at it.
Thats awesome advice, I learned that a few months back and tried sticking to one program for 3 months, I am now starting to reap the rewards as my sites are getting tons of traffic and now the sales are coming in.
Thats great news Andy. We all know how easy it is to get sidetracked, so good on you for focussing on the one program.
We have found that it takes around three months for things to kick in.
Thank you for sharing your comment, it will certainly help some of our newer people to see that the rewards come if you stay focussed and don’t jump from one thing to another.
Hi Paula,
I have few questions, wonder you can answer :)
1)
Earlier on in your article, you mention this “Simply focus on just 3 to 5 pages and nothing else. That means working on each page on a daily basis for three months.”
Sorry, my english is not so strong. Do you mean I focus only 1 product review page for the 1st 3 months, then if i see some sales, after that I proceed to my 2nd product review page…
OR
I focus on 3 product review pages on the 1st 3 months?
which one?
2)
If is the earlier one, I thought Google doesn’t like 1 page site thing.
3)
If I do write 3 product reviews, will that be the same product line, like HDTV .. 3 different product models – samsung, sharp & panasonic?
OR do I write on 3 different kind of products, maybe mobile phone, HDTV and xbox?
4)
How do you overcome the 24 hours cookie thing? is the a way to preserve it?
5)
Last question, do you actually buy each product in amazon before you review it? if yes, wow.. it is really expensive :( i can’t simply afford to buy every single item though.
any help? thanks.
We recommend that you concentrate on 3-5 product reviews for three months. The idea is write, or have written for you, good quality, informative reviews. Then you spend most of the time getting backlinks to those reviews and also write some short informational type articles that point to those review pages. This helps to boost those pages.
No they don’t have to be the same product line. You can write about different unrelated products.
You can’t overcome the 24 hour cookie, but it hasn’t bothered us, most people who go through your site to Amazon will buy something even if its not your product and you still get the commission.
No we don’t buy every single product. You don’t need to own the product to review it. We do thorough research on the internet to see what people who have purchased the product are saying. This might help:
http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/2010/06/22/how-to-write-a-product-review-when-you-dont-own-the-product/
Hi Wanda and Paula again,
Wonder I can ask 1 more question. If I do focus on my 1st review, maybe xbox 360 console … do i create 1 domain e.g. xbox360consolesecrets.com and then write 1 page review of xbox 360 console .. and then create 2nd review site say sharp washing machine e.g. washingmachinesecrets.com …
so basically each review running on its own domain and 1 review page (long one i guess).
or do i create 1 universal site and write reviews all into 1? (including related and unrelated reviews, e.g. consumersearch.com, something like that?
the reason i ask this as I know Google doesn’t favor single 1 page site though (excludes pages like disclaimer, contact us), except it is normally used for product launches. Furthermore, will my customers who visit my amazon review site will actually believe in me, after all it is 1 page site, even it is long review?
like to hear your thoughts :) if you don’t mind sharing :)
You can create separate websites if you want to keep the niches separate or create one website for a variety of different products.
If we were going to create a website specifically about washing machines for instance we would never have just one product review on that site. We would probably start with three to five and keep adding over time once those first few have started to see traffic and sales.
The way we bulk sites up is by adding short information type articles (300 to 500 words) – ‘how to’s’ for instance – that link back to the product reviews that we have written. This helps to slowly build up the site to keep Google happy and it also boosts those product reviews through internal linking.
So in other words, our sites never just have one page of content.
Hi Paula,
Thanks again.
Ohh .. so do you mean?
I create 1 website washingmachinesecrets.com
inside this site will have 3 – 5 product reviews page (long reviews)
and also inside this same site will have shorter articles (300 – 500 words) that link to the product page?
is that what you meant?
if yes, that sounds like inbound linking strategy right? i thought google prefer outbound backlinks than inbound?
OR do you mean?
1 website will have 3 – 5 product reviews pages
then another few websites, will write shorter articles pointing back to the 1st website?
any help? just like to clarify a bit further :)
The first option is correct. You always add articles to boost your product reviews. So that is your internal links taken care of. Then you also need to go out and get backlinks from external sites. That’s what you spend most of your time on.
