How To Make Money From Amazon Affiliate Niche Site

Ultimate guide to making money from #AmazonAffiliate building #Nichesite

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Building an Amazon Affiliate niche site is one of the best ways to see huge profits on a small investment.

Currently, people are discovering the awesome benefits of creating Amazon affiliate niche site and are seeing more and more commission come their way as their site grows.

If you have decided to be successful online, brace yourselves for the practical information provided in this step-by-step guide to building the perfect Amazon affiliate niche site, and making money from Amazon affiliate program.

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What is an Amazon Affiliate Niche Site?

Unlike many other websites online, niche sites focus on a handful of specific products or topics.

For example, any site that offers reviews and performance analysis for a single product, or a lot of a very few similar products, can be considered a niche website.

To put it in simple words, “When making a niche website to help promote a particular type of Amazon products, you are creating an Amazon niche website.”

According to Wikipedia,

Niche blogging is the act of creating a blog with the intent of using it to market to a particular niche market. While it could be argued that every blog is, in some form, a niche blog, the term as it applies to marketing refers to a particular kind of blog.

For affiliate marketers, we consider niche site a website having around 30 to 50 contents for a particular type of products.

Thanks to Amazon’s effective affiliate program, marketers are making thousands of dollars.

Some people are finding financial freedom and traveling the world from niche site income.

Some marketers are in fact building banks from Amazon! I personally made six figures in a year from niche sites.

Some people are even making millions.

Most of the marketers are using niche site model to make money from Amazon affiliate.

Some marketers say, large authority sites provide the harshest competition for niche sites, but the market for niche sites is still strong.

It is working.

It will work in the future too.

Google loves niche specific sites:

Niche sites still benefit from the ability to be set up faster, and for much less of an investment.

Simply doing keyword research, registering a domain name, WordPress install, proper content publishing, and building high quality backlinks will enable you to make money.

In fact, all of this can be done within a couple of weeks (except the link building part) if you know how to go about it.

On this complete step by step guide, I will make you understand how to build and make money from Amazon affiliate niche site.

Step by step:

Step 1: Find A Profitable Niche

The first step of building a niche site and making money from Amazon affiliate program is, select a niche or specific product that you want to promote and build a site around.

Paying attention to what is purchased in high volumes from Amazon (huge number of reviews) is the first step to finding the most profitable products to build Amazon niche site around.

You can find profitable niche site simple by following any of the methods.

Browse Through Amazon Category

Amazon category is the best source of finding profitable ideas for niche site. You can find thousands of types of product names in each category to use them as seed keyword and doing your final keyword research.

Steps:

1. Pick a category that includes products you’re interested in building a site around.
2. Choose a sub-category.
3. Check out the left-hand column to find a product that cost over $100 on average (doing so helps you gain more worthwhile commission rates), and that has an average customer rating of 3.5 stars or higher.

How To Steal Profitable Niche Keyword?

Hint: EmpireFlippers.com is a gold mine on this purpose!

EmpireFlippers is a marketplace for buying and selling Amazon affiliate niche sites.

They thoroughly review every single site before listing on the marketplace, so there is no scope of getting site listed with fake information.

What makes EmpireFlippers stands out is, they keep site URL private and only serious buyers with a 5% deposit can see the site.

I never bought any single site from them, nor deposited money to see URL. However, the marketplace is greatly helping me giving idea of profitable niches:

How?

Well…

You can see the industry of specific site and how much they are making.

Like the images below…

If you click on any listing, you can see further details of the specific listing.

You can see the description with content idea. You can easily build a list of some profitable niche to go further.

So you can see what’s the site about and how much they are making from the site.

Find Niche Idea With TheSweetHome.com Posts

TheSweetHome is a big deal whenever it comes to Amazon Affiliate Marketing. Founded by Brian Lam, former editor of Gizmodo, the site is making some serious money.

The site is ranked on the top for thousands of keywords, and the keywords are chosen very carefully, after thorough research.

What you can do, just browse TheSweetHome posts to discover hundreds of profitable niches.

Check iWriter Profiles’ To Get Niche Site Idea

I use iWriter to get my niche site contents written. I know hundreds of marketers are using their service too.

So how can we use them to find profitable niche ideas?

Well…

You can easily check the profiles of top ranked and average writers and see what they are up to.

Check the history of the contents they wrote; you will find dozens of niche ideas. As they wrote the contents for other marketers’, means you can expect this to be a profitable market.

Find Niche Idea From TopTenReviews.com Subdomains and Categories

TopTenReviews.com is a multimillion dollar company reviewing products and services.

