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Amazon Affiliate Success Part 2: Your Niche Website
Amazon Affiliate Success Part 2: Your Niche Website
Having a significantly functional and cool looking website is a must when it comes to any online niche affiliate business, and it is especially true for Amazon affiliates because having a nice, clean online presence is a requirement to be a part of the Amazon Associates program.
And despite what you may think, having a functional, cool looking affiliate website doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive, at least not at the beginning. When you are just staring out you may not have a lot of money to spend on fancy websites, so you will ideally want to start with a cheap alternative that will allow you to focus on turning a profit while you grow your niche website without you having to drain your budget from day one.
This makes smart business sense as it will give you plenty of room to save up money to invest in the future of your affiliate website as your business grows, which can take you from one to five months, depending on how much time and work you are able to put in to promoting your new niche site.
OK, now you understand that you DO need a niche website as the center of your niche affiliate marketing business, there are two basic stages involved in creating the ultimate Amazon Affiliate website on a shoestring budget.
The first stage is to simply create your Amazon Affiliate website without worrying about getting every bell and whistle. You need to simply have a website where you can insert your niche content and your affiliate links.
This first stage requires you to invest in two elements: hosting and domain. The cheapest type of web hosting is shared hosting. We recommend you to buy a shared hosting plan that you can pay on a monthly basis to a hosting service provider such as HostGator (warr.us/hostgator). Shared hosting plans can go as cheap as $4 a month, and they will work well enough in the beginning.
I will also give you another hosting provider that you can look at if for some reason you don’t want to use Hostgator. I have used both of these companies with no issues so the preference is up to you. The other hosting company I use is Bluehost (warr.us/bluehost) so pick your host and move on to the next decision 🙂
You will also have to buy a domain name for your website. Your domain name is simply your website address and you can also buy your domain name from HostGator, but I would suggest you use another company. This makes sound business sense as you don’t necessarily want to keep all your eggs in the same basket, so I always recommend buying your hosting and domain names from separate companies. I tend to use Namecheap (warr.us/namecheap) for all my domain names as they are cheap and extremely reliable. Now, acquiring a domain name looks as simple as coming up with a name and selecting the cheapest domain extension available, but there are some rules to follow.
First, don’t be tempted to use “exact match” domains for your domain name. Exact match domains are domain names that are made up from a combination of the exact niche keywords that you will target on your website, such as selecting the “cheapelectronicreviews.com” as your domain name.
It doesn’t only look lazy on your part, but it won’t help you to reach a top placement on search engine results. Lots of marketers use exact match domains for that reason, but the truth is that Google and other search engines caught on to that trend a few years ago and updated their search engine algorithms to ignore exact match domains for SEO.
So the best approach is to come up with a brandable name that isn’t an exact match of your target keywords. After you make up your mind about your domain name, you will have to select a domain name extension.
Selecting the .com extension for your domain name is the way to go hands down, but it can happen that your domain name is not available as a .com. In that case, select the .net extension. If it isn’t available as either extension, we recommend you to come up with a variation of your domain name until you find it available as either .com or .net.
That is because those two top level extensions are the most recognizable ones, and because newer extensions such as .club don’t look attractive to any audience. Many websites get passed by as novelty websites when they sport such domain extensions, so stay away from them.
Now, once your website starts growing and getting more and more traffic, you will have to start making some changes to it. This second stage of the process will require you to invest in a hosting plan that can make your affiliate website faster, to invest in a premium theme for your website and to invest in an SSL certificate.
Now, most hosting service vendors will allow you to do such upgrades easily, and our recommendations are as follows:
Upgrade your shared hosting plan to a dedicated hosting plan. Ideally, you should upgrade to a WordPress dedicated hosting plan, as WordPress is the best content management system available for affiliates.
Buy a nice looking theme for your affiliate such as “Kingdom by Woocommerce” WordPress theme for Amazon Affiliates (warr.us/kingdom).
Buying an SSL certificate is recommended, but not mandatory. This will add an extra layer of security for your website, and it looks good on the address bar!
We recommend you to also use WordPress plugins to supercharge your Amazon Affiliate efforts. So far the best one available is the “EasyAzon” plugin, which will allow you to search for Amazon products to post on your website right from your website’s editor and to redirect region specific visitors to their respective international Amazon marketplaces on autopilot.
Fine Tuning Your Niche Keywords
Using the proper set of keywords is crucial for any kind of affiliate business because, unlike ecommerce, the idea behind an affiliate website is for it to be found through search engine queries and results in order to increase its search engine ranking.
