Hey Guys!

UPDATE: I'm now documenting my income strategies on YouTube, feel free to follow me there: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9tPRWQhtCouQwi74nEeDRQ

This is my long, 3 -year Amazon Affiliate journey.

I started creating Amazon Affiliate sites around May 2017. I owned a small (60+ posts) "kayak reviews" site with lengthy buyer's guides. (3000+ words each article). The site made just $200-400/month and NEVER really took off.

Despite hiring an English teacher to write my articles, she had no knowledge of the niche and believe it or not, her writing was not even that great. I believe if I wrote my articles myself, I would have done MUCH better. Largely, the project was a "failure" to me and I ended up selling the site for just $6,000.

Experimenting with more small niche sites

I then experimented with a few other small niche sites that sold for around the same kinda money ($6k or less). Finally, I decided I'm going to launch a new Amazon affiliate. It will be a massive general site and cover 5 major categories and a few smaller ones; home improvement, tech, sports, outdoors, tools, etc.)

Building a huge affiliate site: the journey

Long story short, I spent 2.5 years to curate 585 buyer's guides with the help of a bunch of writers. While a couple of friends and people I spoke to in the industry were making upwards of $30,000-$50,000/month with this much content... I was making a measly $2,000-4,000 for the first 2 years.

For the longest time, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't making the big break. Then, in Dec 2019 I decided I was going to hire a bunch of freelance writers to do patches/fix all my articles. I hired someone to do an SEO analysis and look at my competitors for each article.

What sections do they have that I don't? What's their word count against mine? How many backlinks do they have to each post?

The link building phase

Since I couldn't secure backlinks to my hundreds of posts (would cost upwards of 100 grand), I decided to promote around 100 articles. Reached out to over 1,000 blogs in hopes of getting my links inserted in existing articles or placing guest posts. I ended up securing 350+ backlinks in just 3 months. It was pure INSANITY.

I was sending and answering emails 10+ hours per day until I secured links for 100+ posts. Average of at least 3 backlinks per post (depending on the need).

The result?

Within a few weeks, I went from making around $4,000 to:

$7,000 in January 2020

$7,500 in February 2020

$13,671 in March 2020

$21,029.49 in April 2020 (WOO! :D) Screenshot Here

The screenshot I'm attaching for April 2020 will include earnings from the big site plus a few grand from two other small sites I still own. Eventually, though, Google came out with an algorithm update, nearly the same time Amazon decided to cut its commission rates again. Two big hits. I went from making $21K with the big affiliate site to just 7K a month.

The hype/big money was short-lived. People in the industry that I know were making that kinda money for years....and here I am losing it as fast as I got it. Kinda bittersweet. I ended up selling the site for a little under $200,000 in just 30 days after listing it with my broker. After the broker's 15% commission I ended up with 175K.

Some people would argue it's a lot of money, but I invested my heart and soul into this project for 2.5 years and countless hours (over 1400 hours if I had to guess). If you broke it down to hourly earnings, it would be around $125/hour. Nothing I couldn't charge as an SEO company, working with a few clients.

Don't get me wrong though. I'm grateful for the opportunity. It was a huge learning experience. I also made about $100K during the site's existence, which is pretty much the cost of the site during the time I owned it (content & backlinks).

Why I believe my earnings increased sharply

These results really came from the major overhaul I did to the site with content improvements and the massive backlink investment I made. I worked really hard, every day, for 60 days. I put in nearly 300+ hours during those two months.

Here's what I learned (mistakes you can avoid if you're building an affiliate site):

• Build a specialty/one category/niche site (don't go for too many categories)
• Write really high-quality, long-form content (3000+ words for buyer's guides).
• Take your time to publish great content. Don't add too many posts at once (quality WILL diminish - this was my biggest downfall).
• If you already have a site, remove posts that have no keywords after 6 months or REWRITE the post completely
• Hire VA's to edit your posts (add images, links, charts, etc). It will save you hours on top of hours and allow you to manage the "business" better
• Keyword research is everything (take your time with it)
• Go for topics people don't already cover. Strongly consider using "allintitle" and go for keywords under 200 results or use the KGR method

I was previously motivated by similar posts on Reddit and elsewhere

Over the last 3 years, I was always reading other income reports or looking to learn as much as I possibly can to improve my earnings and keyword rankings. Even though I've been doing SEO for 10+ years for large brands, there's always something you can learn in this game.

If you don't want to consider just an affiliate site, you have options

You have three types of ways to monetize/types of sites:

1. Affiliate (Amazon or a different affiliate program - example site)
2. Lead generation (ex. getting leads for local contractors - example site)
3. Ads/Build an info site (how-to articles - example site)

**That's all I can think about for now. I'll update this over the next few weeks as I go along. I wanted to post this for ya'll for motivation.