About internal link. Is the review article link must be placed on every article on our website or simply put the link in the sidebar? Because I noticed that review article link can also be placed in the sidebar and will be indexed in every page of our website.
You put internal links on articles that relate to your product review. So it won’t be from every article.
You can also add links to your product reviews from your sidebar.
Thanks Wanda, love this blog :) I was recommended by 2 members from James Martell’s forum to this site :)
I am kind of torn. I have a very niche specific site that ranks well and has made money. It’s so specific though, there are very few reviews I could do for it.
I also have a more general domain name in the same niche that I could add many product reviews over time for a lot of related products. I have a site up for it but nothing on it yet.
Would you go with the new one or the old one? The old one is so specific towards one particular product in this niche, I’m wondering if it would be confusing to add product reviews on this site with related products. What would you do?
Try not to focus on the sites Cathy. Instead look at each product review individually. Do the reviews on the old site have potential to make more money if you did a bit more backlinking and got them to number 1 in Google for more keywords? If the answer is yes then you should focus on those pages. Just look for pages you have that have the potential to make money and focus on those. You shouldn’t be creating more sites and more pages….you have enough already. Focus on what you have.
Paula I have two more questions. I started a generic shopping blog focused on a wide variety of niches. My first question is when you said…”When you start seeing sales for one of your product reviews, only then should you start writing another product review.” should I only focus on that 1st product review? and the second question is can I use some of the same content from one of the other reviews for another review of a similar product? i.e. The “What to Look for” Section for elliptical trainers.
I wouldn’t just focus on one review. The only reason I say that is that you never know what could happen to that review. It’s best to diversify a little so we suggest focusing on 3 to 5 pages at any one time.
You can use some of the same content but just be aware that Google doesn’t like duplicate content that sits on your own site. So just don’t copy over large quanitites of content from one product review to the next.
Hey people – Paula and Wanda are two wonderful ladies who will answer questions until the cows come home.
But many of these questions are covered in detail in their product. Buy it – you’ll love it!
LOL, thanks Dawn!
I second what Dawn said. They are really helpful and Amazonian Profit Plan is well worth every penny.
Thanks Jerry, we appreciate your comments.
Guys, do you link building services like BuildMyRank? Do you outsource your backlinking strategy in any way?
Thanks,
Steve
We’ve tried those sorts of services and I think they can work. It’s hard to say because we used them in conjunction with other backlinking techniques so we don’t know whether our techniques worked or those backlinking services worked or if it was a combination of both.
It really requires proper testing. I do know that others have had success with these types of things so it is worth a try.
We do outsource some of our backlinking now to a company called Lexorsoft.net. They don’t do our guest blogging – we still do that ourselves but they do things like social networking and so on.
Hi Paula
We have been trying Guest Blogging with my outsourcer who is a pretty good writer for about 4-5 weeks now. We used your Ebook as the guide and inspiration (thanks). So far he has mainly had success with sort of mid level sites that welcome guest blogging but not the major online magazines in our niche related to graphic design/branding/marketing.
Its been pretty slow going which we expected whilst building up relationships in the start etc but I am trying to get a guide to the volume we should expect? Can you you advise a guide as to how many guests blogs a full time person should be winning per wek? We seem to only be getting 1-2 week. I realise these are worth a lot more than profiles etc but I would wonder if we are going to slow?
Thanks
Manny
You will be lucky to get any major website to accept your articles. They aren’t the ones you should focus on. Go for the smaller websites that are owned by one or two people. These people love content and will happily accept a guest article.
It’s impossible to say how many guest articles you will get each week. It depends on too many factors ie. how many sites you actually contact, what types of sites you contact, the quality of your articles, the quality of your site, how you approach them and so on.
If you are getting 1 to 2 a week then you are doing really well. This may look a little slow but if you can get a few strong backlinks every week it is way better than 100 poor quality backlinks.
That makes more sense Thanks Paula, I really like your blog
What is your recommended practice?
For 1 review page, how many short articles will you write?
