How I Made $32,000 - Niche Site Azon

How I Made $32,000In 12 Months

With Amazon Niche Sites

4/24/2015 How I Made $32,000 in 12 Months with Amazon Niche Sites (And Why They Still Work) | Niche Site Azon

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How I Made $32,000 in 12 Months with Amazon Niche Sites (AndWhy They Still Work)

Over the past 12 months, I have made $32,000 in affiliate income with Amazon niche websites.

I decided to start this website to document and share my strategies, tactics, and resources that helped me earn that(mostly) passive income by building and growing Amazon niche websites.

Here is how I did it.

NOTE: This post is more than 6,000 words long. If you’d like to read a PDF version in an easiertoread format, thenclick the button below for your free copy.

DOWNLOAD THE PDF

First, Some Results

A lot of gurus tell you how to make money online without actually making any real money online themselves. Sobefore I get to my thoughts on why Amazon niche sites are the best way for someone to get started making moneyonline today, and how exactly I've been able to do it, I wanted to provide just a couple of screenshots from myAmazon account.

What you're looking at here is my Amazon sales from this past December, my best month ever (thank you,Christmas season). After accounting for a few minor wedding registry signups that aren't represented here, my totalactually hit just over $5,000 for this one month.

It's not just the Christmas season when I've been able to earn decent income, either. This screenshot above is takenfrom a last month, March 2015, where I earned over $3,500 with Amazon niche sites.

If you want to see all of my Amazon screenshots since May 2014, along with corresponding images of the

http://www.nichesiteazon.com/32k-12months/?tve=true

http://www.nichesiteazon.com/




direct deposits into my checking account, then check out my Proof of Income page.

What you will learn in this post

Why I prefer niche sites to authority sites.

Why Amazon is the only affiliate you need.

How I select a niche.

How I research my keywords and competition.

How I select a productcategory to promote.

How I buildout my sites.

What I use for backlinks.

Why Niche Sites Still Work

Before I outline the steps I took to building a successful Amazon niche site, I need to discuss niche sites specifically,and Amazon as an affiliate partner.

Niche sites have lost their appeal a bit lately due to the massive PBN deindexing by Google back in September.Spencer Haws, the first niche blogger I really started to read religiously, wrote this soon after his PBN was deindexed:

"So, what kind of niche sites will I build going forward? Well, to be honest, I probably won’t be building many nichesites. Perrin and I stopped building new small niche sites almost 6 months ago. About 2 months ago, we started anew site and that will probably be the last one we start new in a long time."

I think a lot of website builders feel the same way. Google is always making things harder on us. But I’m here to tellyou that building niche sites to rank in Google to earn Amazon affiliate income still works.

Is it without risk? Of course not. (More on that below). But as far as I’m concerned, there isn’t a better way forsomeone who is just getting started out online and looking to make a little passive income. Why am I such a big fanof niche sites?

Authority Sites vs Niche Sites

Socalled authority sites are very popular these days, and I think they certainly have their appeal. But I still thinksticking with smaller niche sites, monetized with Amazon affiliate links, is the way to go, especially for people juststarting out.

Niche Sites Are Easy to Set Up

You can setup a fullyfunctioning niche site in literally one day if you wanted to. I don’t recommend moving that fast,but it’s possible: all you need is a domain and hosting provider, a Wordpress install, a theme, some plugins, andmaybe five pages of review content to start off with.

My best performing site which currently brings in around $2,200 per month in the home appliance niche has exactly7 total pages that are indexed: 4 money pages (one is technically a "post"), the home page (which isn’t monetized),an About page, and a Contact page. (The Privacy and Terms pages are set to not be indexed). Seven pages. That’sit.

http://www.nichepursuits.com/alright-google-you-win-ill-never-use-private-blog-networks-again/

http://www.nichesiteazon.com/proof-income/




Only 7 pages of indexed content

Niche Sites Are Cheap to Set Up

It’s possible to start a niche site right now for as little as the cost of a domain name and hosting. You can use a freeWordpress theme, write your own content, and try to attain whitehat backlinks, which won’t cost you a dime. Do Irecommend taking that route?

