This was my first Prime day as an affiliate marketer and I am happy with the results. As promised, I am going to share everything I did to make $1000+ on Prime day 2017. You can apply the same tips for any other upcoming sales including Black Friday.

As always, I am not going to share any URLs in this article. If you believe you can’t learn without seeing the websites under discussion, you just can’t.

To avoid any confusions, I’d like to make few things clear for you.

There were a total of 3 websites and 2 Amazon accounts that were involved on Prime day. Website 1 brought in the major amount of sales and it was using Amazon account 1. The websites 2 and 3 were using Amazon account 2. Reasons these websites use different Amazon accounts is because the website 1 is co-owned by another partner as well, so I am using their account.

Website 1 (Amazon Account 1) – $16,253 in Sales

Websites 2,3 (Amazon Account 2) – $7,313 in Sales

There are two major things that I did and I am going to explain in detail.

1. Benefit from Existing Traffic

I had ~150 daily visitors on website 1, ~200 on website 2 and less than 100 on site 3. Your main goal on prime day should be to make maximum people click on your affiliate links. Once a user has clicked your link to Amazon, your job is done. Almost everyone has something in cart on prime day and the chances of people buying through your links are high. So make sure your goal is make maximum people click on your affiliate links.

But how?

So I came across a post in a FB group, The Cloud Living Community, where Rahul Yadav, a very active group member shared a previous year post from Will Blears. The post had some useful tips on how to maximize your earnings on Prime day. Of all tips, there was one that said to use a Hello Bar or some other sticky bar on your website directing your visitors to Amazon deals page.

I went ahead and designed a sticky bar but with some added creativity. I added a countdown timer in an attempt to leverage scarcity marketing. It turned out really well and I am going to explain how I did it.

Luckily, I had membership of Thrive Ultimatum. It’s a scarcity marketing plugin for WordPress that boosts your conversion rates. And you don’t really need to be a tech geek to implement this. It’s as easy as it gets. Simple drag n drop builder and you can setup a beautiful countdown timer within 5 minutes.

Here is what I did:

When Do I Start Displaying the Countdown Timer?

My timer didn’t start appearing on my website when prime day started. It was actually already there before prime day began; 10 hours before Prime day to be exact.

Why?

I just didn’t want to lose the traffic day before Prime day. So any clicks in those 10 hours might still help me grab commissions on Prime day sales in the first 14 hours. (24 hours cookie). I basically had a separate countdown timer for pre-prime day hype that said something like this:

Key Takeaways

2. Drive More Traffic

There was no SEO involved in driving the extra traffic on Prime day. 100% traffic was social acquired through different platforms that I am going to explain below.

But let’s take a look at Prime day traffic:

See that sharp curve? My regular daily traffic is 150-200 visitors on average whereas the website received around 5000 sessions on Prime day. More than 70% of traffic came through social platforms. Take a look.

And here is a real-time traffic snapshot I was able to capture:

What Pages Did I Create?

I had no idea about how prime day deals work. At first, I simply created a page with best deals that I thought I’d update when Prime day starts.

But when it started, I realized most deals are lightning deals i.e. they last for 3-4 hours only. So I changed my strategy and tried to find deals that were going to last till end of Prime day or atleast 12 hours.

I went ahead and created a new deals with page. That was it about creating content. Next is leveraging social platforms to drive traffic to these pages.

Promoting on Social Platforms

Facebook

One of the products I was promoting has a dedicated group on Facebook with more than 400k members. And luckily, they do allow posts with affiliate links. This was a major win and traffic from this group was totally surprising. I shared my post in some other groups as well which also helped.

Reddit

Reddit is the 9th most visited website in the United States (Source). I already knew a lot of bloggers leveraging this platform to drive traffic but never gave it a try. So on Prime day, I dropped my link in a couple of sub-reddits and results were amazing. 729 sessions through reddit. There are a lot of sub-reddits related to prime day deals as well where you can post your links.

Stumbleupon

102 sessions came through Stumbleupon. All I did was submitted my link on Stumbleupon. Your page is initially displayed to 3-4 visitors and the more thumbs up it receives, the bigger audience it reaches. So you need to create a deals page that people find interesting.

Key Takeaways

Just like Prime day, you can use same tips to benefit from some of the biggest sales of the year including Black Friday and Christmas sales. Let me know if you’ve any questions.

The post How I made $1000 in Commissions on Amazon Prime Day 2017 appeared first on AQIBNAZIR.COM.

Hello Everyone!

I haven’t posted anything in a long time as I’ve been busy with my affiliate websites. This post details exactly what I did to build and grow my first affiliate website to $1000/month. Expect no fluff in this post as I really don’t have time for that. Everything will be straight-forward and to the point. If you’ve any questions, feel free to drop your comments.

A Brief Overview

Let’s start with data first.

May 2017 Earnings

This was my first ever affiliate website that I started back in September 2016. Yes, call me a newbie. The website made it’s first 70 cents in October and then next 5 bucks in November. Here is the earnings data to date:

Here are some of the key stages explained in detail:

1. Keyword Research

I didn’t waste a lot of time in keyword research. In fact, I accidentally hit this niche and found it through someone’s Facebook timeline. Before that time, I had no idea about how keyword research works. You won’t believe but I actually setup my website right after I came across the niche. All I looked at was search volume (5k+ Average Monthly Searches) and product price ($90-$200).