Can the short article in any form of content? Example, short written text articles, copy paste news from other sites (e.g. sharp washing machine model A wins award again), youtube video, etc.
How often will you post short article for the same review page? will you do it couples times at first then set & forget? or do you actually post short article once a month till never ending lifetime?
like to hear from you on this.
lastly, can the same review page .. say sharp washing machine, i actually do a small comparison with another potential panasonic washing machine (pros/cons, stars ratings)? OR is it better i do the panasonic washing machine in a different review page? So each review page will only focus on 1 product and won’t do comparison to avoid distractions?
We usually write between 5 and 10 articles per product review. The articles can be any form of content – just try not to copy too much content over from other sites as you are only going to have a site filled with duplicate content. Try to be unique if you can.
We don’t have any specific time frame for adding those articles, but we generally space them out and not put them up all in one go. So it might be one article a week or one every two weeks for instance. We like to stagger our content so that it goes up over a period of time.
We do better for pages that only review one product at a time. However, sometimes you might want to do a comparison if you can see there are people searching for comparisons of the products you are reviewing.
This threw me off a little bit. Do you link the short articles back to the main review page?
Yes that’s right. They just help to boost those product review pages with internal links.
Internal links aren’t as strong as external links of course but they can help.
Oic, thanks Paula :)
One more question, regarding Amazonian Profit Plan course .. hmm… will you provide any updates in case Amazon change any rules of game? Something like that :)
Hopefully Amazon won’t change the rules but if they do we will definitely update the book. For any minor changes to the process we always update the Amazonian Profit Plan email list.
ya that make sense :)
Thanks :)
Yes yes, save all incoming mail from the Amazonian Profit Plan – – good stuff. ;)
There’s one thing I’m confused about when it comes to blog commenting for backlinks. When you’re commenting on a blog that has a space for you to list your website, do you have to put an anchor link within the comment too in order to get a backlink? Thank you.
The way we do blog commenting is more about getting traffic than getting a backlink. Most blogs are nofollow so you don’t get the benefit of the backlink anyway.
Also, what can often happen if you add your link within the comment itself is that the owner of the blog treats it as spam and deletes it so it’s hard to get backlinks that way.
This post explains how we go about blog commenting:
http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/2010/09/22/how-to-get-instant-traffic-to-your-website-or-blog/
And this explains all about dofollow and nofollow for those that don’t know:
http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/2008/08/03/what-is-dofollow-and-nofollow/
Hi, I new in this affiliate marketing and wondering do you actually buy the product before you write the review? If not than how to write a good review if you did not try it?
You have mentioned reviewing amazon products and choose those over $150, for a starter I don’t have so much money to buy product and start reviewing them.
Please kindly advise.
This post will answer your questions.
http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/2010/06/22/how-to-write-a-product-review-when-you-dont-own-the-product/
I kind of agree on the focus issue. I find it the biggest challenge in my business model of creating small 6-10 page websites, getting them indexed and traffic flowing, then selling them off. I try for 5 a month, then flip in 5 months, so there is a constant workload. Thank goodness for outsourcing!
Concentrating on just 3 pages sounds sweet!
It’s definitely a lot easier than focusing on multiple sites.
Im just checking similiar technique on my own. Will see if there are any results.
I know I’m late to the party, but I just wanted to stop by and say a sincere thank you to Paula and Wanda for this awesome blog post, and all those replies to the comments here. These replies are pure gold btw!
You’re never too late Matt. Thank you for the lovely comment. Our aim is to help everyone to succeed, there are so many people out there struggling to make it. And we appreciate the comments from everyone who takes the time to stop by.
Thanks for the awsome post
Thank you for the comment
Wonderful site – I just discovered you today and have been reading for hours now. You’ve given me some great ideas for pursuing better Amazon conversion rates – I’ve been reworking my products pages for several weeks now and your info has come in a timely way.
I have heard from another successful internet marketer who has a products review site that getting backlinks for product reviews is more difficult than if you have a purely informational site. If this is so, do you have any tips to encourage webmasters to agree to a link exchange or guest blog post?