No.

I believe in spending a little money up front to get better (and faster results). This means doing proper keywordresearch with a tool like Long Tail Pro, purchasing a premium theme like Thrive Themes so your site looksprofessional, hiring writers to create your content, paying for links (or building your own PBN) to rank your site, etc.Even with those costs, you should be able to get a site up and running with a couple hundred dollars.

Niche Sites Are Lean

When you’re managing a niche site, or a portfolio of sites, it can largely be a oneman operation (you). There are nofulltime employees to pay and look after (like you have with an authority site).

You will hireout for certain tasks, especially content creation and maybe linkbuilding, but those are oneoff jobs thatdon’t require much oversight, and you’re paying only for individual tasks, as opposed to a salary or monthly retainer.

Niche Sites Are Mostly Passive

Don’t get me wrong, setting up a successful Amazon affiliate site requires a LOT of work upfront.

But once you have the site built out, and once you have your systems in place, you can enjoy a truly passive incomestream. That site I mentioned above in the home appliance niche making $2,200+ each month? I haven’t added anynew content, or pointed any new backlinks to it in over six months. All of the revenue over that time has beencompletely passive.

Niche Sites Are Agile

There are definitely risks that come along with building an affiliate site using grayhat linkbuilding tactics. The fact isthat your site has a very real, decent chance of getting hit with a Google penalty.

Sometimes you can recover from the penalty: my $2,200/mo. site was hit by both a Panda update (September 2014)



and a Penguin Update (October 2014, which completely knocked it out of the SERPs), and I was able to recover itusing a 301redirect technique. (This was back when I still really sure what I was doing, in terms of risk mitigation).

But sometimes you can’t recover. And when that happens, you have to know when it’s time to pivot to a brand newsite and start from scratch. The thing about the niche site business is that it’s very agile, meaning when one thing (orone site) is no longer working, you can quickly move on to the next.

What about Authority Sites?

These days, authority sites all the rage. And I can certainly see the appeal. I’m not here to crap all over the authoritysite model, not at all.

http://www.authorityhacker.com/



There are a lot of great authority sites out there today, such as Nerd Fitness and Survival Life, which have tons ofcontent, teams of writers, and their own products and services that they sell. It’s a ton of work, but potentially veryprofitable.

But right now, they’re not for me. Why not? Here are some things to keep in mind about authority sites before you goout and try to build one.

Authority Sites Are Time Intensive

Building out a website using purely whitehat tactics takes a TON of time. You have to flood your site with quality,

http://nerdfitness.com/

http://survivallife.com/



engaging content and a lot of it. If you’re starting out from scratch without any networking in place (i.e. you’restarting a fitness site but don’t know any other fitness bloggers), it’s going to take a long time to build relationshipsand get your content out there. Spencer has been working on his authority site since July of last year.

And, if you're like me, with a fulltime day job and a wife/family, finding the time to devote to an authority site isextremely difficult.

Authority Sites Aren’t a Magic Income Bullet

Just because you build out a great authority site with lots of helpful and engaging content doesn’t guarantee thatyou’ll be making money off it. Again, Spencer is more than 9 months into his authority site, and how much websiterelated* income did it generate in March?

$37.39.

Let me be clear here: this is not meant to bash Spencer and Perrin in ANY WAY about their site.

Spencer is a pioneer in the niche field and I read all of his content. He knows more about this stuff than I ever will.

My point is that even if you put in all the hard work that he and his team have done, you aren’t necessarily going tomake a lot of money. It takes a lot of hard work and time, and I'm sure Spencer would be the first person to tell youthat.

*I write “websiterelated income” because that’s how much the site itself made from Adsense in March. They mademuch more selling Kindle books ($900+).

Authority Sites Require a Lot of Capital

Think about it: if you want to be a true authority in your field, you must product a LOT of content.

Take NerdFitness.com. They have 144,000 pages indexed in Google!