They rate and publish reviews of thousands of products that are available in Amazon.

As a company with big investment, you can sure they have some big guys in the team for keyword research. What you can do is simply vesting their categories and pick them for further research.

As long as they have a contents on the site, be sure the particular niche is a profitable one.

What next?

Okay, you have done the hard work.

But how to proceed now?

By using one of these methods mentioned above, you can easily find profitable niches that (niche products) have at least:

1. 10 customer reviews on Amazon
2. Price at least $100 on average

Note: If you are planning to build a larger site, select a product that also has related accessory products available on Amazon (e.g.: For Road bike, helmet or light is an accessory). Selecting this type of products always bring better result. Try to focus more on this type of products.

Following all the criteria I just mentioned, you need to build a list of products for further keyword research.

Step 2: Proper Keyword Research and Competition Analysis

Researching keywords and competition analysis is needed after building a list of niches you want to work with.

The keywords you use will make or break your ability to run a successful Amazon niche site.

Knowing how to properly research the keywords that will lead you to success. To ensure further success, knowing how to analyze the competition you will be facing is the key.

I use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to research keywords and Long Tail Pro to analyze the competition (Check my review of Long Tail Pro V3).

For doing keyword research, I keep AIDA principle in mind.

When people start their searches online with generic term like ‘Camera’, its’ more for basic information.

As they figure out which one to buy, they get more specific on what exactly they are looking for. So they search specific search terms like ‘Nikon D5300 DSLR Camera Review’.

Generic terms don’t bring sells, specific terms do.

Check out the image below to get idea of online purchases and how research cycle relates to AIDA principle.

Overall, the closer terms of ‘Action’ you use, the higher your conversion rates will be, and the more commission you will make off of your niche site.

These are the search pattern close to ‘action’

• Best/Top Rate + Product Name
• Cheap + Product Name
• Quality + Product Name
• Product Name + For Sale
• Product Name + Review/Reviews
• Product Name + Coupon
• Where Can I Buy + Product Name
• Buy + Product Name
• Best + Product Name + Review
• Best + Product Name + Online
• Best + Product Name + Year
• VS/Or/Compare to + Product Name

For me, I always prefer to work with ‘Best + Product type’ keyword as main keyword of a niche site.

Having a list of 50+ keywords (including product list long tail keywords, review keywords and resources keywords) to build the strength of your niche site on search engine results is imperative to your site’s future success, so don’t cut corners here.

Metrics I follow when finalizing a niche are straightforward. I usually select ones which have:

• Search Volume – 800 to 3500
• KC – Under 30
• Dozens of products available on Amazon
• Product Price ranging from $50 to $500
• Not a seasonal keyword

I have a detailed and step by step tutorial on keyword research and competition analysis for Amazon Niche Site. Check out the content to learn my exact keyword research process that’s making me thousands of dollars from Amazon per month.

Step 3: Picking the Right Domain Name

After finding the right niche and set of keywords, you will need a domain name. You should register a domain name that will be easily identifiable what your site about.

Exact Match or Brandable Domain?

Finding a name that is catchy and relevant to your product niche is important. I personally recommend going for brandable names, rather going for heavy keyword rich or exact match domains.

Exact match domain is not as powerful as it was to be in the past.

If your keyword is ‘best kitchen knife’, for example, a site named “bestkitchenknife.com” will be a poor choice, while something catchier such as “KnifeGuide.com” will likely be better choice.

Your domain name has to be brandable if you want to see your niche site eventually take off, so keep this in mind when choosing a site name.

Domain Extension [Hint: Go for .com]

If at all possible, you want to get a domain name that ends with .com.

Although other domain extensions will work in most cases (and work same in when it comes to ranking on search engine), the .com extension is the easiest to remember, and the most easily recognized by visitors.

If all the domain extensions get same value in ranking, why still I suggest you to go for a .com domain?

Well…

Google prefers brands when ranking websites, so you need to build a brand to be on the top.

(Google’s recent Alphabet branding is completely exception; and exceptions don’t count)

How To Get A Brandable Domain Name Idea?

Certain site name generators can be useful in helping you choose the right name. Trying sites such as Bust A Name can be a great place to start your search for the perfect domain name to fit your niche site.

You can also use the following suffix with your niche and see if the domain name is available for registration.

Domain Name Suffix You Can Use

• Guide
• Magazine
• Pro
• Lab
• Express
• Garden
• Review
• Reviewed

Your Turn

Once you’ve decided on a knockout name, you will need to register the domain. You can register your domain name from Godaddy or Namecheap.