Actually, we haven’t really found this to be the case. I think if your site looks professional and your reviews look helpful then they are more likely to accept an article from you.
Oftentimes review sites are full of flashing ads and widgets and the site just looks like one big advertisement. That’s why many webmasters avoid linking to those sorts of sites.
What we try to do is get our home page looking as professional as possible because if someone is going to take an article from us the first thing they will check is our home page…first impressions do count. This means removing Adsense ads and flashing banner ads from that page.
And making it more personal helps big time – you can put a photo of yourself on the page and talk a little about yourself.
Thank you for this very helpful advice, Paula! :) Flashing ads and widgets I have not! Plus I’m holding off on AdSense on my second site for precisely the reason you mention. Getting backlinks may be easier if it is not bombarded with advertising.
Exactly Amy. You can always add Adsense later once you have traffic flowing in to your site.
Hey guys, wonderful site and the Amazonian Profit Plan has helped me immensely. My thought process for marketing products from Amazon has changed completely. I do have a quick question though. Should I be promoting the site that my review page is on or just the review page itself? Not sure if I should backlink to the main site url or to the page the review appears on.
You can do both Dennis although you should really focus more on the review page itself.
You wrote the essential sentense “Spend the next 10 weeks getting backlinks/traffic”. I think there are many people here want to know “how to get backlinks/trafic”… :) Do you use article marketing, link exchange or link buying? How do you “meet” your blogs with your visitors?
Our main goal with back linking is to rank well in Google so we go searching for quality links rather than quantity. Our main method is by submitting articles to other websites and bloggers. We find quality websites and blogs and ask them if they would like a nice well written article. We add a few links in the article back to our website in those articles.
Hello Ladies
I only use text links on my sites, but I read somewhere that the Amazon product previews are very good for converting sales. What is your experience?
We’ve tried all sorts of widgets but we keep coming back to text links every time. Having said that however, we haven’t tried the product previews so we can’t really gauge whether they will work effectively or not. I would love to hear from someone who has tested them to see how well they work.
Regarding clickbank products. Most of the stuff they sell looks spammy to me, what is your take on their marketplace? I sold one product and of course that money is gone because you need to make 5 unique sales and they take the money away if you don’t reach it. Stinks!
Some of the products do look spammy but a good majority of them are legitimate. It’s just a matter of doing your research and checking out reviews for those products before promoting them.
Funny, I was just reading an article, about microsites, espousing something along the same lines…
It still depends on TRAFFIC, my friend
That’s very true Ron. But people do need to realise that they also need to have quality content that captivates visitors once they reach their site. There is no greater turnoff than spammy or low qualtiy reviews to send visitors reaching for the back button. So its really a two way street.
Hi Paula and Wanda, i’m very excited to find your blog. many great quality post here. in this post,do you mean that all i need is make one minisite for each product i want promote?instead of bulid a blog that review and promote many product?which ways give the best result?
You can have one site that focuses on just one product type like digital cameras or dog beds or cordless drills for instance. Or you can have one big site that focuses on all sorts of products.
We don’t really create sites that focus on just one particular product. For instance, I wouldn’t build a site on a Canon XYZ Digital camera for instance. The only reason why I wouldn’t is that products can become obsolete.
waw,,you reply my comment.hehe..thanks.
btw,the 3-5 page you mention refers to one product?
It can be one product type like digital cameras and you can have five different brands of digital cameras.
Or it can be totally different products that are totally unrelated.
It doesn’t really matter. What matters is choosing good quality products that you would be proud to promote and writing good quality reviews that are worth reading.
thanks paula, your words are very clear and helpful to me :)
Hello Paula,
I’ve been looking for a good Amazon course and came here after hearing your interview with James Martell. I have a question that is really bugging me. How do you keep writing articles for back-links on products like drills, printers, watches ect… I mean .. what can we keep saying about a drill or many of these products?
You really have to do your homework. With each product review we research the product thoroughly. We know that every product is different and therefore each review will be different because of the amount of research we do. In terms of product reviews you really don’t need to write that many to start making money online. We always recommend starting with 5 product reviews and backlinking to them until they start making money. When you only focus on a few at a time the writing part is a lot easier.
