If you are looking at where to buy an amazon affiliate website and what to watch out for this post is for you.

A few weeks ago as the stay at home orders were setting in we had a discussion internally about what new problem existed that we were uniquely capable of solving. From that discussion, EssentialGoods.org was born. 

As mentioned on several earlier posts I believe there has never been a time in our lives where the rate of problem creation has been greater and if you are able to solve a problem it is needed! 

TODAY – April 28, 2020 – We are live on ProductHunt and would love your feedback. Currently, we are in the top 5 trending products for the day!

Visit Us on ProductHunt Here

To better understand EssentialGoods.org here is a video I did with Conor the developer…

What is EssentialGoods? 

EssentialGoods.org provides an SMS text alert when a product you want that was out of stock comes back in stock.

• First, if you go to Amazon to purchase some essentials (education book for your kids, bread making yeast and hair dye) – then realize they are all currently out of stock
  • You can enter a re-stock alert email from Amazon but it will be delayed
• Signup at EssentialGoods.org and either select from a pre-screened list of common essentials like masks and sanitzer or add your custom essential product
• Receive a text message as soon as the product comes back in stock to be able to purchase quickly 

Initially, it does this for Amazon but will be adding additional online stores in the coming week(s).  

Who is this for?

It is for anyone who is looking to purchase products on Amazon that are currently out of stock. 

From common essentials like masks and hand sanitizer to less common dietary favorites. 

We have seen people using it for trending products like airpods and nintendo switch. 

We decided to make it free during COVID-19 impact for those most at risk including frontline medical professionals and a free trial for everyone else. 

Who Built It & Why?

Conor the lead developer at adbank.network identified the opportunity and quickly built it. The team at ContentRefined.com helped with the research into products and the buyer guides. 

The marketing coordination was handled by the adbank marketing team and specifically Catherine. 

The entire team felt there was a need that if we could help address one small problem around the stress of finding out when a product was back in stock it would be a worthwhile activity. 

How Does it Give Back?

It was important for us to ensure that we were giving back in a meaningful way. For that reason we are doing several things with our inventory restock alert app. 

• Free for frontline medical workers
• Free for senior citizens
• Free trial for everyone
• 5% of any profits to our local hospital foundation – https://cgmhf.com/

When and How Often Does Amazon Restock Items?

The Amazon machine is constantly running unloading shipments and restocking. In addition products can be out of stock on Amazon while shipments are moving between warehouses. So products can come back into stock at any time. 

If it is an essential product sign up for an alert service like essentialgoods.org or if you are prime member and it isn’t critical then Amazon has a free inventory restock alert email. 

Can this Be Used for Popular Products?

When will Amamzon restock nintendo switch or Amazon airpods? As mentioned above this can happen at any time. 

Yes, despite essentialgoods being built for products related to COVID-19 it is being used by people to receive alerts for popular consumer products that are out of stock and sell out quickly when they are restocked, such as Nintendo Switch. 

Interested in following this strategy? Pickup a pre-built turnkey Amazon Affiliate site HERE (limited quantity and often sold-out but you can get on the wait list!)

This case study is hopefully the most actionable 12 month affiliate site case study ever published. The goal is to break down what was done over 52 weeks to show you exactly how we grew a website to over 11,000 unique visitors per month (revealing all the numbers down to the # of posts and blog posts made!).

Monetization Comment – This business was started with the intent of creating an Amazon Affiliate site to then push the sales of a physical product we would source. With my Amazon Associate account getting suspended it hurt this sites earnings A LOT! So definitely the earnings are not very impressive but the traffic results are.

Why drop a case study as ONE big post… one of the issues with case studies is that sometimes keeping the pace moving on the case study is difficult by keeping this quiet until I was ready to publish an entire years worth of updates with data it should be a useful complete read.

The story of this site is summed up in the one graph below… great traffic growth but with the Amazon Associate account getting suspended it was hard to repeat the $/visitor we did with Amazon.

