Make Your First $1000 Online Through Amazon.com
And the beauty of it is that Amazon.com shares its revenue with independent marketers who direct buyers from their websites to Amazon.com where they purchase products. This has given opportunity to people across the globe to share from the billions of dollars Amazon.com makes as commission for directing their website visitors to Amazon.com
Making money from Amazon.com has become lots easier than ever because today buyers already know Amazon.com and are very comfortable buying from there. So, all you need to make money from the site is to direct people who are already in a buying mood to Amazon.com, and you can be sure that Amazon.com will do its part in making the sale.
In fact, if you know how to position your website to get and send targeted prospects to Amazon, you too will be part of the Amazon money makers in no time.
That knowledge is what you will get in this guide produced by Gaz Cooper, who is a leading expert and earner from Amazon.com. The guide is especially for people who are just starting out online and haven’t made money and are looking for a genuine way of making money online.
Experienced online marketers can also find valuable ideas from this article, which they can use in increasing their income from their already established websites through Amazon.com. Read on:
My name is Gaz Cooper and I make a full time living online building websites which promote products that are sold on Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer.
Amazon.com sold over 61 BILLION dollars in 2012 and paid out over a BILLION dollars in Commissions to Affiliates that helped them, by simply building websites promoting Amazon products.
Amazon Affiliates can make you anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month. The best part about Amazon sites is once you have built these websites (very easy to do) they provide you with a residual income month after month. Even when you’re sleeping, your stores will be open for business.
You can do this part time or full time and literally ANYONE can do this. Here, I am going to teach you step by step how to build a simple money making Amazon site, that can start making you money month after month.
Why Amazon?
I believe Amazon.com is the absolute best way for a complete beginner to be able to start making money online and by following this Amazon Formula, I believe you can make your first dollar online in the shortest time possible.
The biggest problem that beginners face when looking for a way to make money online is all the new shiny objects and the shysters out there that are intent on relieving you of your money by selling you a dream that you can become successful and make a million bucks overnight. When these false promises fail to deliver you go off looking for the next dream seller until eventually you realize you are going round in circles and losing money hand over fist.
If that is you, then it’s time to STOP and start learning the real process of making money online. You can make a lot of money online once you learn how, but at the beginning you need to learn the process and build a solid foundation for a real business that you can build up that will make you money month after month.
People buy products on Amazon every single day and whether they buy through your website or through someone else's, Amazon pays a commission. This is where you can step in and quickly start making a lucrative residual income that will come in month after month even if you are sitting on the beach.
Amazon pays commissions based on your performance and commissions vary depending on what is purchased. The commission goes all the way up to 15% and is based on how many sales you make each month.
The other great thing is when you direct people to Amazon’s website via your mini-sites many times those people may not buy what your site is promoting but instead they may purchase a more expensive item. You still get paid no matter what they buy as long as they go through your link.
Just follow this Amazon Formula step by step and you will be making money in no time.
Choosing a Niche.
The first step in the process to making a profitable Amazon website is to find a niche. You might be asking what's a Niche? In the context of Internet Marketing it is a subset of a particular market for instance Fitness could be the Market and Niches would be Men's Fitness, Fitness for over fifties and so on.
It's always best to start off in a niche that you are experienced with or have some knowledge of. You could even enter a niche in a subject that you have always wanted to find out more about and would be interested in researching. So your first step is...
Decide on the topic for your website
Grab a pen and a piece of paper or just open up notepad on your computer and start listing all the things you have a passion or interest in it might be baking cakes, Mixed Martial Arts, Your Pets, Gardening or Metal Detecting.
Next add to that list any subject that you would like to discover more about maybe you always wanted to play the trumpet or become a DJ. Don't over think this process, just aim to get a big a list as possible it doesn't matter what the subject or niche is as long as you think you will enjoy setting up a site and writing about the topic.
As I mentioned before don't worry about being an expert in the subject to start off with. A good idea is also to look to see if there are other blogs and forums in the niche you have chosen, don't worry about competition or anything like that, you just want to see if there is an active community online who are interested in the subject or hobby.
Next step is....Can you promote products in this topic? So let’s head over to Amazon.com. We are going to be looking at three sets of Criteria:
How to Pick Products to Promote
Are there a wide range of products that you can promote in this niche and are there at least a few products that sell for more than $100?
Reviews
Once you have found some potential products you will see customer reviews on the product page. Each product on Amazon will have reviews submitted by customers who have purchased the item and posted it on Amazon for potential customers to read it and decide if it is a good product that performs as advertised. They can rate the product between 1 to 5 stars, with 5 stars being the top score.
It is common sense that if the reviews are bad then when a potential new customer reads the negative review it is very unlikely they will purchase that product, so it is very important that we only choose products that have at least 5 or more positive reviews preferably rated 4 to 5 stars.