Keywords play a huge role in increasing your search ranks alongside quality content and loading speeds, but more importantly, they get your amazon affiliate site to rank higher for popular keywords that are related to your site’s niche and the topics discussed in there.
Ok, so you already know that most of the relevant keywords on your site are going to be product related, and to that you have to add purchase based keywords as well. From now on, think of your target keywords as a combination of the two. An example of this combination could be “best cheap refrigerators”, where “best cheap” is the purchase based keyword and “refrigerator” is the product based keyword.
Now you will need to use a keyword research tool such as Google’s own “Keyword planner”, which will allow you to enter your target keywords and determine their search volume and data including their average monthly search volumes, their rank, and their competition.
Once you determine which ones are your target keywords, you will have to do some research around them to optimize your chances to outrank other sites using them. The first step is to use those keywords on Google.
Now, instead of focusing on results from the first page because you already know that the keywords used on sites hitting the first page of results include the ones that you just used, you will need to check sites targeting those same keywords that are on the second, third and fourth page pages of results.
Why would you do this? Because you can then look for other long tail keywords on those sites that are related to your target keyword and use the keyword planner to determine their search volume and data. If some of those long tail keywords have high search volumes, from 500 and upwards, you can use them on your content in order to rank higher.
The real science behind this little known strategy is that you can leverage the search volumes of these keywords by creating better content around them, which will undoubtedly redirect the traffic from those low ranking websites to your website, vastly increasing your organic outreach and your rank in a couple weeks or less!
OK, that’s it for part 2. In the final part of this mini-series we will look at creating the content for your website that will encourage people to buy through your link, and a quick way to keep this content fresh for your visitors. See you next time 🙂
Amazon Affiliate Success Part 1: Your Niche
Amazon Affiliate Success Part 1: Your Niche
Starting any type of online business represents a leap of faith for many people and affiliate marketing is no different. Normally, this is NOT because it looks like something that is particularly difficult to do or understand, but because it is something that apparently looks so easy that it seems impossible to not succeed at first glance.
But the truth is that the affiliate marketing business model is not only a way of turning a profit, but you can actually make a good living from it if you put in the work (the same as in any business venture). Many novice marketers can become put off by the time that it takes for them to drive traffic to their affiliate offers and to see their first few conversions. This often results in them convincing themselves that low profit volumes are all there are for affiliate marketers, yet many others have moderate success and keep their affiliate activity going.
The good news is that you can easily go from moderate to pro by leveraging the pulling power of an online behemoth, namely Amazon! By introducing the Amazon Associates program into your affiliate marketing efforts and by applying certain strategies anyone can become a very successful affiliate marketer in a relatively short space of time.
One of the attractions of affiliate marketing is that you can get started immediately; you don’t need to spend time or money creating your own products. Just find products that you can promote as an affiliate and direct people to these offers using your affiliate link so that you can get paid if/when they buy, and by leveraging the Amazon marketplace, you have a huge potential market to target!
So, where do you begin? Well the first thing you need to determine is the niche you are going to be targeting and serving and that is what we will be covering in the rest of this article.
Defining A Specific Yet Broad Niche
What is the first thing that crosses your mind when you realize that you need to buy something? Let’s elaborate by revisiting a real-world scenario as our example, so let’s say that your 5 year old niece is coming home for a holiday and that you need to get her a gift.
What do you do about that? You go to the toy store downtown, or to the closest one to your house. Or perhaps you go to the one that you know would offer you the best prices, or to the one where the staff knows you and are willing to give you the best, most honest advice about what to gift to your little niece.
There are two takeaways to pay attention to in this particular scenario:
- You already know that you need to go to the toy store because that’s where they sell what you are looking for, preferably the one you are already familiar with
- You are also aware that you will need a little help with your purchase, even when you are already in purchase mode
The same thing happens when you decide that you want to purchase a new car, or a new kitchen, or the newest high definition TV. You need a little help from an informed sales representative to make an informed purchase that you are not likely to regret later.
That is the exact same process of the affiliate marketer, who builds a website which serves as an informed middleman for people looking for information about products that they want to buy. When the affiliate website successfully talks people into buying a product through its content, it earns the affiliate money.
And just like an electronics store would only sell electronics and hire someone who knows how to talk and sell electronics, an affiliate website needs to focus on a specific niche. An affiliate website promoting video games and bathtubs would look as bad as an electronics store selling novelty items.