I had no idea how to do a competitor analysis and what it takes to rank a website. But once my first round up post was live, that was when I learned I should do keyword research. I used KWFinder and Ahrefs keywords explorer to analyze keyword difficulty and then discover more related keywords in that niche. Ahrefs is better at checking keyword difficulty, but it’s expensive for beginners. So I find KWFinder economical and useful at the same time.

Please note that if you’re solely relying on metrics from these tools to make your decisions, you are mistaken. I mostly use KWFinder for finding more keywords in a niche. I do look at the keyword difficulty values, but that’s where my research begins. Manually evaluate search results. Analyze your competitors, their on-page, off-page and everything they’ve done to rank. Only then you’ll be able to decide if you should be aiming for this keyword or not.

If ^^that’s your excuse for not starting a niche website, join the NicheHacks Facebook Group. This group is owned by Stuart Walker from NicheHacks who is a famous internet marketer. You will find 100’s of niche website ideas if you read his blog and follow FB group closely. I’ve started 2 new websites recently and NicheHacks FB group is where I discovered those niches.

Tools used

Key Takeaways

2. Domain and Hosting

I went with a partial match domain. Back then, I had no idea about EMDs (exact-match domains), PMDs (partial-match domains) and branded domains. I just thought it was a good name and I went with it, without thinking of any SEO aspects. But now, I prefer going with branded domains.

I see a lot of people wasting too much time on this step. Please don’t. Come up with any name and move on to the real thing. I got a domain for $12 and hosting for $9 at Namecheap. A really good hosting package for getting started. You can host up-to 3 websites which is great. Though I have started hosting my new websites on Siteground now. Expensive, but better in a longer run.

But if you are a beginner, don’t bother investing too much on hosting if you have limited funds. Save that money and spend on more important stuff like content and links.

Services used

Key Takeaways

3. Content

If someone told you content is king, that’s true 100%. Good content is extremely vital to the success of your website. A well-written piece connects with readers and definitely converts well. You can outsource your content or write it yourself if you don’t have enough funds.

I didn’t have enough funds but I took a different approach. I partnered with a content writer and offered her a percentage in the ownership. There are endless possibilities when you want to get things done. All that’s needed is your desire to take action.

I told my writer to write more content than what our competitors on page 1 had. So we went with 3k+ words approx. This was published on the homepage. There was nothing else published for the next month.

Then I published another round-up in November. And the website has total 5 money posts (2500+ words) and 4 informative articles (500+ words) as we speak.

Don’t under-estimate the important of OnPage SEO. I didn’t know much about it until I came across few of the best internet marketers; Matt Diggity from Diggity Marketing and Charles Floate. Trust me, I was so sick of information overload and trying random bullshit from the internet until I found them. Both these guys really know their stuff and all their advice is based on real data and rigorous testing. I haven’t directly interacted with any of them but they all make a huge contribution towards the success of my affiliate website(s). Go read their on-page SEO guides and make sure you implement it right.

Key Takeaways

4. Off-site SEO

Being a beginner, I wasn’t aware of maintaining anchor text ratios, link velocity and all that technical stuff. I read somewhere to reverse-engineer the competition and replicate. I did the same. So one of the main competitor was having around 300 links. 90% of the links were blog comments with exact-match anchor text. I replicated. (I’ll never do that again, even though it worked well back then).

I spent some time in acquiring scholarship links as well. Like I sent out 25-30 emails and was able to secure 4 good edu links. I found it daunting later on and stopped. Now that everyone seems to be doing this, I don’t see any value though some people might disagree.

Next, I did some guest posts on a couple of websites like all those famous self-publishing platforms including HuffPost, RebelMouse, Medium, etc. And again, I was blatant with anchors. The website was stuck at page 5. Later in November, someone told me about Hatred, a vendor on Konker. That was the game-changer actually. I got 10 links from him. He didn’t only deliver excellent links but also suggested anchor text changes for my order. (I was going exact-match again :P). After Hatred’s links and kind advice, I did some more guest posts with long tail anchors and tried to diversify my anchor profile.

Now if you ask me about final anchor-text distribution, here is how it looks like:

My site was probably sandboxed until February and it picked up after that. I didn’t maintain a good link velocity and went hard on exact-match anchors. This is something I avoid now and you should too.

Services used

Key Takeaways

Summing it up

This website was crazy beginning to a fruitful journey. I have started more than 5 websites after this and almost all are a success. There are a couple that have crazy success stories. One of them was actually setup on a $5 expired domain and it made a whopping $1000 within a month. If I find time any sooner, I will write a blog sharing more details about that website.

I have tried my best to write down all that popped up in my mind. Still, I am sure there’s details I might have missed. If you’ve any questions, feel free to ask and I’d love to answer.

The post First Amazon Affiliate Website: $0 to $1000/Month appeared first on AQIBNAZIR.COM.