We also want to check that the last 3 reviews are all positive and again min 4-5 stars. The reason for this is when a potential customer comes to purchase they will rarely read past the top 3 reviews so if the last 3 reviews posted are positive that will be a big help in making that customer make a positive purchase decision.
OK, so let’s just recap on where we are at 1.) You have found a range of products with at least a few that sell for $100 or more 2.) The product has at least 5, preferably more, positive reviews with at least a score of 4-5 stars. 3.) The last 3 reviews are all positive with a min of 4 star reviews. 3 ½ is acceptable as long as they are all positive.
So I'll give you an example here and I am going to chose 'The Survival and Homesteading Niche' as something I am interested in. It's not something that is actually a hobby of mine but I love all those Zombie programs like the Walking Dead LOL.
So what would homesteaders or survivalists be interested in? I reckon Generators would be a good start and here's one I found on Amazon that meets all the right criteria, and it’s well over the $100 minimum, don't be afraid to sell some high ticket items like this one, you might not sell as many but you will get some big commissions!
It also has 11 customer reviews with a rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars. I've checked out the last few reviews and they are on the whole favorable with one negative review so I would go with this product. I'd then look for a few more items over $100 and a few in the $20-$100 price range to have a good wide range of products on my site.
I'd be looking at survival knives, Survival and Homesteading books, equipment for preserving food and maybe some more generators. OK we have found a Niche and some products to promote so that we can monetise that niche.
So let’s take a look at... Keyword Research
Carrying Out Keyword Research
Before we start setting up our site we need to do a little bit of research on keywords. There are many ways for visitors to visit your site for instance through Facebook or Pinterest or even paid traffic but we are going to concentrate on organic traffic here and basically that means visitors coming to your site via a search engine such as Google.
Every time you write a new post for your site you need to think about optimising your content so that the search engines can understand it, and in turn know when to display it in the results. This is called On Site SEO or Search Engine Optimisation, where you set up your site so that the Search Engines favor it.
So we need to find the keywords that your potential visitors might be looking for and also letting the search engines know what your site is about. Ideally you should carry out some Keyword Research before you write any content so you can be sure that people out there are actually looking for the information you are providing.
Keyword Research Tools
There are a number of tools available to help you with your Keyword Research, some are free and some require a little investment we are going to just discuss a couple of free tools here. The first is Google's own Google Keyword Planner tool and the second is ubersuggest.org.
As the web address for the Google tool keeps changing the easiest way to find it is go to Google.com and search for 'Google Keyword Planner'.
Google Keyword Planner
You need to sign up to Google Adwords through you Gmail account to use this tool; it is pretty straightforward to do and won't cost you anything. This will carry out a search for keyword or ad group ideas and insert a high level keyword into the box.
Examples could be 'portable Generator' 'Survival Knife' or '3D TV'. Google will then provide you with other keywords that are being searched for that are similar to your top level keywords. You will want to look through some of the suggestions and use common sense to decide if they are articles that you can write about.
So, for instance it might pull back keywords like 'best portable generator' which would be a keyword that we could write about. It also might pull back 'Portable Generator Wallmart' which would be of no interest.
The Ubersuggest Tool
The Ubersuggest tool doesn't give you any search volumes, just keywords but I don't always find that the Google Keyword planner is that accurate anyway.
As you did with the Google Keyword planner just type in the high level keyword and Ubersuggest will return a series of keywords that you can use to see what information people are searching for. Here's an example here using the Term Survival Knives.
You will see a few hundreds of suggestions; it gives a list of ideas but you can also click on the green circles to expand the keywords even more. You will be able to see a few good ideas for articles just from these keywords 'Best Survival Knives with Kit' 'Top Five Survival Knives with Firestarter' 'What are the Best Survival Knives made in the USA'.
You can see how easy it is! You can go really deep into keyword research but I prefer to get as much great content out there as possible and concentrate on the Long Tails. I don't always rate the search volumes that are given by the keyword planner, for instance I have a keyword on the 1 page of Google that the Keyword Planner tells me only has 20 searches a month, I have sold well over a $100 of this product in the last month.
Another keyword I have sitting at the 1st position on page 1 apparently gets 2,900 searches a month and I have yet to make a sale in over a month! We will revisit Keywords again once we have set up our site but our next step is to get hosting and register a domain.
Pages to have on your website:
About Us page
You already have a contact us page on your site next up is an About Us page so that people can find out more about what your site is about. Go into the Pages section of the Dashboard and add this new page.
