Amazon Affiliate Marketing: The Complete Guide for 2021

Affiliate marketing on Amazon has been around for several years. It started to gain popularity back in 2014 when the first guides were created after people noticed the success of sites like pickmyshaver.com.

You might think it’s too late in the game to start your own Amazon affiliate website, but you’d be very wrong.

Why?

The growth of online shopping has literally exploded over the past 5 years and is set to continue to grow.

What is happening is there are more people than ever before buying online. Not only they are buying more online, but they are buying a wider range of goods.

The space is expanding faster than affiliates are creating new sites to meet the demand.

This means the opportunity right now for you is huge.

People are searching for millions upon millions of reviews. They want to know what the best products are, and it's your job as an Amazon affiliate marketer to help them find the best products by writing review articles.

Skills you need to start your own Amazon affiliate site

The most important skill is persistence. Everything else can be learned, but you need to be patient and keep trying, keep learning.

It helps if you can write your own articles. If you can’t write you’ll need to hire a writer to do that for you.

Basic computing skills are needed but can be learned. You'll be setting up your own WordPress site, but don’t worry, I’ll guide you through how to do that in this guide.

Everything you need from the start of your journey, right through to selling your profitable site is contained within this ultimate guide.

How Much You Can Earn

You can easily make 6 figures per year. Mid 6 figures in some cases. Amazon sites sell for 18-50x their monthly revenue, which means if you have a site making $5,000 per month, it will sell for between $90,000 and $175,000.

You can expect to make between $1000 and $5000 per month with your first site if you follow this guide. More if you have money to invest.

How much money you need to start your first Amazon site

You can get started with less than $100 if you can write your own articles. You'll have to be patient and hardworking, but if you write 2000-3000 words per day, every day for a year, then you'll have a site that will make you between $2000 and $5000 per month.

Think about that.. Even if your site is only making $2000 per month, you can sell it for up to $70,000. Not bad for your first site, and that money can be used to build your next, even more profitable site.

If you have a budget of around $100 to $250 per month, then you'll still need to write your own content, but you’ll be able to spend some money on SEO.

At $250 to $1000 per month I would recommend writing your own content, but investing more heavily into SEO.

If you have $1000+ per month, then you’ll have the luxury of being able to hire a writer and have money to spend on SEO as well.

The more you have to invest, the bigger the reward will be.

Other Ways to Make Money with Amazon

There are alternative ways to make money with Amazon, such as FBA and merch.

Merch is where you create t-shirt designs and Amazon sells them. It’s invite-only at this time and doesn’t have the same potential as creating your own affiliate website.

FBA – Fulfillment by Amazon is where you sell your own products through Amazon. Instead of warehousing your own products, you send them to Amazon, and they handle storage, shipping, customer service and returns.

But, this is a guide to creating your own Amazon affiliate review site, so let’s jump right into getting you started.

Creating your site involves choosing a niche, acquiring a domain, doing your keyword research and then creating a content plan.

This is the most important part of the entire process and when done right will guarantee the success of your project. For that reason, this will be the biggest most in-depth part of the guide.

Initial Considerations

Before you start, you must decide whether you plan to sell your site later on.

Remember when I talked about how you can get a price of around 18x to 35x your monthly sales when you sell your site?

Niche Research

Your niche is the set of topics that your site is about. Amazon is huge and you'll find almost every product imaginable, so you have a lot to choose from. You could create a site about model train sets, one about power tools, or a full on tech review site with 1000’s of tech guides. Your choices are near limitless.

First, decide whether you're going to write the content yourself or hire a writer. I'd recommend having a budget of at least $500-$600 per month if you're going to use a writer. Your Amazon review articles should be between 1500 words and 5000 words depending on the amount of searches. Most should be around 2000-3000 words.

If you find a writer at $2/100 you’ll average about $50 per article. That’s 10 articles per month, or 120 in a year. That’s a good minimum for a serious review site.

If you’re hiring a writer, then you can choose almost any niche you like. However, if you're writing your own content I strongly advise that you pick a niche you enjoy writing about.

You should pick a niche that’s big, but not too big. Something where you can write at least 150 full “Best X” review guides.

Smaller niches aren’t so good because you'll run out of topics to write about. For example, kids RC cars. You can have “Best RC Trucks for Kids”, “Best RC Cars for Teens” and about 20-25 more, but you won't be able to have a 100+ without having content that overlaps. Overlapping content is very bad for SEO. Ie, you'd never have “Best White Toasters”, and “Best Black Toasters”.

Very large niches aren’t as good either because it becomes harder to build what we call “topical relevancy”. Topical relevancy is where Google starts to view you as an expert in a topic. Avoid creating generic review sites unless you have a budget of $5000 per month or more for content.