In terms of general articles like how-to’s and so on, it’s all a matter of knowing your subject. If you know everything there is to know about cordless drills then writing articles for them is easy. And after a while as you write more and more articles you get more and more ideas and you get to know your subject in even more detail so it becomes easier and easier.
The other way is just to get someone to write them for you. We use Elance a lot for our general articles although we still write the product reviews ourselves.
Hi Ladies,
I remember reading somewhere you saying that you had about 20 websites but that your income really comes from only two of them. (sorry, if I am not quoting you correctly) My question is, did you finally give up on the other sites and if so, do you plan to sell them? Thanks very much.
That used to be true but not so much anymore. We have income coming from a variety of sites now. But we don’t think ‘sites’, we think ‘pages’. So one site might have three pages that are making money, another site might have four pages and another site might have one page and so on.
So we haven’t trashed any of our sites. What we do is look for pages on those sites that could have the potential to make money and work on them. Or we might create a whole new page on a site.
We are currently in the process of tidying up our neglected sites so they look a little more presentable, they were looking old and shabby.
First off, I must have read this post like ten times!! It is so informative! I’ve been struggling with this concept for a while now. I recently started a website based on reviews. I only have two reviews up, but feel like it is an empty site. What exactly am I promoting when I send people to my site?? I can’t have a facebook page sending people there when there are only two reviews! I also feel like once someone does go to my site and sees there is barely any info on it, they will never come back again. I understand only linking to that one review page, but what about the rest of the site?
You have a great looking site Pearl. Just remember that with a review site you aren’t likely to get repeat visitors anyway. Usually people are looking for a specific product and want to see a review for it. Once they’ve bought it they aren’t going to bother going back to your site.
What you need to do now is start adding information type articles like How to Choose a Stroller for instance. This will slowly build up your site.
For the rest of the time, just work on getting backlinks to those two reviews.
Hi,
Found this article very interesting, and relevant to my own experience, whereby I have created some 180 websites and find myself all over the place with trying to keep up with everything. I wish now that I had just stuck with my original spanish property website, which has always been my main source of income and find suitable affiliate partners to promote with this. As you say I have spread myself too thin and in fact all the websites suffer. The ridiculous thing is that I often come across a website that I forgot I had created because, I had quickly jumped onto some other project. Once you start on this road it is difficult to get off.
Wow, 180 websites would be a lot of work. We struggled in the past with 20 – that was too many. At one time we realised it wasnt going to work and just let them go. We didn’t sell them or anything but we just didnt work on them anymore and focused solely on one website. That was the turning point for us.
Now we focus on pages instead of sites so we are glad in a way that we didn’t get rid of those sites as we will just pick a page from any of them and work on them until they are making money.
First starting out with Amazon is scary all by itself. After reading this I believe that I found out that I can make it with just a couple review sites. Just have to learn how to choose the right product to promote.
You actually only need one review site to do it. The more websites you have the more work you will have to do and the longer it will take you to make money.
Paula I love your posts and reached your blog from reading your article on maxxblogger. Be honest I earned 0.04 from amazon by selling a e-book. Am not sure but you may be now laughing on me. I used blogger blog with dot.tk free blog but could not succeed. Now I got a top level free domain from google and hostgator association INDIA GET ONLINE YOUR BUSINESS for one year(used in signature) but have to star working on it. Will you specify me please?
Your domain name in your signature is an Indian domain name which means you will only rank in India. If you have done your homework and you think you can make money by targeting India then go for it. I don’t have enough info on how well you can do there but my preference would be to target the US and go with a .com domain name. You can get a .com domain for under $10 from Hostagator.
If you are wanting to sell the ebook on Amazon then I would be checking out the Amazon KDP forum to see what others have done to promote their ebooks. I assume your ebook is on the Kindle store so that is where you need to be looking for advice.
We never laugh at anyone, Satbir. We know just how hard it can be to earn money online,and only have admiration for anyone who decides to have a go.