Add a Privacy Policy Page
You will also want to add a privacy policy to your site which lets the reader know how you will use any information they give you and whether your site uses cookies. The easiest way to do this is use an online generator to create the text you need and then cut and paste it into a new page on your site. You can carry out a Google search for 'Free Privacy Policy Generators' to find them. This one is currently popular: http://www.serprank.com/privacy-policy-generator/
Add a Disclosure Policy Page
You also need to add a page that contains your disclosure policy, this lets your readers know who your website generates income. Again you can Google 'Free Disclosure Policy Generators' to find them. Here is a popular one: http://disclosurepolicy.org.
All done… time to add some content!!
Adding Content
Let's move on to adding content to your site. Google will come down hard on you if they think that you are purely an affiliate site out to make sales. They want to see that you are adding value to your visitor and that is what I am going to show you how to do here.
You will need a good mix of content, including; Informational Articles, Review Articles, Buyers Guides and Comparison Tables. You review articles will be where you have your call to actions, contextual links and links to Amazon. The other articles will all point to the review posts.
Informative articles
Let's start with the informative articles that people will find useful at the start of their 'journey'. Hopefully you will have some ideas for these articles from the Keyword Research that you carried out.
So for instance here are a few ideas I found researching keywords in the survival niche: 5 Earthquake; Safety Tips; Survival Kit Essentials; 5 survival apocalypse recipes; survival quotes from the hunger games; and how to survive a dog attack.
There are just thousands of ideas to write about and if you are ever stuck just head over to Amazon...... I went over to the Books section and typed 'Survival Books' in the search box.
There are over 1,000 books on survival so we know for sure that it is a great niche to sell in but we are looking for article ideas. If you click on the books available for the topic you are researching you will find that most of them give you the option to 'Look Inside'.
So, I have found a book; if we open it up it gives us a menu of contents and this is where we can get some great ideas. There are lots of ideas here, for instance: What Bait to use for trapping Game;
How to set up a water Trap; and 5 tips for successful Trapping.
Some of the books are less than a $1 and it might be worth buying a few to get more ideas. You don't want to steal their content but you can use their topics for outlines and rewrite it in your own words.
Structure for an Informational Article
You will see on a lot of the big sites the 5 ways to... or 7 tips, for.....these are always good articles to add to your site.
I would set them up with an Introduction, followed by the 5 or 7 points you are making and then end with a summary and a call to action, this call to action would normally link to one or more of your review pages. You can also add contextual links in the article as well.
Make sure you use headings to break the article into sections and write nice short sentences. If you don't already have an Amazon Affiliate Account you will want to make sure that you have a reasonable looking site with an About Us, Contact Us page, and then at least 10 informational articles of at least 500 words long added to your site. If Amazon thinks that your site is thin and of poor quality then you will not get approved, so make sure that you have some quality articles added before applying.
Signing Up For Your Amazon Associates Account
Now you have the basics of a site we can now apply to Amazon for an Amazon Associates account, so go to: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/. It might take a couple of days for you to be approved.
Buyers Guides
Buyer’s guides are a great editions to your site, with some sites it might be easier to find ideas for this than others. For instance, with my survival site I could add buyer’s guides to portable home generators or to survival knives. Some Sites, for instance if you have a home improvement site, it allows you to add dozens of buyers guides for all the different power tools you can buy.
Buyer's Guides help your readers understand the features that come with the products and to see which features meet their needs, and which would be a waste of money to them. Let's take a look at some examples so you can get an idea of what your Guides should include…
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cordless-drills-tool-kits/buying-
guide.htm. This is one of my favorite sites as the two ladies who run this site make thousands of dollars every month with this site and it is a great example of how a profitable Amazon site should look.http://www.only-cookware.com/cookware_buyers_guide.html. I'd suggest taking an in depth look at this site and study what they are doing.
You can also add an FAQ at the end of your buyers guide. The easiest way to do this is to go over to Yahoo Answers and see what questions are being asked about products in your niche.
Product Review Articles
These are the articles that will have your call to action banners and contextual affiliate links in. Once the visitor has read through your review hopefully they will click through to the product and buy it from Amazon. You’re probably wondering how you’re going to review these products without purchasing them and the good news is that you don’t need to spend a cent to write a really balanced and informative review that will help people decide whether they should buy or not.
You can easily find detailed information on your chosen product by visiting the product page at Amazon.com where it will have detailed information on your chosen product. It will also have the product description and the product specifications which you will add to your Descriptions and your Specifications pages.
You can copy these pages and re write them, but do not just copy them and put them on your site. You MUST re- write them and reword them so the content is unique. Customer reviews on Amazon.com are a crucial part of your research so you need to look for products that have at least ten reviews. More than twenty is better still.
The more people leaving reviews the more popular the product is, and the easier it will be for you to convert the reader into a buyer. Scroll down to the bottom of the Amazon.com page for the products you are researching and check to see if the most recent comments are positive.