Of course, that doesn’t mean that they actually wrote 144,000 pieces of content, but that gives you the idea of thetype of scale they operate on. And content costs money.

http://www.nichepursuits.com/whats-up-with-the-authority-site-combined-income-report-for-february-and-march/

http://www.nichepursuits.com/welcome-to-the-authority-site-project/



Here’s what Perrin had to say about the type of resources required to launch and operate his and Spencer’sauthority site:

So, around three months after the launch of their authority site, Spencer and Perrin had added 160 articles, of which55 of them were ~3,000 words each. And they were paying their writer $1,000 per month to produce the contentnecessary to operate a site of this size.

Authority Sites Require a Team

Which leads to this next point. Do you think you can pump out 160 articles over three months just by yourself? Ofcourse not: you would need to hire a writer, or more likely a team of writers, just to handle your content. And this isnot just a oneoff hire to write your product reviews; these are effectively parttime employees that you must pay andmanage.

Now, if you feel like you can handle all of these tasks, and have the required startup capital, then that’s great. I’mnot here to tell you to never start an authority site. If you can execute it well, it can certainly pay off.

http://www.digitalmarketer.com/6-million/

http://www.nichepursuits.com/welcome-to-the-authority-site-project/



I just wanted to draw the distinctions between Amazon niche sites and authority sites, and why I much prefer theformer.

Why Amazon?

Before I bought this domain and gave my site a name, I wondered if I should really limit the scope to simply coveringAmazon affiliate sites. After all, there are tons of affiliates out there, so why not write about them too? And theanswer is because I’ve never used them. Amazon is the only affiliate network I’ve ever used, and I don’t see thatchanging anytime soon. Why is that?

Amazon is Trusted

When someone does a Google search and then lands on your product review page, think about it from theirperspective: they’ve never seen your site before, have never heard about you, and know nothing about your brand.In short, they have no reason to trust you. Google, by ranking your site high in the SERPs, has effectively told themthat your site could be helpful, but that’s the extent of it.

So if that is the mindset of your reader when they hit your site, and you try to sell them something, you have to bevery cautious. Personally speaking, I don’t want to send them off to some shady ClickBank product that no one hasever heard of. Why would your reader trust that entire buying process, from clicking your unknown website over to arandom affiliate product that’s trying to get them to buy something?

Amazon changes that entire dynamic. When you send a reader off to Amazon, your job is done.

The fact that your reader may not have necessarily trusted your site is irrelevant once they land on Amazon,because Amazon is the single most trusted online retailer in the entire world. When a customer hits Amazon fromone of your affiliate links, they have all but forgotten about your site. And that’s a good thing.

Amazon is Huge & Familiar

Amazon did nearly $30 billion in revenue in Q4 2014. Every single person who shops online is familiar with Amazon.They’re huge. But you already knew that.

Amazon Sells Products Other Than The Ones You're Promoting

Amazon’s commission are considered low in the affiliate space I consistently hit either the 7.5% or 8.0%commission rates but this is partially offset by the fact that when you refer a customer to Amazon, you are eligibleto receive a commission not just on the product you sent them there for, but on any other product that they maypurchase (within the 24hour cookie period).

This means that if you’re selling a $100 stroller on your site and a reader clicks your link over to Amazon, and thatreader also purchases a $300 crib, you get commissions for both products.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/t2/a11

http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/29/amazon-q4-2014/



I haven’t done the full analysis with my own portfolio, but I estimate that a full 20% of my earnings come fromproducts that I don’t even promote on my sites.

Amazon Knows What They're Doing

You don’t do $30 billion in a single quarter without knowing how to sell. You know how all those marketing bloggersspend so much time talking about how to master conversions and upsells?

Amazon has this down to a science.

http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/07/01/how-to-upsell-your-customers/



They upsell better than anyone. Which means that once you get a reader over to Amazon via your affiliate link, youcan leverage the knowledge and expertise and scale of their entire sales funnel to your advantage.

How I Went from Zero to $32,000 in 12 Months



The Beginning

I am not an expert.

I had never even heard of niche sites until sometime around 2010 when I somehow came across Pat Flynn’s wellknown SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com case study. I read Pat’s blog for a while, without taking any action on my part.Pat then led me to Spencer over at Niche Pursuits, and it was then and there that I eventually discovered his andPerrin’s Niche Site Project with APennyShaved.com.