The idea behind creating an affiliate website is, like we said, to talk people into buying products through affiliate links, but that doesn’t mean that you have to populate your affiliate website with all kinds of affiliate links spread throughout random content in the hopes that people will click through by chance.
The truth is that this strategy is doomed from the beginning because websites that talk about everything are exhausting to navigate. The best approach is to simply pick a product niche that you either like or have no problem writing about and then go from there.
Remember that you have to act as middleman between a buyer and the amazon marketplace, and as such you will need to make their purchasing decisions easier, so liking or knowing the products that you promote on your affiliate website will make it easier for you to recommend the products.
Once you have picked up a niche, go to Amazon.com and search for products in that niche that meet the following criteria: products that are low priced but that sell like hot cakes, and high priced items that are popular even when they don’t sell as much as lower priced products.
This is because you have to promote products that sell well enough as to leave you with a healthy amount of revenue at the end of the month. Try not to narrow down your offers too much because you will end up slowing down your profits.
To give you an example, let’s say that you decided to promote trendy, entertainment based electronics. In that case, you will have to promote products that are lower priced but sell constantly such as newly released video games and higher priced equipment such as thousand-dollar TV sets.
Yet if you decide to promote rare collector stuff only, you’ll be narrowing down your niche too much, so don’t do it unless you dedicate a separate section for that stuff on your website, or if you have an affiliate website that makes you enough money as to allow you to create a separate micro website dedicated to rare collector stuff.
OK, now that you have decided on your niche, you will need somewhere to promote it. You will need a website to create content, write reviews etc. to tempt visitors to purchase your recommendations through your affiliate link and we will cover this in part 2 of this mini-series 🙂
Be Grateful
The world today is full of uncertainties and challenges, and the last thing that we want to do is to do something as simple as say “thank you.” With the hardships, turmoil, difficulties and problems that people are facing these days, it has become increasingly difficult to see the good side of the world we live in. And listening to all the negativity in the news and media just reinforces this bleak view of modern day life. But this is an incredibly skewed version of reality and bears no real resemblance to the real world, but hey, bad news sells!
Things appear to have become so irrational and unpredictable. The world has changed so much and become so different, and being grateful in this (apparently) very ungrateful world can be really challenging. And the quicker things change, the more disconnected people start to feel.
Also, the sad fact is that many people in this generation have an “entitlement” attitude; they believe that they are entitled to pretty much anything with little to no effort. This may not be a politically correct statement but is the plain truth (in my opinion).
If you want to use gratitude in your life, try pairing it with some self-reflection and it becomes even more powerful. To learn more about self-reflection click here to download a free report
The thing that we all need to remember is that although the world seems so difficult and things may not always go the way we want them to go, there are still many things to be grateful for. No matter what good things happen in your life, if you don’t have an attitude of gratitude, you will never be completely happy. It is simply a matter of focus; in fact, focus can be used to support many aspects of your life, not just gratitude.
Learning to be grateful when things go wrong, when problems strike or when difficulties happen will make a huge difference in your life and the way you will generally feel about life itself. Life is always better once you feel blessed no matter how difficult things might seem. Is it easy? No, but is it worth it? You bet it is!
Feeling grateful allows you to see life as a great and wonderful gift. Once you can feel great about the world and about your life, you will be able to find real happiness and peace.
When everything around you seems to be going wrong, it is can be very difficult to feel grateful for anything, but if you remain thankful about even those little blessings you have, your life will become happier. Learning to be grateful in this ungrateful world is something worth doing. If you don’t, you will keep feeling a sense of unhappiness, a lack of self-worth and a general lack and that is no way to go through life.
After all, you only have one life so you owe it to yourself to do everything you can to enjoy it and to experience everything that it has to offer. Living with an attitude of gratitude will help you to do that.
Start practicing gratitude daily and see what a difference it can make. Start off gradually; why not spend a few minutes in the morning when you first wake to think of all the things in your life that you are grateful for? Why not write these things down and start a gratitude journal. Try doing this for 30 days and see how this small thing done daily can make you feel and how your outlook on life will shift. You will become more content, happier and people will notice and wonder what your secret is. Share it with them and let’s all make the world a happier, more grateful place in our own small way.
Start today and allow gratitude into your life and reap the benefits. What are you waiting for?
7 Essential Strategies For Increasing Conversions
7 Essential Strategies For Increasing Conversions
Increasing Conversions Through Engagement
If you want to maximize sales, you need to focus on one primary component of your entire sales funnel and that is in improving visitor engagement!