When your reader clicks through this is what they will see first so it’s important for your conversion. You must provide great value to your readers if you are going to get them to click through to Amazon. Be sure to research your product and write a compelling review.
Best Place to Read Real Customer Reviews from People that own the (Product Name): Link to reviews page on Amazon (you can even tell them how many reviews it has)
Craft an engaging and eye-catching title
You can just go with Product XXX Review but try to add a number of other review articles with more catchy titles You want people to read your review, so you need to grab their attention and let them know that your review will help them decide whether the product is right for them or not.
Here are some examples once again using the Survival and Homesteading Niche.
• Buying the perfect Survival Knife for Jungle Survival • What to look for when buying Knives for A Survivalist • Choosing the perfect Survival Knife for you • Why buy Survival Knife X instead of Survival Knife Y? • 3 uses for a Flashlight you might not have thought of • The ultimate guide to buying Survival Knives • What you should consider when buying a Survival Knife • Most popular gifts for Survivalists • Top Five Survival Knives on the Market • Searching for A Survival Knife? We have the answers…
Other key components to include in your review: At least one image of the product – people like to see what they are buying. If you can add in more images, from other angles, or showing the product in use then that’s even better.
A Buy Now button – Add a Buy Now button that links through to the Amazon information page. I like to have a mixture of text links and buttons to encourage people to click through. Add a Related
YouTube Video – YouTube are owned by Google so it doesn't hurt to have a video embedded on you review post. Ideally you will want a video of the product from the manufacturer.
Just be careful not to use a video that is openly promoting the product, otherwise you could lose your reader to another website and lose the sale!
Comparison– If the product is expensive compared to other models then you can help the reader justify the cost. For instance it might have more features or might be more robust or have more longevity than cheaper models. Other reviews– Check out some of the reviews and Paraphrase a couple of them in your articles, for instance you could say John from Texas mentioned that Product X was really easy to install, you can read more about what he says about the installation process here....
If it has been rated by a Consumer Body or won an award then say that too. You are helping the potential purchaser to validate their purchase, and the best validation comes from other people who have used the product.
Make sure that you don't just copy and paste customer reviews from Amazon.com as this is also against their Terms of Service.
Length of your Review - usually the longer the review the higher the conversion rate. You should ideally be looking at least 800 words but the longer the better. Obviously without too much waffling!
Adding Amazon links to your posts: Don't go crazy adding links on these posts as Google will penalize your site. A good ratio is 1 link to 1 post or page on your site. So for instance if you have a buying guide, 5 informational posts and 3 review posts, that is a total of 9 affiliate links that you can add. I would add 3 links to each of the review posts.
So now you have a site set up all ready to make money!
But remember this is an on going project you can't just sit back. Do the Work. The key to future success with this project is that you need to spend some time working on your website each and every month. You need to be adding a steady stream of good quality content to your site, which will please both your readers and the Search Engines. You need get into a routine and make it a habit to work on your site at set times every day. I understand that you might be busy with Work or Family commitments but instead of sitting in front of TV every night commit to an hour or two to work on adding to your site.
Informational Articles – Aim to publish two informative articles on your website each month. Don’t forget these should be at least 800 words long. You might like to write them both on the same day and then use the schedule function in the Post Dashboard to have them publish two weeks apart.
Buyer's Guides - Try and add at least one a month, obviously depending on what your site is about this may be easier for some than others.
Reviews – Try and write two good quality review a months because a good quality review is where you are going to make your income. Once again make sure that you write at least 800 words of quality content.
Remember you can always outsource your reviews to free up time if you have the funds The main thing is consistency, try to get in the habit of adding the minimum amount of content I have mentioned above. You don't have to stop there you can add more content if you have the time, just make sure it is great quality.
Taking Advantage of the Holiday Season
Now let's have a look at how you can use content to cash in on the Holiday season. Ask any Amazon Affiliate and they will tell you that October, November, and December are when their commissions sky rocket! It Starts with Halloween, then Thanksgiving and Black Friday and then of course Christmas.
I also make sure that I hit the Health and Fitness Market as well when everyone is making their New Years Resolutions! You need to make sure that plan in advance for this period and have your content in place and indexed in Google. The great thing about Christmas is that everyone is buying and every year more and more people are doing their shopping online.
They also don't buy just one item they will buy their complete shopping list of presents in one go from Amazon and you will get the commissions on everything that they buy! A lot more people are shopping online on Black Friday as well which comes the day after Thanksgiving. I know of marketers who have made Thousands of dollars in just a couple of days over the Black Friday weekend sales. Black Friday is followed up on the Monday by Cyber Monday so this is another one to look out for.
Note: if you live outside United States and you want to own a Bank of America current account that you use to withdraw and receive money/payments for services online, I will recommend you to register for a Payoneer account using the link below:
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