Our first sale on Amazon was for 92 cents. We all have to start somewhere. And that 4 cents is 4 cents more than you would have had if you hadn’t sold an e-book. So its a start and that is what is important.
Thank u “Wanda & Paula”. I will buy a top level domain name. Thank u a llot. And yes it was my first sale on amazon which earned me 0.04$. Now i am a sbscriber of your newsletter. I have to learn allot from your blog posts and soon i will buy your blueprint also.
Hey Guys,
I received this week my first check from CB :-) Only $385 ,but it made me feel good and give more faith in affbiz. I need more traffic though.
What do you think about Amazon shop which is selling on Warriors now. It looks more like real shop, but with Amazon stuff. Besides, I found they put logo of Amazon which states that “This website is Amazon affiliate”. What do you think about such statement, which make people aware that someone make money on their purchases?
Thanks
There are lots of different plugins and similar for creating an Amazon style shop – WPZon Builder and ReviewAzon are the two most popular ones and the two best in our opinion.
We use both of these plugins however we only use them to add images and other additional information to a review that we have personally written ourselves. There is no point just copying over the information from Amazon. Google doesn’t like ‘thin affiliate sites’ and a site full of duplicated Amazon content is a thin affiliate site.
I don’t see a problem with the “Amazon affiliate” statement. I doubt most people would even know what that meant.
Hi Paula,
Thank you for your reply. I always very appreciate it. I decided to go ahead and purchased shop. WOW! It`s exciting. However, I do agree with you about ‘thin affiliate sites’ I know what does it mean and what can happen. The good thing is that even developers of the shop advise everyone NOT TO GO LIVE without good content and great reviews. It is possible to add as many pages as one wish, which can be used for example for blog. Others I found have page with auto RSS on the same subject as their shop, but from other sources. The point is not to go live with Amazon affiliate shop juts like that. I have to input my own content and review there. Besides, it is also possible to write review direct in that shop from buyers without need to copy reviews from Amazon what add another value to the shop itself. I have a lot of work to do and I will follow your advise too. I signed up with Elence. Can you advice on specific person who can write reviews or proofread? I have never used them and I have no idea how much cost to write review. I know how much cost iPhone app development though ;-)
Cheers
We don’t have a specific writer for our reviews. We tend to write them ourselves. Our favorite writer decided to go back to full time work so we just use different writers in Elance whenever we need content.
Just ensure when you choose a writer that they have good feedback and they have been on Elance for a while. Also ensure that you get examples of their work so you can tell what their writing style is like.
We usually pay around $10 to $20 per article but you may need to pay a little more for a review.
Thank you Paula for your advice :-)
One more question. What plug-in do you use to generate auto links to your affiliate in text. (e.g. above “Elance)
We use the Maxblog Ninja Affiliate plugin. It would have to be my all time favorite plugin.
Thank you :-)
Hi Paula and Wanda.
Great information here indeed!
February i ll begin backlinking schedule for my sites.i ll follow your tactics.
All my site have index so looks more proffesional.
Is there any problem to give specific(model numbers) or brand keywords(eg nikon cameras)to pages reviews and more general keywords(e.g best camera reviews) to index?
Or is better more general keywords that have target to rank go to the review page
eg
site:http://bestcomputerspeakersreview.com
backlinks:
keywords:Studiophile AV40,M-Audio speakers >>http://bestcomputerspeakersreview.com/m-audio-studiophile-av-40/
keywords:computer speakers,best computer speakers>>>index
>>http://bestcomputerspeakersreview.com
thank you
Dimitris
We go for both all types of keywords when backlinking.
The generic keywords like “computer speakers” for instance would get you more traffic but will be less targeted.
The product specific keywords like “Studiophile AV40,M-Audio speakers” will get you less traffic but will be a lot more targeted.
The generic keywords are often more difficult to rank for than product specific keywords but they are worth it because of the amount of traffic you will get.
thank you Paula for your reply,
the question is:General keywords linking to the review page(rank with review page for the specific general key) or linking to index(rank with index page for the specific general key)??
are you using index page for your sites?
thx in advance
What do you mean by index page? Do you mean the home page? If yes, then we also link to the home page when backlinking. When we link to the home page we link using generic keywords. But we also link to our product review pages using generic keywords.