Or you can simply go for Bluehost, if you buy a hosting package from them, they will give you a free domain name.

Once you’ve purchased a domain name for your site, it’s time to move on to the next step.

Step 4: Purchasing Super-Fast Web Hosting

Technically, a “web hosting service” refers to the server where your site’s information will be stored and relayed to your visitors.

There are several things to consider before buying niche site hosting.

Site loading issue comes first.

Load times are extremely important to the success of your Amazon niche site, as without the ability to load quickly, people will likely leave your site before they consume your content and click on your affiliate link.

Google counts loading speed as ranking factor, keep loading speed into contingency and choose a hosting that offers you best site performance.

“Customer Support” of the hosting companies is a crucial factor as well.

The two best options on the market currently for niche site owners are Bluehost and Hostgator. SiteGround is another great option for niche site builders.

Both companies provide all the options you will need to run a successful Amazon niche website, and can be accessed for a very low cost. Currently, you can host your domain via Bluehost for as low as $6.95 a month, and in HostGator for as low as $7.16per month.

Pat Flynn (and some other great marketers) recommend Bluehost as the best hosting provider. For my public niche site project, I’m going for this provider over any other providers.

These are the reasons I recommend Bluehost.

• Competitive price
• Extremely helpful support
• Free domain name
• Automated backup
• WordPress recommended hosting

Step 5: Setting Up The Site (CMS, Themes, Plugins & Configurations)

Once you are done with registering your domain name and hosting, Setting up website comes in the next step.

We need to install a Content Management System(CMS) to get the website functional.

WordPress is considered one of the best choices for those looking for highly functional, fast, and highly customizable CMS.

Almost 25% of the entire web is powered by WordPress.

For Amazon niche site, we should never choose any other platform over WordPress. It is a dynamic CMS with most of the themes, plugins and add-ons for a successful website is available for that platform.

When creating your Amazon niche website using WordPress, the themes and plug-ins you choose to utilize are of critical importance.

Thankfully, this process is very simple for niche site owners, and won’t take a big time investment to see big results.

Installing WordPress is as simple creating an email account!

What’s The Best Theme For Amazon Niche Site?

The best theme option available by far is the FocusBlog theme. This is the exact theme I’m using on marketever.com.

Here are just a few of the amazing features you will gain access to through FocusBlog:

• Extensive Look and Feel Options
• Built for conversion
• Very clean look and faster loading
• Designs that are Both Mobile and Desktop Friendly

You can also go for AuthorityAzon, an intuitive WordPress theme designed and developed for Amazon affiliate marketers.

You can also check my post to know some other recommended WordPress themes for Amazon niche sites.

Plugins To Install On Your Amazon Niche Site

Once you are done with theme setup, you need install some plugins to get your site completely ready as niche site.

You can check my post to know the details of plugins I’m using for my niche sites (and why) here.

To summarize it, here is the list of plugins required:

• Yoast SEO
• Jetpack by WordPress.com
• Akismet
• EasyAzon
• WordPress Backup to Dropbox
• W3 Total Cache
• Social Locker
• Q2W3 Fixed Widget
• Click To Tweet
• Free Tools to grow your Email List, Social Sharing and Analytics by SumoMe
• Pinterest Pin It Button On Image Hover and Post
• Outbound Link Manager
• Floating Social Bar
• Contact Form 7
• TablePress
• Thrive Content Builder
• Thrive Leads

Step 6: Setup Mandatory Pages / Menu

There are some mandatory pages you need to create before making your Amazon affiliate niche site live.

• About
• Contact
• Privacy Policy
• Affiliate Disclosure

These are the pages I create before opening my niche site for Google to index. Not only these make the site legitimate to visitors, this helps Google to understand about your websites’ credibility.

I keep all the pages mentioned above with a top menu. I also put a short ‘Amazon Affiliate Disclaimer’ in the footer and link it to the page.

This is something you must do to avoid your Amazon Affiliate account ban.

Step 7: Proper Content Creation and Publishing

Once you are done with setting up your site and mandatory pages, it’s time to publish contents.

When creating content, you must follow certain guidelines to ensure you receive high search engine rankings, and that you have pages’ customers will actually interact with.I have written a detailed content on writing contents for Amazon affiliate niche site that converts, you should follow every steps I mentioned.

Let me summarize niche site contents here:

I try to publish multiple types of contents on a niche site.

Publishing multiple types of contents besides product reviews is necessary. In fact, to appease Google, you will want to make sure the search giant doesn’t take you as a shady affiliate site trying to trick them, send visitors away (affiliate site) and make money with some product review articles.