How to find your niche

I'll now choose a niche, research it and build out a site around it, taking you through the process step by step and include screenshots of the setups within wordpress. Let’s choose Sports & Fitness.

Now, this is a big niche, and we can keep expanding this, but we are going to just pick a few topics to focus on. This allows us to build topical relevancy. Let’s start by having a look at this niche and deciding on some interesting sub-topics.

Now let’s pick some sub-categories.

Click on fitness.

Let’s go for strength training equipment, exercise machines, fitness technology, Pilates and yoga.  Now open up each of these categories. We will use these later when doing our content plan, but for now you can see we have a lot of ideas. Medicine balls, power cages, smith machines, rowing machines.. There’s lots of topics here, all of which we’ll turn into review article ideas like “Best Rowing Machines for Seniors”

Now go back to the main sports & outdoors page. Click on “Sports Technology”.

From here we will pick activity trackers, action cameras, pedometers, golf range finders, cycle computers, sports watches, GPS units, stopwatches, compasses, swimming mp3 players, massage belts & electric stimulators and speedometers.

From these we want 5-6 main categories for our site..

These will be :- 

Now we have the main categories for the site. Our next step is to find a domain and build out the core site, then we can move on to more detailed keyword and content research.

Choosing Your Domain

Your domain should be brandable and unique. It must sound general enough so that it will make sense for you to expand your site.

For our test site we have chosen thefitnessgenie.net. It’s very brandable and we can quite happily write about any fitness topics. It also says that we are experts and are here to help because of the word ‘genie’.

What you don’t want is something like: “bestfitnessproducts.com” or even worse, something more limited like: “bestexercisemachines.com”. Avoid these spammy domains. We call them EMDs (exact match domains). They used to work incredibly well pre-2012 until Google’s infamous EMD update in September 2012.

Expired Domain vs Fresh Domain

The decision you’ll make is whether to start with a freshly registered domain that has no backlinks, or buy an expired domain that has been previously used and comes with existing authority.

More specifically, it’s not an “expired” domain you want, but an aged auction domain. However, most people just call them expired domains even though there is a big difference.

Truly expired domains are domains that the owner has let expire and are free to register again. These are rarely good.

An aged auction domain is a domain you buy at auction or from a broker that will look like it never dropped, so it keeps its age. All the good domains are bought at auction. Anything left to expire is almost certainly garbage.

I highly recommend you spend as much as possible on an aged auction domain. It is the best thing you could spend your investment on when starting your Amazon project.

You can either go straight to the GoDaddy auctions and buy something yourself or buy from a domain seller like serpnames.com. The domain sellers will charge more, but they have pre-screened all their domains so you are guaranteed to get something good and spam free.

The Site Setup Phase

We’re now ready to build our site. You can have a look at our test site at thefitnessgenie.net to see how it should look.

Hosting

The first thing you need to do before you can setup your site is choose a hosting provider. I recommend WPXhosting.com. They do fully managed WordPress hosting so they will guarantee your site is working, updated and secure. They are also ultra fast and if your site is slow they will take a look and get it fixed. You can go for a cheaper hosting company like Hostgator, but your site will be much slower and you have to diagnose and fix all problems yourself. All a company like Hostgator will do is guarantee your site is “switched on”. They won’t help you with speeding up your site, update the site, handle security or fix anything that’s broken.

Theme

On-Page SEO

Most of the discussion about “on-page SEO” is going to be found in the content creation guide below. You’ll learn how to do your on-page while learning how to structure your content.

Plugins

Here's the essential plugins you will install.

Yoast SEO

The main plugin I recommend installing is Yoast SEO. Go into Plugins->Add New and search for Yoast. Install and activate it and you should see this.

Click on Search Appearance, then Taxonomies.

“Show Tags in search results” should be set to No.

And disable format-based archives.

Remove the categories prefix.

Next click on Archives. Disable the author and date-based archives.

Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP

This plugin will setup some schema basics for us. After installing go to settings and check the following so it matches with the image below.

Next click on “Knowledge Graph” and fill in your details. The rest you the settings you can leave default. Now go to “Schema Types”, click Add Schema Type up the top, and add “Article” type, then keep clicking next accepting the defaults.

Contact Form 7

Install this plugin, then go to Contact->Contact Forms, and copy the shortcode highlighted in blue. Head over to your contact us page and paste it in there.

Logo

Site Architecture

The simplest and cleanest type of site architecture you can have is to create your main product categories as WordPress categories. In this case we have

• Clothing
• Exercise Machines
• Fitness Technology
• Pilates & Yoga
• Sports Accessories
• Strength Training

In your WordPress admin panel go to posts->categories and create all these as main categories just like in the screenshot below.