So, why is visitor engagement so important?
Think of it this way; visitor engagement is probably the strongest indicator as to how a potential customer feels about you, your product or brand.
The more you engage with your visitors, the easier it will be to build brand loyalty and make your vistors feel valued.
And when you manage to do that, these vistors will turn into paying customers who will buy all your products and devote more time and money to you! They’ll decide to choose you over the competition, and they’ll buy from you again and again.
Here are just a few powerful strategies that you should be using to increase engagement on your website:
Combine Action with Rewards
Rewards and incentives such as giveaways, coupons, and bonus products add extra value to a customer’s purchase which will positively impact visitor engagement.
One easy way to set up a reward-style program is to use something like Perkzilla (warr.us/PerkZilla)
PerkZilla is a smart way of grabbing attention, engaging visitors and boosting clicks and sales just by rewarding customers who take action.
Offer Time-Sensitive Coupons & Discounts
You can also offer special discounts and time-sensitive coupon codes in order to combine the use of urgency with making people feel special. This can be a powerful motivator as many people suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out) so by adding a sense of urgency, you are tapping into that fear.
Offer Early Bird Discounts
Reward those who purchase in the early stages of your product launch with the lower pricing or added bonuses.
Tip: You can do both of these tasks easily with a great tool called Conversion Gorilla (warr.us/ConversionGorilla)
Create a NO-RISK Low Cost Front-End Offer
A low cost, front-end offer is the easiest way to engage visitors and transform them into customers because you’re giving them an opportunity to test out your product and get to know your brand without a lot of upfront cost or investment.
In other words, there is no risk to them for simply giving your company a try.
Personalize Your Outreach
Build stronger relationships with your audience by creating marketing campaigns based on location, traffic sources or social media platforms. This used to be virtually impossible
but increasingly clever technology is making these things achievable.
People love receiving personalized offers or being addressed by name or location. It will help you stand out!
Add Visual Magnets To Your Sales Process
Consider integrating infographics or videos into your content so it stands out. Anything you can do to be different that will capture attention quickly is important.
These are just a few ways to improve your customers on-site experience. Can you think of a few more? By doing this you can engage your prospects and hopefully turn them into buyers.
Carry this practice over into you sales pages and you will see an increase in your conversion rate, guaranteed. And talking of sales pages, let’s have a quick look at them whilst we are here 🙂
By the way, if you want to learn more conversion boosting tips, grab my free report here.
How To Test Your Sales Page For Maximum Conversions
Split testing is a way of gauging the effectiveness of specific elements on a sales page or within a sales funnel to improve conversion rates. The idea is that you test ONE element at a time, and run a split testing campaign long enough for both pages to generate an equal number of visitors (or “hits”).
You need to get into the habit of split testing your sales pages so that you have a clear idea as to what’s working and what needs tweaking.
Just a simple change can significantly increase conversion rates but without testing your copy so that you can determine areas that need strengthening, you won’t know what that change should be and this could be the difference between a profitable campaign and a failure; it is that important!
You can literally split test every aspect of your webpage from headlines, pricing, graphics, buttons, layout, color schemes, and more. And you don’t have to just split your sales pages either. You can also split test your email messages, auto-responder follow-ups, and even your blog! If it can be created, it can be tested 🙂
By split testing your pages you will quickly see just what draws your visitors in and what simply pushes them out to the next website. By analyzing this information, you can make little (or big) changes that will boost conversion and send your profits through the roof!
The easiest way to split test your pages is to sign up with a great tool such as Split Test Monkey (warr.us/SplitTestMonkey), which is a powerful tool that takes the grunt-work out of split testing.
Split Test Monkey works for everyone. If you’re trying to grow an email list you’ll be able to use Split Test Monkey to boost your subscriber rates and grow your list faster by testing your landing pages, from the lead magnets to the color of your sign-up buttons.
Here’s an example of a basic split testing campaign:
You create two WebPages, with two different headlines.
You call them SalesPage-1.html and SalesPage-2.html
You then direct people to both pages equally, so that both pages are receiving the same number of hits. You let it do its job for a reasonable amount of time (usually 7-10 days) or until each page has received a specific number of visitors (2000, 4000, etc).
The objective is to have a clear snapshot of which page is preforming best based on conversion rates.
Once you’ve established which page is out-performing the other, you change another element of the “winning” page and comparatively test it against a different component (another area of your sales page, such as your bullet points, opt-in box, placement of graphics, etc).