In addition to reviews, you will want to have buying guides, resource and how to articles, lists of products by types and more.

Write Exactly What The Audience Is Searching For

Articles should be straightforward, and their titles should make it immediately clear what their use is to your audience.

Check what your competitors are writing and come up with a better copy than them.

Well written and useful reviews will help bring visitors to your site, and can help turn those visitors into Amazon customers, landing you a commission.

Titles that include phrases like “Top 5 [Product Name] for [Target Audience]” are always a good template to follow.

Content Format [Hint: Write At-Least 700 Word Reviews]

It’s a good idea to mix up the length and format of your content, as search engines will reward you for having content of different lengths structured around any given keyword.

As you can see the image, serpIQ found that longer contents tend to rank better on Google.

So what’s my content length suggestion for Amazzon affiliate niche site?

For review contents – I try to maintain a minimum length of 700 words per post.

For product list long tail keyword contents – at least 1500 words each.

And length of other contents depends on requirement and the importance of the topics.

Don’t Forget On-Page SEO

When thinking about what kind of content to create, you should keep SEO practices in mind, but you should also think about the user experience, and what kind of content your visitors are likely to interact with.

When writing contents, don’t forget common On-Page SEO techniques to implement. In fact, On Page SEO factors are 70% of all ranking factors, according to Moz.

You can read my detailed guideline on how to do on-page SEO.

Some Other Content Considerations To Take Into Action

1. In the rest of your review, you should focus on unboxing photos, detailed product summaries, real person feedback and product experiences, Amazon review citations, product comparisons, and more information about the product.
2. Tons of photos should be in every review. Always make sure these photos link back to the Amazon products you are trying to gain commissions from.

Step 8 : Creating Social Media Profiles

Remember when I said the customer centric and valuable content would be useful during future promotion of your Amazon niche website?

Well, one of the best platforms out there for the promotion of this content is social media. With social media, you get an extremely cheap, and sometimes free way to promote the niche product you are trying to sell to your audience.

Driving traffic to your site via social media platforms will help boost your organic search engine rankings and make your brand more visible across the internet.

Facebook and Twitter are the best platforms for promoting your niche site, but different social media platforms have various advantages, and if you have the time to invest, the more places you promote your niche site the better.

Just keep in mind that, the more people share your link, the more visible you will become on both social media and in search rankings, so always post consistently and focus on sharing high quality, engaging material.

So these are the final list I invest my time on…

1. Facebook Page
2. Twitter Account
3. Google Plus Business Page
4. Pinterest Business Page
5. YouTube Channel

(As part of my public niche site case study series, I’m experimenting these traffic sources and I will be publishing the detailed case studies soon.)

Wait…

Seems too much of work?

Not really!

You shouldn’t focus much here…

Social Media Strategy For Small Niche Site

As search engine traffic is my number one focus, I don’t spend much time with social media marketing for niche site. But if you have bigger goal with a single site, you can try to build some large loyal followers.

For small niche sites, working this much on social media promotion will be over killing your effort. For me, I work a couple of days to get a decent number of followers and consistently post new contents on the channels. That’s just it, I do nothing more for a niche site.

Once you have set up brand pages, you can buy social signals or promotions from sites like Social Kingo and UpTopSocial. They have social media marketing services for all major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Go with the small packages only, as I don’t recommend spending much money on this type of promotion for your niche website.

Social Media Strategy For Larger Niche Site

Well, I discussed social media promotion for small niche site.

For larger niche site or authority site?

Once you have a decent number of followers, you need to get engaged with them and get them like your contents.

How to do that?

Likable have a niche infographic on how you can do it.

I repeat:

This process is for large niche, or authority sites.

Do I need paid social media promotion?

To build some followers for your blog rapidly…

In addition to simple and traditional posting, Facebook and other social media platforms offer paid ad services that you might be interested to try.

Thanks to a much higher click rate than other traditional PPC setups, these services can be highly beneficial to your Amazon niche website’s success if you have the money to invest.

For me, I don’t focus on paid ads much, rather I focus more on link building.

Step 9 : High-Quality Link Building

Having quality links in and out of your content has been a consistently effective way to get big search engines like Google to rank your site.

The more links to your website, the more likely you are to be seen when someone searches the keywords you are targeting for your niche.

As the images shows, Google’s 66.46% of ranking factors are related to backlinks. So building high quality backlink is really important to get a niche site ranked.

Knowing how to build high quality links is the first step to ensuring you are on the right track.