In January of 2014, I decided it was time to take action.

In the beginning, there was much confusion and frustration. When I first started out, I had no idea what I was doing.Outside of watching some of Pat’s videos, I had no clue how to register a domain with Bluehost or install Wordpress,let alone know anything about creating content and building links. SEO was a term I was only vaguely familiar with.

I did a LOT of things wrong.

For my first site, I didn’t spend nearly enough time on keyword research (a common mistake) and picked a nichewhich, on the surface, was much too difficult to rank for. I didn’t want to spend any money, so I didn’t invest in apremium theme, I didn’t outsource my content, and I didn’t want to pay for links.

So my original site ended up looking like crap, the “reviews” were a joke since I had written them myself and had nointerest or knowledge about the niche, and my links were all forum spamtype junk (which I believe eventually led meto receiving a Penguin penalty).

But I also got extremely lucky.

Yes, my very first niche site is the same site that is currently my biggest earner, the one in the home appliance nichethat has made more than $26,000 of my overall $32,000 in revenue over these past 12 months.

I remember being two months into the site, it wasn’t ranking anywhere in the SERPs, it wasn’t getting any traffic, andit certainly wasn’t earning any money. I was ready to give up on it entirely, and then I read a post on some randomblog (I wish I could remember which blog) that mentioned buying backlinks on Fiverr (bear with me here) not oneof those “I’ll send 2,000 links to your site for $5” jobs, but people who owned actual “blogs” with real Page Authoritywho would offer up “guest posts” in exchange for $5 and a link back to your money site.

And it worked.

Important: This was back in January 2014, when I was a beginner and had nothing to lose. I no longer use Fivver forbuying links and do NOT recommend that you try it either. It will likely result in a Google slap down.

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/securityguardtraininghq/

http://www.bluehost.com/track/nichesiteazon/

http://www.nichepursuits.com/niche-site-project-2-overview/



My Fiverr Orders

Over the course of 2014, I ended up spending more than $500 on Fiverr, mostly on these types of links. I launchedthe site in January, and here is the trajectory of the Amazon affiliate income I started earning:

To see a more detailed view of my earnings, check out my Proof of Income page.

Now, this wasn’t all due to Fiverr links. Sometime around May I started experiencing with PBNs (more below) andthose certainly helped. But if I had never bought those first set of Fiverr links, I probably would never have earned adime.

As I mentioned, this site was (predictably) hit with multiple Google penalties, but I’ve been able to recover most ofthe earnings, and just this past month it did over $2,400 on its own.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves talking about link building. As any affiliate site owner knows, it all starts withniche selection and keyword research.

My Portfolio of Niche Sites

I currently have only four niche sites that I am actively trying to build out. I started my first one, as I mentioned, inJanuary 2014. It started earning money, and I got so excited that I immediately launched three more in June 2014

http://www.nichesiteazon.com/proof-income/



thinking I could duplicate its success.

Here's what my current portfolio looks like, with March 2015 earnings for each.

Site Niche March 2015 Earnings

Niche Site 1 Home Appliances $2,402.11

Niche Site 2 Health $922.04

Niche Site 3 Hobbies $89.90

Niche Site 4 Gadgets $6.31

A couple of notes here:

Niche Site 1 has been running on autopilot since it recovered from the Penguin penalty in October 2014; nonew content or links since then. I honestly think it could get hit in the next Panda refresh.

Niche Site 2 is the one I've been spending the most time and resources on lately. In October, this site earnedonly $47.22. I believe it's the one with the most earning potential.

I had been neglecting Niche Sites and 3 and 4 for a while, but have started devoting resources to linkbuildingto them recently. Just in the past couple weeks I've started to see a nice bump with NS4.

Niche Selection

I wish there was some magic formula I could give you topick your niche, but it’s more intuition and brainstormingthan anything else.

The general idea is to take a broad niche, and try to narrow it down to a specific type of product or group of productsthat you could promote. For example, in Spencer’s survival knife series, he targeted a large community of peoplewho are passionate about a hobby (the survival lifestyle), and he then zeroed in on a specific product (the survivalknife) that he could promote.