4 Main Methods Used on the Site

During the process of building out the site, we focused on 4 particular methods that helped to steer the site in the right direction. The idea with this case study was to do something a little different and stick to only a handful of tactics and document every single little step then only reveal the results once I was ready to publish a BIG case study post like this!

Great Keyword Research, Niche Research, and Solid Initial Site

Starting out with a great site was very important. Both the sitemap, initial content and site creation is important for our strategy.

• Resource – Turnkey Affiliate Sites (often sold out) or Custom Affiliate Sites
• Resource – How to build an Amazon affiliate site

Blog Commenting

Each week we try to do 5+ blog comments. This is simply going to articles that are relevant to the niche/topic and leaving a comment on their site. The key is, when you leave a good useful comment, you also leave your URL which will be linked to your name once published. Although these are nofollow links, we still believe they hold some value. If you are interested in learning more about blog commenting you should read this article.

• Resource – Blog comment and guest post campaign procedure to follow (we never ended up doing any guest posting)

Article Posting

Each week I try to keep the site fresh by adding an article. Each article I create follows the ContentRefined process to ensure quality. If you are interested in learning more about the ContentRefined process you can go here.

• Resource – How to systematically create great content! (the ultimate guide to content creation at NichePursuits.com)
• Resource – Done for You Content Marketing at ContentRefined.com

Use My PBN Links

At the start of building the site I worked on getting 1-2 links per week for our Use My PBN service, but after a few months I wanted to dial it down a bit and do 1 every other week. Use My PBN is a service I created where I built up a large network of PBN sites that have on average DA25 and PA30.  I have seen good improvements with our sites as well as our clients sites when using these links. If you are interested in learning more about this service you can do so here.

• Resource – How to build a PBN
• Resource – Use My PBN

Editorial Links

Before starting this site, we had not used the editorial link building root, so we decided we wanted to try it out a few times. This is the process of getting backlinks from sites such as lifehack.org, huffingtonpost.com (now nofollow links), engadget.com etc. These links hold a lot of power as they come from some of the best sites on the internet, and when you have a link from it to your money site, Google really likes it. If you are interested in learning more about our editorial links you can find out more here.

• Resource – Sometimes getting Videos Created can help make the site look better and allow more editorial links to be published – Buy links on major editorial sites here 

 

Month by Month Update – In the section below I will a month by month update showing eactly what we did to built the site.

March  2016

Last March, my project manager came up to me and asked if we could build a site around a niche that she had been doing keyword research around. After taking a look at the niche, the competition and the keywords I decided it would be a worthwhile venture to take on with the intent of growing the affiliate site and then turning it into an Amazon FBA business. During this month we dug into keyword research more and found a handle of keywords that were low competition. We then took a few of those keywords and created 20 articles around them. We knew that the niche was going to involve a few silos so we planned to get 5 articles created per silo.

	3/20/2016
Blog comments	0
Article posted	0
Use My PBN	0
Editorial	0
Total Keywords	0
Keywords under 20	0
Keywords under 35	0
Organic Traffic	0
Monetization	$0.00

April 2016

In April, we started to plan out how we were going to build and structure the site. We picked out a theme (Luxe – from Thrive Themes) and worked on getting it up and running. We then added the 20 articles (5 articles per each silo) to the side and gave it the proper category tag. For the menu, we added each category tag as its own. For the homepage, we added a monster post on the main keyword we wanted to rank for with internal links to the main pages for each silo.

After 2 weeks of the site being up, we started to do some off page as well as adding more content. For off page we were able to get 37 blog comments made.

During the last week 2 weeks of the month we started ranking and getting organic traffic to the site. By the end of the month we were able to get 42 organic searches to the site while ranking for 15 keywords.

	4/17/2016	4/24/2016	5/1/2016
Blog comments	7	15	15
Article posted	20	5	0
Use My PBN	0	0	0
Editorial	0	0	0
Total Keywords	5	8	15
Keywords under 20	0	0	0
Keywords under 35	0	1	2
Organic Traffic	6	15	21
Monetization	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00

May 2016

In May, we wanted to continue on April’s upwards momentum so we did more content, backlinks and blog commenting. During this month we saw a great increase in the amount of keywords we were ranking for. We went from 42 organic traffic last month to a total of 171 this month. This month we added in an editorial link and 4 links from the Use My PBN service which had a great impact on our keywords and their rankings. We also were able to work on the internal linking structure of the site as we didn’t have to many in place during the previous months.