Basically, when other sites link to yours, Google and other search engines will see you as an authority, and give your higher rankings in search engine results.

As a niche site owner, you want to look for places where you can build links to your site that are low effort and low cost.

Here’s a few places to start looking:

• Web 2.0 Sites
• Article Directories, like eHow
• Social Media Sites
• Social Bookmarking sites, like StumbleUpon, Reddit
• Q&A Sites, like Yahoo! Answers and Quora
• Quality Web Directories
• Forum posts in niche specific forums
• Photo sharing sites, like Flickr
• Infographic creation and distribution
• Guest Posts
• Blog outreach
• Resource page link building

Some of the sites above are easy to build links from because you can start your own profile for free or cheap and start linking back to your own sites.

These links I call as foundation link.

If you can gain at least 10 links from each one, or at least most of these categories, your niche website will be on the right track.

Constantly building your link potential is important if you want your niche site to remain successful, so always be looking for new linking opportunities to and from your site.

Ultimately, you will want to have around 100/150 base links within 3months of launching your Amazon niche website to ensure you have the right foundation for success.

As your niche site grows, you will want to start looking for linking opportunities in more valuable places which will be harder to build links from:

Like guest posting and blog outreach.

These links I call as power link that helps hugely to get your ranks improved rapidly.

Writing guest posts on other sites and blogs is a good place to start building more valuable links. From there, you can start networking with authorities and other site owners, and look for people willing to link back to your site.

Step 10 : Optimising Conversion Rates

If you have visitors on your site.

But they won’t make you money unless you can make them purchase products from Amazon.

You need to initiate some efforts to get them click on your affiliate link and buy products from Amazon.

If you don’t do the conversion rate optimisation in proper way, you won’t see much profit from a niche site.

If you want to see your site generate big commissions, you need to think about optimising your conversion rates.

The more qualified your leads are, the more likely you are able to convert them to paying customers that will gain you commission.

That’s why targeting keywords that are associated with buying is such a good tool, thought your conversion rate optimisation can’t stop there.

There are a few important steps you can take to make it more likely that visitors become customers once they are actually on your site.

• Always include a call to action in the “above the fold section” of your reviews, and at the beginning and end of every article you create. A good call to action will direct visitors towards Amazon, making it more likely for your casual readers to turn into commission generating buyers.
• Use a lot of in-content text links. For me, I use Amazon affiliate link every time I mention any product name in the content. As well as I add some special contextual call to action in the body.
• You can use coloured information box on the content body. And at the end, you can add a strong call to action just like an example shown below.

• Always use high quality images on post, and make the product images clickable.
• Comparison tables can be excellent for helping people follow the links you want them to. If you make the product you are trying to sell look obviously superior to the competition, you will bring to see your commission rates skyrocket.

• Use beautifully designed button after the content that catches visitors’ attention and make them click on the link.

Split Test A Lot

The best way to get maximum conversion rate is split test a lot. Make some small changes on the site, see the effect of for one week and decide which one is better.

Step 11 : Scaling Up Your Site

By using all these steps appropriately, you will begin to see your site grow.

As you grow more traffic, you will want to scale up your site to handle the newly increased traffic. That can mean investing in a more expensive hosting plan, investing in more contents, and even outsourcing some link building for your site.

As long as you keep posting high quality and engaging content, and keep staying on top of the various SEO practices outlined above.

For me, once my site is ranked, I focus on new niche sites. I also keep publishing contents on the ranked site on a regular basis. Depending on site to site, I keep a schedule of 1 content per week to 1 content per month.

So there are the things you can do to scale your niche site…

• Creating more SEO content around more keywords related to your niche.
• Link building your existing content to improve its rankings. Focus more in deep page link building.
• Start collecting email address and nurture them on a regular basis. Once your list is big enough, you can launch any digital products or send them periodic contents to get more visitor on your niche site.

If you follow the tips in this guide, the growth potential of your Amazon niche site is almost endless.

There are plenty of resources online to scale of niche site business.

Dom Well from Human Proof Design published a post on 6 months’ growth strategy for niche site. Mike Bradford has a similar resource over at NicheSiteAzon.

Your Turn

So I’m coming to a conclusion to a monster guide to making money from Amazon building niche site. As you probably guessed, the scope is huge, it’s a BILLION dollar market.

Amazon affiliate is great, simple way to start making money online.

Niche site builders are making a lot of money:

I hope this step by step guide will help you understand the whole process and get your journey started. The process I showed above is really feasible and future proof.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments and I will get back to you with my thoughts.