Now go to Appearance->Menus

Click “create a new menu”, name it “primary” and select the checkbox “Primary Menu” at the bottom where it says “Menu Settings”.

On the left show the Categories and add all your new categories in here and save.

You will now have your main categories as your primary menu. In most cases this is fine to start. Every article that you create will be in 1 of these categories. Only 1. Don’t add an article to 2 or more categories.

As you grow the site you might find you have a lot of articles in the 1 category, for example strength training, in which case you can then add more sub-categories. I’ll show you how to do that for when the time comes.

Ok, let’s say we want to add “Weights”, “Pull-Up Bars”, “Medicine Balls” and “Dip Stands” to our strength training.

We go back into Posts->Categories and we add those 4 categories, but this time we select “strength Training” as the parent category.

Next, add them to the menu. Appearance->Menus. It should look like this

Now when you add new articles, you put them in 1 of the main categories, and if there are sub-categories, also add them to that. If you create an article such as “The Best Dip Stands for your Home in 2020” then it will go in the category “Strength Training” and “Dip Stands”.

Pages vs Posts

When should you use pages and when should you use posts? In Google’s eyes they are the same. They’re just different internally in WordPress.

A page is meant to be used for something static/fixed, like an about us page, and a post is for your regularly published articles. Posts have categories and tags. You should use pages for things like your privacy policy, and posts for all your regular articles.

Essential Pages

Almost live now...

That’s the setup phase done now. Have a look at thefitnessgenie.com to see how it should look. All you have to do now is add your articles now, which leads us to the next section on finding low competition article ideas and on-page SEO.

Keyword Research

Finding low competition keywords with Ahrefs

What is DR – Domain Rating?

Before we dive in, let’s take a look at DR so you have a better understanding of how to find those golden low comp keywords.

It’s Ahrefs own Domain Rating and it’s extremely accurate at determining the power of a website. It wasn’t always that useful, but they changed their algorithm about a year ago and it started to correlate really strongly with actual real live results in Google.

Ultra Authority Sites

These are proper, strong authority sites. Don’t try to compete here.

Authority Sites

Regular authority sites. This is reachable with time and a good budget. You can compete here but it’s not where the easy money is.

Regular Sites

These are your plain old sites. The difference between a regular site and an authority site is usually size. Regular sites don’t tend to be over 100 articles. Authority sites have 100’s into the 1000’s of articles. Sites here are ‘low-end’. Here is where we want to compete. DR 0 to 40.

Content Creation Guide

Creating good content is essential to ranking well. This isn’t an area you can go cheap on. Don’t expect to do well if you’re hiring some cheap writers to create garbage.

Keyword Density

First, a note about over-use of keywords. Ie, keyword density. In the past you needed to include keywords a certain amount of times in order to rank for them. Today this isn’t the case. In fact, it’s the opposite. If you use keywords too much you’ll trigger a Penguin over optimization penalty.

This is especially true for h2 and h3’s. Don’t repeat your exact match phrases in your sub-headings. If you have “best” in your title, then have a sub-heading with “top”. Don’t repeat!

Just write naturally and create headings that are useful to the reader. Create sub-headings that read well. If your article title is “10 Best Chin-Up Bars”, then you can have another sub-heading like “Top 10 Chin-Up Bars”, but beyond that don’t keep writing “chin-up bars”. The reader already knows they’re reading about chin-up bars, so you can have sub-headings like “Considerations”, rather than “Considerations when buying a chin-up bar”.  Ie, the sub-title here “Keyword Density”.

I don’t need to say “Keyword Density for Amazon Review Articles”. If I keep saying that over and over in all the sub-titles I'll trigger that nasty penguin penalty. Using phrases in sub-titles gives them extra emphasis, so a phrase used once in a sub-title is equivalent to using it for example 3 times in the paragraphs.

If you’re writing natural long content you won’t have to worry too much about the keyword density in your paragraphs. Unless you're trying to use the same words over and over, you’ll be fine. But the percent amounts you want to stay under are 1.5% for word pairs, like “chin-up bar”, and under 1% for trip words like “best chin-up bar”. Just watch out for your sub-headings and you’ll be good to go.

Writing Style

You should write your articles in a conversational, easy to read tone. Write like you're writing for just 1 person. Imagine that person is sitting down in front of you and you are actually speaking to them. Your job is to help them and give them useful facts to help them pick the product that is best for them.