	5/8/2016	5/15/2016	5/23/2016	5/30/2016
Blog comments	10	10	13	9
Article posted	0	4	2	0
Use My PBN	0	0	2	2
Editorial	0	1	0	0
Total Keywords	56	116	225	350
Keywords under 20	0	0	0	0
Keywords under 35	12	28	45	70
Organic Traffic	29	56	44	34
Monetization	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00

June 2016

This month we had some great breakthroughs with our keywords and having some of them jumping to the top 20. One of the main keywords we are trying to rank went from 28th to 11th this month. Near the tail end of the month we started making our first few dollars with the site. This month we also were able to reach 356 organic searches which is just about double of last month.

	6/5/2016	6/12/2016	6/19/2016	6/26/2016
Blog comments	12	9	10	9
Article posted	2	2	2	2
Use My PBN	1	1	1	1
Editorial	1	0	0	0
Total Keywords	495	702	776	905
Keywords under 20	0	20	35	41
Keywords under 35	112	164	176	228
Organic Traffic	44	53	99	105
Monetization	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	$32.80

July 2016

This month we had a few down weeks put near the end of the month it started picking back up and improving again. This month we saw that a lot of our traffic was landing on a particular article and was getting click throughs to amazon on a specific product so we decided to think about getting our own similar product created. Again this month we saw a doubling of organic searches from last month, going from 356 to 725. Another one of our keywords had a good ranking increase over the month going from 32nd to 15th position.

	7/3/2016	7/10/2016	7/17/2016	7/24/2016	7/31/2016
Blog comments	15	20	10	5	17
Article posted	2	2	2	2	2
Use My PBN	1	1	0	1	1
Editorial	0	0	0	0	0
Total Keywords	941	945	969	1,111	1,531
Keywords under 20	37	38	38	41	81
Keywords under 35	251	256	256	281	426
Organic Traffic	124	73	99	238	253
Monetization	$1.50	$8.90	$1.01	$2.01	$2.27

August 2016

In the month of August we had a few positives to touch on. We had good growth with monetization from Amazon. Our rankings also had a positive uptick by increasing the number of keywords we are ranking by over 200.

We also started to look at outsourcing our product and looked on Alibaba. When looking at the best way to go about getting a company and your product created, we followed Scott Voelker’s and his article on how to find and source private label products. If you haven’t read it and are looking at getting  into the FBA business it would be a great resource.

	8/7/2016	8/14/2016	8/21/2016	8/28/2016
Blog comments	13	10	12	10
Article posted	2	2	2	0
Use My PBN	1	1	0	1
Editorial	0	1	0	0
Total Keywords	1,609	1,613	1,619	1,947
Keywords under 20	87	90	92	101
Keywords under 35	445	450	450	501
Organic Traffic	278	310	446	494
Monetization	$6.65	$5.88	$18.77	$34.09

6 Month Update (March 2016 – August 2016)

	Total over last 6 months
Blog comments	231
Article posted	55
Use My PBN	14
Editorial	3
Total Keywords	1,619
Keywords under 20	101
Keywords under 35	501
Organic Traffic	2,821
Monetization	$113.91

September 2016

This month had a few negatives and a few positives. This month we made progress with our product outsourcing. We got 4 quotes back from suppliers and we created a weighted matrix chart to decide which ones we wanted to get samples from. We even got two samples, however one was a no right away.

We saw good growth this month in terms of monetization, however by the last week of the month our Amazon account got banned and so we lost a good source of revenue that we were hoping to have.

This month we also did a bit of design change on the site. The homepage, which once was a monster blog post is now laid out with videos, images and small descriptions on each of the silos our site talks about. We also added a call to action button that takes people to the monster post.