Hi
Yes index page=home page..i understand..thanks for your answer
While I agree it’s possible to make money online from just one page (or a few pages), there is definitely a downside for people visiting your website. We do a lot of online secret shopping for companies, and there can be a lack of trust for customers if you don’t have enough information. Obviously this isn’t a big problem when you’re an affiliate, but it can still mean that people don’t click-through when you want them to if they don’t trust you! Joanna
Exactly, trust is the key. This is why we always say that to write a quality review, you have to do the research. You have to know the product inside and out. If you don’t then forget it. We used to write 300 word reviews and we couldn’t figure out why we weren’t making much money. Nobody is going to trust a 300 word review.
Paula,
Just a technical question: I am interested in the type of keyword you are targeting for your product reviews. Are you targeting specific combinations of generic words (like in the case of exercise bikes… e.g. “exercise bikes for sale” or “cheap fitness bikes for sale”) or are you targeting the product name (like in my case Proform 290 SPX).
Thank you in advance for your response. Sergio
We target both.
The generic keywords are generally harder to rank for but they will usually get the most traffic.
The product based keywords are usually easier to rank for but they will get less traffic.
This is why we target both types. Both are worth targeting.
Hey Wanda and Paula,
You are so right. So many people try to do too many things online at one time. Focus is absolutely critical. I think it’s probably the number 1 part of success online. Most people don’t give things long enough to work because they fall into the mindset of “fast and easy money”.
Then, when the next “big thing” comes out, they jump to that and just spend all of their time jumping from program to program or from niche to niche.
I did much better when I stopped listening to all the “noise” around me and just started to focus on ONE thing. If that one thing takes off, then you can start to branch out, but if you try to do it all at once, you never get anywhere.
Well said. You pretty much summed up our entire philosophy in just a few paragraphs.
thank you sooooooo much Wanda and Paula for this great post. I’ve spent hours reading thru it and thru all the comments and your replies.
i must say that i’m impressed that you respond to all the comments.
i’m a newbie in blogging and i will try out your recommendations
Thanks for visiting. Glad you liked the post. Usually the comments are better than the post so it’s good that you read through them all.
Hi Ladies, l read your post with great interest. l am sitting here pulling my hair out with confusion and fustration. I really want to learn this internet thing. l joined Chris FFarrell membership to learn how to do wordpress, but found l was tied in to his hosting and his special deal with wordpress seolite, l felt l had no control over my sites, so l left. Then l read a many reviews of a book on Amazon “building an online cash cow” which tells me l need to build one website with thousands, yes thousands of pages, write 3 articles a day, otherwise google will not rank me. As per the book the author states that google hates simple small sites. For years l have been reading that simple sites are the best, now l am really confused!! What on earth is the right way for an newbie to start?
When we say ‘you only need one page to make money’ we don’t mean that one page is all you have to create. You do need to build a good solid site and regularly add content. However, having to build a site with thousands of pages is not really necessary.
The ‘one page’ thing simply means that you have to focus on pages and not your site as a whole. So this is how it works:
1. You create a site.
2. You write 1 to 5 really good quality pages. These pages will be ones that promote a product. So they might be reviews of products or just pages where you write about something that you like and then add a link to a product eg. “I’ve just baked a cake and used my Kitchenaid Mixer which I love. Here’s a link to Amazon where you can buy one.”
3. Now you backlink to those pages AND your home page. (Every now and then you backlink to other pages on your site too so it looks more natural to Google)
4. While you are backlinking to those pages, you continue to add content to your site. These are usually informational type pages like how-to’s and so on. Google loves new content so by regularly adding new content it keeps Google happy. You can add an article a day if you have the time or an article a week if you don’t have as much time.
That’s it really.
Amazing article. I have a question, could you tell any way to make money from adsense with single page website? I mean any example?
You could easily make money from one page with just Adsense alone IF you got enough traffic to it. It’s all about the traffic.