Or take Perrin’s electric razor example. The shaving and beard market is huge; all guys need to shave, and there isa community of people who are very passionate about growing beards. So Perrin zeroed in on a couple of specificproducts (safety razor and electric shaver) that he could focus on.

I’m not going to reveal my own money sites (or niches) here for obvious reasons, but this is a similar tact that I take.Think about a potential niche, and then see if there’s a community of passionate people who will spend money onproducts.

Reddit is a great place to check. Their Survival page has more than 63,000 members.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/05/the-shaving-industry-is-in-a-rough-patch-even-before-no-shave-november/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Survival/



Survival Life’s Facebook page has nearly 800,000 likes!

Speaking of Facebook and finding other onlinecommunities, Glen from ViperChill has an excellent postabout identifying these niches, where he examines themagic niche.

But this isn’t the only way to select a niche. Not everyproduct category that sells well has a community of peoplethat want to engage in discussion around it. I can’t imagethere are many people passionate about toaster ovens, forexample, but that doesn’t mean that tons of people don’tbuy them.

And that’s exactly what happened with Niche Site 1, in thehome appliance niche. This is a product category thatdoes NOT have any community of likeminded people wholove to talk about it, no Reddit groups, no Facebookpages. But it’s a necessity that people need in theirhomes.

So both approaches can certainly work.

Keyword Research & Competition

Once you have your niche, you need to focus onkeywords. I wouldn’t call myself an “expert” in this area,I’m just going to tell you how I go about it, and why itworks for me.

I only target two very specific type of keywordswhen I’m doing my research: “best [type ofproduct]” and “[type of product]” reviews”.

For example: “best survival knife” and “survival knifereviews”. Are there dozens of potentially other keywordsthat you could target? Probably. But part of my success has been my ability to focus only only a few things at a time.So I like to stick to researching only those two types of keywords.

I’m not going to try and reinvent the wheel when it comes to KW research. I plan on doing a full post on it eventually,but for now take a look at Tung Tran’s post on his method.

What it boils down to is that you should buy yourself a copy of Long Tail Pro, and start playing around with differentkeywords.

Generally you want to target a keyword that has a Keyword Competitiveness score of 30 or under. This number is acalculation that the software makes to give you an idea of how difficult it will be to outrank your competition.

I'm not breaking any news here when I tell you that Long Tail Pro is the best keyword research tool on the

https://www.facebook.com/SurvivalLife

http://www.viperchill.com/profitable-website-2015/

http://www.cloudliving.com/keyword-research-niche-website/



market today. It's what I use EVERY single time I even think about starting a new niche site.

I also like to simply run my search into Google. Who is currently ranking in the top 57 spots? Are they all authoritysites, like Consumer Reports and Good Housekeeping? Or are there other niche sites ranking in there too?

I’ll be honest, I used to only look for KWs where other niche sites were ranking somewhere in the top 5 spots. Ifigured that would mean that I could rank there, too. That’s still the case, but now I’m not afraid of a moreauthoritative competitor. For Niche Site 1, two of my most profitable KWs, I am outranking Consumer Reports andTopTenReviews.com. With a welloptimized money page and the right backlinks, I’m convinced that a niche site canoutrank any true authority site.

Let’s go back to Perrin’s shaving example, for “best electric shaver”.



What’s that you see? Oh, just an affiliate site outranking both Consumer Reports, and AskMen.com, two realauthority sites.

Search Volume

You also want to take a look at search volume. Just because you have a low KC score doesn’t mean it’s a winningkeyword. Are people actually typing your phrase into Google? I don’t have a hard and fast rule for this one, but Iprefer that my main keyword have at least 1,500 local monthly searches to make it worth my while, and preferably3,000 or more.



Here’s a screenshot for Niche Site 2 showing my current SERP rankings and the search volume to give you an ideafor what I like to look for:

Product Pricing

But you can’t judge a winning keyword just oncompetition search volume either. You also need toknow how much the products in your niche are sellingfor. You could sell 50 items a month but if that productonly sells for $10 and you receive a 7% comission,you’re only going to make $35. If you have an item onthe other hand that sells for $100 and you sell 50 ofthem in a month at a 7% rate, then you’ve just made $350.