	9/4/2016	9/11/2016	9/18/2016	9/25/2016
Blog comments	11	9	10	8
Article posted	2	2	2	1
Use My PBN	0	0	0	0
Editorial	0	0	0	1
Total Keywords	1,947	2,044	2,556	2,002
Keywords under 20	147	159	247	184
Keywords under 35	605	651	914	681
Organic Traffic	582	633	661	812
Monetization	$35.83	$25.45	$24.76	$9.53

October 2016

This month I was able to get an average 156 organic visitors per day. When looking at the metrics for the site, I found that we had made some good progress, Page Authority 36 Domain Authority 25 Citation Flow 26 and Trust Flow 23.

We were having a LOT of issues with sizing for our product, we are still working with the one company to come up with a solution to solve this problem.

	10/2/2016	10/9/2016	10/16/2016	10/23/2016	10/30/2016
Blog comments	7	9	6	8	10
Article posted	1	1	1	2	2
Use My PBN	0	1	0	0	1
Editorial	0	0	0	0	0
Total Keywords	2,233	2,452	2,919	3,032	3,153
Keywords under 20	210	248	350	362	380
Keywords under 35	780	780	1,069	1,115	1,127
Organic Traffic	976	1,114	1,121	1,093	1,099
Monetization	$22.96	$23.38	$45.70	$27.48	$41.28

One of our main keywords went from 8th to 3rd this month.

November 2016

Monetization for the month also hit a new high at $164.04 (despite loosing Amazon Associates account!). This month we found a solution to the sizing issues on our outsourced product. I also hired a graphic designer to create the packaging design for the product.

	11/6/2016	11/13/2016	11/20/2016	11/27/2016
Blog comments	6	5	7	5
Article posted	1	1	1	1
Use My PBN	0	1	0	1
Editorial	0	0	0	0
Total Keywords	3,220	3,354	3,399	3,594
Keywords under 20	400	434	461	515
Keywords under 35	1,250	1,187	1,222	1,313
Organic Traffic	1,250	1,159	1,352	1,694
Monetization	$42.18	$38.00	$44.17	$39.69

December 2016

Almost increased the keywords I was ranking for by 1,000 in one week. As expected from a December month the monetization had some good weeks.

I also order 600 units of the product FINALLY! The product will take about a month to complete. We also incorporated the new business and signed up on Amazon Seller. In order to get the barcodes for the product I had to buy GTINS from GS1. The product is being shipped to a third party company in the US where they will be labelled with their barcodes and sent to Amazon.

	12/4/2016	12/11/2016	12/18/2016	12/26/2016
Blog comments	6	5	6	5
Article posted	1	1	1	1
Use My PBN	0	1	0	0
Editorial	0	1	0	0
Total Keywords	3,683	3,714	4,691	5,345
Keywords under 20	540	552	664	767
Keywords under 35	1,364	1,377	1,686	1,896
Organic Traffic	1,828	1,815	1,934	1,743
Monetization	$35.03	$66.34	$98.33	$67.98

January 2017

Every day this month the site had received over 250 organic visitors. The site now reached over 6,000 keywords that it is ranking for, 845 of which are below 20.

The site has not been collecting any email addresses so for next month I decided to make that a priority, especially with our product being released soon.

Our product landed in USA and we asked for 3 units to be sent to us so that I can get pictures done and the listing created. I also got the shipping labels created and mailed to the company so that they can send the boxes with the units to Amazon.

	1/1/2017	1/9/2017	1/15/2016	1/22/2016	1/29/2017
Blog comments	5	7	5	6	5
Article posted	2	1	2	1	1
Use My PBN	0	1	0	1	0
Editorial	0	0	0	0	0
Total Keywords	5,525	5,525	5,721	5,986	6,001
Keywords under 20	786	786	792	822	845
Keywords under 35	1,936	1,936	1,948	2,012	2,041
Organic Traffic	2,283	2,558	2,500	2,609	2,785
Monetization	$59.93	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00	$15.09

February 2017

This month we were focusing on Amazon and getting everything setup. We ran into some issues with the shipping labels not being correct as the product was over the weight limit that the shipping label said.