Don’t think in terms of an absolute “best product”, since that doesn’t usually exist. Everyone has different needs, so your job is to go into detail about the different products you review to help the reader make a decision about what’s best for their particular needs.

Avoid writing fluff like “This is a great chin-up bar because it has lots of features that make it easy to use”. You’ve probably read that kind of garbage before and Google can tell the difference between detailed content and fluff. They can’t tell the difference between good and great content, but they can tell the difference between good and below average content.

So with that in mind your reviews should read more like this: “This chin-up bar will easily support 300kg of weight hanging from it provided that the wall you’ve attached it to is strong enough. It has 3 grip positions, with soft foam where you hold it which makes it extra comfortable to use.”

Content Length and Total Number of Articles

The content length depends on how long the articles already ranking in the top 5 are, and the combined search volume for all the keywords in the topic. A good general minimum is 1500 words for the low volume articles with very little competition, 2500-3000 for most others, and 3000-5000 where there’s more competition and more volume. For really good ones you can go for large 6000-8000 word mega reviews.

Most sites should have at least 50 good sized articles. The smallest you can get away with is 30. I recommend 100-150 articles on your site, since once you hit about 100 articles you’ll start to notice your site gaining a lot of topical authority.

How to Structure Your Articles

You have your main article title, which will be along the lines of “Best something for something in 2020”. Don’t repeat “best something” in any other sub-titles.

You then have 1-2 paragraphs of opening text with your main eye catching image. For some articles you can write an extra couple of opening paragraphs, but only if it makes sense for that particular article.

You can choose to include a table with your top 5 to 10 products using a plugin like ninja tables or TablePress. If you do, you should include 3-4 columns with product data and a button to view the price on Amazon. Don’t ever list the price anywhere in your articles, and don’t rate your products as this can cause issues with Amazon.

Next you have a sub-title like “Top 10 Blah blah” and below that your individual product reviews.

Your product reviews should start with the product name as the heading, then be as detailed as possible about your product, including pros and cons, and then having a button at the bottom with the text “Check price on Amazon”. At the top of each product review include some bullet points. This is essential for people who are just skimming.

It’s important to pick good products. Don’t just choose anything. Set your intention to actually help your reader. If you're hiring a writer I would strongly recommend you choose the products for each review unless you have a writer that’s been working with you for a while and understands your site and the niche.

Read over 2-3 reviews of each product you're going to review so you learn enough to write about it in detail. You can read over the Amazon reviews too. This helps you get more of a feeling for the product. Product specs documents are good for tech products. They can give you a lot ideas to write about.

After you’ve done all your product reviews you can have another section with the sub-heading “Buyers Guide”, so for example “Chin-up Bars: A Buyers Guide” or “Chin-up Bars: Shopping Guide”. However, only do this for products where you can go into more general detail. Your buyers guide will have sections like “Considerations”, with bullet point lists like “Safety”, “Design”, “Price” or any other general points your reader should be aware of when coming to their buying decision. For ‘fluffy’ products like toys, don’t do this. You don’t need any “considerations” when buying a board game for your child, but you do when buying an electric shaver or a computer monitor.

I personally don’t like having a “Best Pick” or “Runner up” type section. It’s better to have a bullet points in each individual review so people can skim over and make a quick decision themselves. Most people aren’t going to just take your word that something is the best pick. They would rather skim over and look at the bullet points and decide which is best for them, or they will be the type of person who will read the review slowly and in detail.

However!

This rule doesn’t always apply. With certain types of products there will be a distinctive best pick. Chin-up bars, probably not. Computer monitors? Again, probably not. Gaming laptops on the other hand, will probably have a distinctively best pick. So in these cases add a little section at the top called “Our Top Pick” and write about why this one is so unbelievably good that it needed to be highlighted.

That’s all there is to structuring your articles. The key thing is that you write useful, detailed information about the products because Google can tell the difference.

Writing Your Own Articles vs Hiring Someone Else

Quality over quantity is the name of the game in 2020 and beyond. These are the type of links that work..

Before we go into more detail about each of the effective link building methods, let’s discuss anchor text and Google Penguin.

Anchor Text & Avoiding a Google Penguin Penalty

So in summary here’s some examples of safe anchor profiles..

Remember, your keyword brand and generic brand are part of your overall brand %

If you want to go even more aggressive, but still be safe, try this one.

This is the most aggressive I would go while still saying on the safe side of the fence. You'll get faster rankings with this anchor profile if it’s done right. Doing it right means you build out plenty of brand/naked/generic first before, keeping the anchor profile like number 2, then as you grow turn it more into 3, then eventually turn it into 4. Don’t run this ratio from day 1.