With Niche Site 1 (4,000 8,000 LMS), most of the products range from $50 to more than $300, with anaverage sale I’d say of around $150$200.

For Niche Sites 3 and 4, the products are more in the $40$80 range, but their search volume is much higher(12,000 18,000 LMS).

Let me show you what I mean.



What you’re looking at above is a snapshot of just part of my Earnings Report from my Amazon account from Marchof products that I sold through Niche Site 1.

For those of you new to Amazon, here’s what the columns represent, from left to right: Item Price, My CommissionRate, Number of Units Sold, Total Revenue to Amazon, and then My Total Commission.

You’ll see for that month, for that one site, I had several items sell for $130 or more. That is the key to having aprofitable site: selling highpriced items!

You’ll also notice in the middle of that image one particular product that sells for $200, of which I sold 20 units: so for



just that ONE product, in one month, I earned $320 in affiliate income.

Here’s another screenshot, this time from that same health niche alluded to above:

This is also from March, but it’s for Niche Site 2 that currently does around $600800 per month. Right now this sitedoesn’t do a lot of volume in terms of total units sold, but you see that the products themselves are priced quite high.This is a strategy that I have found works quite well: target a product category that may not do a ton of volume, butwhose products are expensive.

The best way that I've found to find ideal Amazon products, however, is with the AmaSuite 4 software. Ithelps you identify Top 100 products on Amazon for you to promote. I plan on doing a full review of thesoftware in a later post, but I've found that it's definitely been worth the investment.

You can then take your product ideas and plug them into this resource from Steve Rendell and one of his buddies,who put together this really cool tool that lets you estimate how much money an Amazon site could potentially earn,based on things like keyword search volume, longtail search volume, SERP position, conversion rates, and productprices.

Creating Your Site

Now that you’ve selected your market, niche, and products that you’re going to promote, it’s time to build out theactual site. I’m not going to walk you through how to sign up for hosting and install Wordpress in this post (maybeanother time), but once you’ve got that setup, it’s time to design and get your site set up.

For me, it boils down to two things: your theme, and your written content (reviews).

Themes

Some niche site builders don’t believe in spending money on premium themes, and I’m totally fine with that. I'm notgoing to tell you that you NEED to buy a premium theme.

But for my sites, I like them to look good. When a potential buyer does a search on Google and lands on my page, Iwant them to trust the look and feel of my site. I truly believe that makes the reader more comfortable with what I’mtrying to convey to them. And if they trust your site because it looks professional, they’re more likely to stay on your

http://www.texfly.com/

http://amaprofits.com/

http://getamasuite.com/



page, read your content, and click on one of your links.

I have used other premium themes in the past now, but right now I have been using Thrive Themes and I’vebeen very pleased. It's what this blog is running on. I plan on doing a full review of Thrive Themes and theirexcellent Thrive Content Builder (which is how I'm creating this very post) in a future series.

Reviews

Of course, you could have the most elegant theme on the entire internet, but if your content sucks, it doesn’t reallymatter.

Amazon niche sites are built around the idea of proving great product reviews.

Again, I build my sites with just two keywordconstructions: “best [product category” and “[product category] reviews”.This means that when a reader visits my site from Google, they are expecting a great review of the product they arethinking of buying.

When I first started out, my product reviews were only 250 words each! Now, I aim to produce a page that has atleast 4,000 words, reviewing a handful of products in a single product category. The absolute Holy Grail of productreviews right now is from the guys over at The Wirecutter; pick any random review of theirs, like this one, and youwill see what I’m talking about.

Of course, chances are you won’t be able to produce content of that length and quality. I certainly can’t, but it’s whatI strive for, and it’s how I structure my reviews on all of my sites. Not only do I believe reviews like this are beneficialin regards to your readers, but I feel the same way with Google as well. You want to make your niche site as“natural” as possible, and indepth content certainly helps that cause.

How do you write a review for a product you’ve never actually used? See Human Proof Designs for this great post.