The email list has been going well, the site now has an email list of 145 people. Later down the road we will be doing a free giveaway promotion with the audience and the email list.

	2/5/2017	2/12/2017	2/19/2017	2/26/2017
Blog comments	0	2	6	0
Article posted	1	2	1	1
Use My PBN	0	1	0	1
Editorial	0	0	0	0
Total Keywords	6,249	6,402	6,512	6,884
Keywords under 20	882	907	907	964
Keywords under 35	2,112	2,138	2,167	2,222
Organic Traffic	2,543	2,522	2,466	2,809
Monetization	$14.19	$10.57	$21.00	$18.96

12 Month Update

Overall in the last 12 months the site has been doing well. Not so much in terms of monetization as the site took a hit when my account was banned from Amazon.

However the traffic is growing and the amount of keywords the site is ranking for grows each week. Hopefully once the product goes live on Amazon there will be some traction and a few sales.

	Total over last 6 months
Blog comments	390
Article posted	89
Use My PBN	23
Editorial	5
Total Keywords	6,884
Keywords under 20	964
Keywords under 35	2,222
Organic Traffic	123,753
Monetization	$941.71

Traffic over the last 12 months:

Conclusion

We will do more updates in the future on this site and how the FBA part of it is going. This site should continue to grow with the continued weekly effort of editorial links, Use My PBN links, blog commenting and content plan by following the ContentRefined structure.

If you have any questions on anything in this case study please let me know!

Want to know the EXACT impact the changes to the Amazon Associate Commissions will have on your site?

See the 2020 April Amazon Affiliate Earnings update

With the new changes how much money are you going to lose or more are you going to make moving forward?

With the help of some geniuses I have put together a tool that will show you quickly and easily the exact impact on your account!

What Would Have Been The Impact For Me?

For Nov & Dec Only I Would Have Had a 24% Drop in Earnings!

Find out how much your earnings will be impacted by, it takes under 5 minutes and you can stop guessing at the impact!

CLICK HERE – DOWNLOAD FREE SPREADSHEET

1. Download Spreadsheet
2. Download Earnings Report From Amazon
3. Upload Earnings Report to Spreadsheet
4. Let the Spreadsheet Do Its Thing & Immediatly See How Much Your Sites Earnings Will Drop OR Grow By!

I like to say it is pointless discussing a hypothetical impact when the data is available to know. The data above is from my account in Nov and Dec 2015. This post and tool will show you the exact impact these changes will have for you and your site and hope will add some data to the discussions which are occuring online now!

Amazon Affiliate Program Change:

On Feb 23^rd Amazon announced a very big change to the Amazon Associate program. Moving forward instead of having a tiered commission structure people now will have a flat structure defined by category and not related to the volume they drive.

Change is a constant with Amazon. This post covers the topic of the earnings update. If you want to stay up to date with Amazon Affiliate Disclosure checkout this guide.

Before:

From – https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies#Associates Program Fee Statement

Variable Standard Program Fee Rates

With a very limited segment of categories at a lower commission…

Amazon Associate Commissions as of March 1^st 2017

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/compare

So the bottom line is that many products will now get a flat 4% vs what might have been 8.50% if you were doing substantial volume.

So How Will this Affect You and Each of Your Sites?

Fee Change Calculator Tutorial:

Now that you know what the change is… the potentially million dollar question (if your site is big enough) is what will be the change to your earnings?

This tool will allow you to upload your data from your Amazon Associates account and determine what your earnings would be under the old vs new commission structures.

You will see if this policy was in place for whatever time period you select what your earnings would have been.

DOWNLOAD THE FREE SPREADSHEET

• Step 1 – Login to your Amazon Associate Account
• Step 2 – Got To Reports

• Step 3 – Select Download Reports

• Step 4 – Select Timeline You Want to Analyze (suggest picking trailing 12 months)

• Step 5 – Wait For It To Download & Download It

• Step 6 – Open The Free Tool I Sent To You (

click here to get it

)

(Important – Enable Editing and Enable Content)

• Step 7 – Open The Downloaded Report

• Step 8 – Copy the entire “Fee-Earnings” tab

• Step 9 – Paste the entire “Fee-Earnings” tab into the tab specified on the tool

• Step 10 – Go Back to The Instructions Tab Hit The “SHOW ME THE IMPACT” button

• Step 11 – See Your Results & Analzye!