And here is why split testing is so incredibly important to your business (in case you are still unsure!):
Let’s say that your sales letter is currently converting only one sale out of every 100 visitors you receive.
Let’s pretend that you are selling a low-end product for $20.00.
If only one visitor out of 100 purchases your product, your conversion rate would be 1%.
Now, let’s say you start split testing your sales pages. Perhaps you change the headline so it’s more catchy and instantly your conversion rate increases by .25%.
Now you are generating 5 sales a day for every 400 visitors to your site. You would end up earning $100.00 per day instead of $80.00.
You continue to split test your pages, this time changing the graphics so they load faster and aren’t so cluttered on the page, or you shift your copy so that the first paragraph is directly above the fold.
This increases your conversion rate yet again, this time by .75%.
With just a few small changes you have boosted your conversion rate up by 1% and you are able to turn two visitors out of every 100 into a sale.
Your earnings would have literally doubled!
Sometimes even the smallest, minor changes within a split testing campaign can cause a tremendous boost in revenue, and all with very little work involved! Just don’t forget to test only ONE element at a time, or you won’t know which element is giving you the biggest conversion boost.
That’s it for this post; I hope you found it useful. Now go and create some engaging content for your visitors and sales pages (and don’t forget to test, test, test)!
Science Proves That Gratitude Can Make You Happy!
Science Proves That Gratitude Can Make You Happy!
For many people, gratitude is a pure outright thank you. For others a half-hearted thank you text or card may seal the deal. But in psychology, it’s is not just an offhand action. Gratitude is a positive emotion that goes a long way in contributing to happiness and our general emotional well-being. The recognition entails more than feeling thankful for an act of kindness or condition because it consists of a deeper appreciation for someone or something. It affirms the graciousness of the giver. When we focus more on the many blessings in our lives, we are more contented, cheerful and generous. The great thing about this is that the feeling goes both ways.
The giver derives immense joy from the act, and the receiver appreciates the kindness. A definite win-win for all concerned and this highlights why we should all be a little more grateful and pass the benefits forward. Imagine how amazing you and those around you would feel with a bit more gratitude in their lives!
 In a fast-paced world like ours, it is not unusual for daily blessings to go unnoticed. We often overlook the little acts of kindness we experience every day. Small acts of kindness shown daily culminate into a happier life. Whether receiving or giving gratitude, scientific studies prove that the result is immense happiness; such an amazing reward from such a small gesture.
If you want to use gratitude in your life, try pairing it with some self-reflection and it becomes even more powerful. To learn more about self-reflection click here to download a free report
So, what benefits can you expect from being more grateful? Well, here are 4 for starters:Â
Better Health
Gratitude increases optimism, and optimism has been proven to boost the immune system. According to a study by Harvard Medical school, those who are optimistic live happier, healthier, longer lives. This just makes sense when you think about it; feeling well emotionally has a direct effect on our physical health so anything that we can do to make ourselves feel better emotionally is well worth it!
New RelationshipsÂ
Saying thank you may constitute good manners, but showing appreciation may help you create new friendships, as well as live a happier life. A 2014 study discovered that thanking an acquaintance for a kindness more often than not makes them seek a deeper relationship with you. It doesn’t matter how small the kindness. Simply acknowledging little deeds leads to new relationship opportunities, and of course, more happiness. And who doesn’t want more happiness in their life?
Less Depression
Counting your blessings goes a long way in loving yourself without undue comparison. According to a study, a one-time act of thoughtful appreciation produced a 10% increase in happiness and 35% reduction in depression. This is especially important in today’s high-speed, highly stressful world so take a few minutes each day to slow down and feel grateful for who you are and what you have, and what you have to look forward to. Your blood pressure will thank you for it!
Business Health
As an entrepreneur or a team player, gratefulness is non-negotiable. Everyone loves to be appreciated. So think of the world of good it would do your business if you showed more gratitude in your life. Send a thank you email or card. Say thanks when someone goes out of their way to make your life and business easier. Showing gratitude to workers, clients and investors makes you all happier and will give your business the needed boost because everyone you deal with will feel appreciated.
Cultivating and sustaining an attitude of gratitude goes a long way in helping you achieve happiness since there is virtually no downside to this simple act. Though it may seem tasking at first, it becomes easy with persistence.
Start practicing gratitude today, right now and I promise you, it will make you feel better about yourself and those around you. And you will also have a positive impact on those around you and you will attract more like-minded people towards you which will only help to reinforce the positivity you are now experiencing in your life. There’s no time to waste so start right now.