Personally, I hate writing product reviews, so I pay someone that I found on Textbroker to write them for me. Ipay him .24 cents per word, and he typically writes between 6001200 words each review for each product. Itmakes my process much more efficient.

Link Building

Getting Started with The Hoth

Linkbuilding is a hot topic in the niche site field, but people make it far more complicated than it was to be. For me, itis a twostep process. And it all starts with building a nice set of layered backlinks from The Hoth.

Instead of trying to explain exactly what The Hoth does, let's first look at their product visually.

http://thrivethemes.com/affiliates/ref.php?id=2185_2_3_2

http://thrivethemes.com/affiliates/ref.php?id=2185

http://www.humanproofdesigns.com/real-reporting-how-to-write-a-product-review-when-you-dont-own-the-product/

http://www.thehoth.com/affiliates/idevaffiliate.php?id=576

http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-on-ear-headphones-at-any-price/

https://www.textbroker.com/



Your money site, your niche site, is way up there at the top. What The Hoth does is create a number of Tier 1properties, such as Wordpress, Tumblr, and Blogspot blogs, and puts unique content on them relevant to your niche.These properties are set to link back to your money page.

Then, they create web 2.0 articles and point them to the Tier 1 properties, to infuse them with some link juice.

Then they create another layer of links, such as social bookmarking and forum profiles, and and blast those at yourTier 1 level properties as well.

They slowdrip these over several weeks, making it appear more natural.

When I start out with a new site, I will typically order The Hoth Platinum package with Filipino content, which getsyou eight Tier 1 properties, each with three unique articles, for a cost of $250.

My Experience with PBNs: They Still Work

The Hoth will definitely get you started on the right foot, but they won't get you all the way there. For that, you'regoing to need PBN links.

As I mentioned, when I first started out building niche sites, I had no idea what I was doing, and I used Fiverr for linkbuilding. And it worked. I did this for maybe 34 months. But since my site was starting to earn real money, I becameworried about a potential Google penalty (which eventually came anyway) due to using the Fiverr links. So I stopped.And that’s when I pivoted to using PBNs.

Here’s the truth about PBNs: they still work.

Do a search in Google for nearly any productniche keyword, and you will likely find a site ranking near the top of theSERPs that got there by using a PBN.

Let’s look an an example. Go ahead and type “best digital piano” into your Google search. This is a keyword with1,900 LMS (and 1,600 for “digital piano reviews”) and products on Amazon that sell for hundreds of dollars. As of thiswriting, here are the SERPs that I see:

http://www.thehoth.com/affiliates/idevaffiliate.php?id=576



That’s three niche sites in the top six results. Let’s take the second result and head on over to Moz.com and type inthe URL.

Here are the backlinks that we see:



The top three domains, all PA44 or higher, are PBN links. And this just shows the few domains that this webmasterhasn’t hidden from the backlink crawlers. He surely has many, many more PBN links than this.

Again, you can do this for nearly any applicable keyword, and see the same thing, over and over again. Bottom line:PBN links still work great for ranking niche sites.

My Experience with PBNs

How have I used PBNs to rank my own site? At first, I used a couple of services. One was from Jon Haver calledLightningRank, and another was a private service from Doug over at Niche Site Project.

These were topnotch services, where I purchased posts on their sites for around $30$50 per post (no, they’re notcheap), on domains with PAs between PA30 and PA45 or so. I was definitely pleased with the results, as it helpedmy sites rank even higher. Once Google slapped down on PBNs, however, I stopped using them.

That is to say: I stopped using public PBNs.

When you’re in the niche site game, you’re always competing with Google. So in an effort to decrease my risk, Idecided it was time to start building out my own PBN. I’m not going to go over everything I did in this post, but I’lloutline what I’ve been doing, and what’s been working.

Right now, I have over 40 domains in my PBN portfolio. Here’s a screenshot of just the ones hosted withNamecheap.com.

Finding expired domains is definitely a little tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing. So at first, I used a service to

http://nichesiteproject.com/

http://www.lightningrank.com/

http://www.namecheap.com/

http://authoritywebsiteincome.com/



find them for me. Dan Thompson, who now does localSEO, ran a service (along with his friend Curt) calledDomain Colosseum, where they would find the expireddomains for you, register them, and then push them to youraccount. I was paying on average $40 for each domain. Iordered some domains from them as a private client aswell. They provided an excellent service.