Who Will This Change Help?

• This will help the little guy starting out in some niches since now from day 1 you have the same earning potential as much larger sellers.
• Hopefully this will help everyone by having another player become more competitive in terms of a true Amazon Affiliate Alternative (jet/walmart?)
• Affiliates in Arkansas (random but Arkansas residents can now participate)

Who Will This Change Hurt?

• Any seller heavily focused on a specific niche… toys or PC Components
• Buyers/Sellers who just either bought or sold a winner or a loser with this shakeup will be impacted
• From the math it looks like most large Amazon Affiliate site owners will take a hit.

How Will This Impact Website Valuations?

Who knows, we will have a month where this gets talked about and the sale of site will likely slow then a process for establishing fair value (hopefully this tool will help that) and things will be back to normal soon I predict.

I predict many of the brokerages will have content coming out soon commenting on how they will handle this change (EmpireFlippers, QuietLight, FEInternational etc).

5 Clever Ways to Benefit From This Change:

First, don’t over-react. Things will be back to normal soon and even though I believe this will ultimately take money out of affiliates pockets and into Amazons the change is not substantial enough that there will be a mass exit from Amazon Associate Sites.

Additionally whenever there are changes it provides a unique opportunity. Here are 6 clever ways you can benefit from this change…

1. Focus your websites content on products related to your site that get a higher commission. If you run a video game review website that makes money via Amazon start focusing content around digital video games and make 10X more for each dollar spent! (great time to signup to a content service that does this keyword research for you!)
2. If you are an FBA seller than position your product into a category with a higher commission so it will be easier to recruit affiliates. For example a toy makeup kit could (maybe?) be luxury beauty product (depending on being a gated category) changing the attractiveness of an affiliate promoting it from 2% to 10%! (obviously do at your own risk since I am sure Amazon will crack down on people abusing this). This example is a little extreme but look at the example below regarding standing desks attachments being furniture vs PC Components.
3. Using the tool I have provided here spot an arbitrage opportunity with a website for sale that will perform better moving forward. For example if there is a home / lawn & garden niche site that was only at the 6.5% commission level it would likely now have most products at the 8% level. If you can identify those sites that are selling at a discount relative to expected future earnings you can scoop a deal at an 18% discount.
4. Buying sites where you know there is a good alternative monetization method. For example if you have a PC component website and have a method of monetizing the site that outperformed Amazon then there will likely be Amazon Affiliate site owners who would be happy to sell at a discount. For example if you run an ecommerce shop in the IPhone/PC Cable space you can likely buy some websites that will drive traffic to your store at a substantial discount to what you could have 1 week ago. This applies for people in the FBA space wanting to pick up an affiliate site to drive sales to their physical product, those websites may have just gotten cheaper for the same traffic depending on the niche.
5. If you are building a new site (or getting an Amazon Affiliate Site built for you) focus on niches that have products that get a higher commission. This will be a temporary opening as others will do the same thing driving up competition for the keywords in the higher commission categories of Amazon.
6. For most people this is one action they should do! Review all your most important pages to see if the product you are promoting is in a low commission category vs a high commission category. For example you will be 4X better off promoting a standing desk converter in the furniture category then a standing desk in the PC components category. For example look at the 2 products below they look similar but on one you will earn a 2% (or 4%) commission and on the other you will earn an 8% commission on (Furniture).

How Will This Impact Your Site?

Please use the tool and comment below/take the survey on how this will impact your site! Do you have any ideas on how to benefit from this change?

Today you will get to see exactly how to setup an amazon affiliate websites on wordpress with great looking and high converting pages.

Here is how to make some of the best looking and well converting amazon affiliate pages I have seen and today we are lucky enough to have person responsible for these pages share exactly how he does it.
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