Now, I have been scraping my own expired domains using ExpiredDomains.net. It definitely takes some getting usedto, and it’s a bit of a process, but I like how I can control exactly how many domains I need, and I can control mycosts (just the registration and hosting fees).

I plan on doing a future post where I dive a little bit deeper into how I use PBNs, so stay tuned.

It Takes Time to Rank

If you think you can get a domain, throw up some reviews, buy some backlinks, and start ranking and making moneyin a month, I've got some bad news for you: these days, it takes a LOT of time to rank well in Google.

How long? These days I'm finding that it's taking at LEAST 46 months to start ranking , and sometimes even longerto start making real money.

So, patience is key here. When you're just starting out, you should be focusing on the look and design of your site,and building out great, useful content. I wouldn't start worrying about building links at least until you're three monthsinto it.

Google Penalties: The Risk Factor

You knew this was coming.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it: building niche sites with grayhat linkbuilding tactics comes with very real risk. I’ve onlybeen building and operating sites for 15 months or so, and I’ve certainly grown a lot smarter along the way, but I’vebeen hit with every Google penalty imaginable: Panda and Penguin (in back to back months for the same site), andthe dreaded manual “thin content” penalty which is really a penalty (I believe) for using PBNs.

As I mentioned, the Panda penalty sapped about 40% of my earnings from my highestearning site, while Penguin(which I recovered from; a post for another time) knocked it completely out of the SERPs. The manual penalty wason a site that was only six months old and had just started ranking and earning, but I find manual penalties MUCHharder to recover from, so I took that one as a loss.

This is by far the biggest downside to the niche site game. One day, you can be earning an average of $100 everyday, and then, the next day, out of nowhere and without warning, you’re earning $0. You can be as cautious ashumanly possible in your linkbuilding, but there’s no guarantee Google won’t catch you.

But that’s the game we play, and if you’re going to be a niche site builder, you have to accept it as part of the rules.Just be aware of the risks going into it. Besides, even whitehat sites trying to play by all of the rules can get hit witha Panda update.

Tools I Use

One last piece of advice that I alluded to above is that in order to make money, you’re going to have to spend a littlemoney, too. No, you don’t have to go crazy like you would with an authority site, but in order to find a profitable niche

http://searchengineland.com/google-targets-sites-using-private-blog-networks-manual-action-ranking-penalties-204000

http://mylocalseo.ca/

http://www.brandonmdennis.com/devastated-panda-4-1/



and then build out a welldesigned, wellwritten content that’s going to convert well, you would be wise to invest insome highquality products. Here are just some of the tools I use when I’m building my sites.

I plan on creating full reviews of all of these in the coming months.

Acknowledgements

This has been a very long post (more than 6,000 words, if you’ve made it this far), and I don’t want to give off theimpression that I think I know everything, or that I came up with these ideas all on my own.

That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

What is true is that I read TONS of blog content to learn every aspect of my approach. I’m sure I’m forgetting somepeople, but I just wanted to give a public THANK YOU to the following people/sites, in no particular order, forpumping out all the great content that they do that inspired me to get started with building Amazon niche sites.

Thank You

Patt Flynn, Smart Passive Income

Spencer Haws and Perrin Carrell, Niche Pursuits

Matthew Allen, Dumb Passive Income

Doug Cunnington, Niche Site Project

Jon Haver, Authority Website Income

Stuart Walker, Niche Hacks

Steve Rendell, Texfly

Dom Wells, Human Proof Design

Tung Tran, Cloud Living

Dan Thompson, My Local SEO

http://authoritywebsiteincome.com/

http://nichesiteproject.com/

http://www.texfly.com/

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/

http://www.cloudliving.com/

http://mylocalseo.ca/

http://nichehacks.com/

http://nichepursuits.com/

http://www.humanproofdesigns.com/

http://dumbpassiveincome.com/

How I Made $32,000 - Niche Site Azon

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