And if you want a risky anchor text profile to try to push your rankings even harder then go for this one. As above, make sure there's plenty of brand/naked first. Also don't over-optimize your internal anchors if using this one.

Also, remember that there are 100’s of ranking factors in Google. Just because you see a site ranking with an aggressive profile doesn’t mean it will work for you. It’s worked for that site because of just the right set of circumstances. Penguin works on a site and page level, so you might see a page on an authority site with a huge amount of exact match anchors, say, 50%, but if you look at their overall site anchor profile it’ll be < 1%.

It's for this reason that you shouldn’t listen to the articles that tell you to analyse sites in the top 10 for a particular keyword and mimic their anchor profile. This does not work. Stick to the above guidelines, profile 1, 2 and 3 and you'll rank just fine.

Types of Backlink You can build for Your Niche Site

Guest Posts

Guest posts are one of the best types of links, but they’re also one of the most expensive. They range from free(you provide content) to $5000 and over for the most sought after sites.

You must decide as to whether a guest post is of value or not based on the individual circumstances. Here’s some of the main considerations

The most important thing, and it’s something I don’t see talked about much is to make sure your new post will be linked to from either the main homepage or one of the category pages. What we often see on sites or individuals selling guest posts is they don’t display the post in any feeds on the site. Ie, appearing in the latest posts on the homepage, or at least on a category page, so you have homepage->your article, or homepage->category page->your article. Instead, the article is just placed deep on the site, giving you almost no juice from it.  

In general, the following list is what you want to look for in your guest posts :-

If you follow these rules your guest post links will drive your site up the rankings. You don’t need links on very niche relevant sites, and in fact too many overly relevant links look more spammy. A natural site will have links from a lot of different types of sites.

Boost Your Guest Posts

You can increase the power of your guest posts by backlinking them with PBNs. This is a great tactic if you have extra budget. Only do this if you have maxed out the number of PBNs to your main site.(Details about this are in the 12-month blueprint).

1-5 moderate PBNs per guest post is ideal. For 5 links use 2 title anchors, 1 generic, 1 keyword brand and 1 LSI. For a more powerful site you can do 2 title, 1 exact, 1 partial and 1 LSI.(DR50+’s)

Niche Edits

Niche edits are a riskier type of link. They can be very effective for older, more powerful sites, but be careful using them on newer sites.

I put them in the effective link building technique list because they do work, but they are to be used with caution by experts only.

I recommend avoiding these until you have gained more experience with link building and your site has at least 50,000 traffic per month. Ie, is a proper authority site.

If you do decide to use niche edits then keep your edits much more relevant than guest posts. It is more natural for your link to be added into a relevant article months or years after it was written, than it is for your link to be added into a non-relevant article. Ie, imagine you have an a fitness article talking about chin-up bars.

It would make sense for the author to add in a link to a page reviewing chin-up bars a year after the link was created.

On the other hand if you have an article about the life of a celebrity it would be strange to suddenly add in a link to a page reviewing chin-up bars, but at the time of writing that article might link off to pages about multiple different topics.

It’s just unusual to come back a year later and add in a link that isn’t really related to the focus/important points of the article.

This is my personal opinion based on I see Google evolving over the years and how they approach identifying unnatural links. I believe this to be the reason why niche edits can work so well or cause your site to drop.

How to Find Guest Posts, Niche Edits & Other Link Opportunities

The methods for finding guest posts and niche edits are essentially the same. I’ll go over a few different ways to find them.

Method 1: Buy them retail

The first way is to buy them from a provider. This is the easiest, but also the most expensive.

You can find providers all over the internet by googling for them, or looking on the major marketing forums and facebook groups.  I don’t really recommend this method, but it’s included for completeness.

Even when you're making more money, it’s still far better to train your own freelancer to find guest posts and niche edits for you.

 You have more control and even with a member of staff doing it you’ll still pay far less than you would buying them from a retail supplier.

Method 2: The mass email approach

Method 3: The Sniper Method

This one is my favorite and it’s my custom approach that I came up with. 

Your response rate will be far higher because you're targeting specific sites that in many cases already accept guest posts and because you're asking a question that is specific to an article on their site, so your email won’t look automated like the method 2 above.

Create a spreadsheet called Guest Post & Niche Edit Prospecting.

Create a tab called keywords with just 1 column: Keywords.

Create a tab called competitors. Have the columns: URL, DR, Root Domains.

Create another tab called Opportunities with the following columns: Page URL, DR, Root Domains, Author, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

Step 1

Gather a list of all the major keywords for the pages on your site.

Put them in the spreadsheet under keywords.

Step 2

Compile a list of all your competitors in a spreadsheet. You can find SO many with Ahrefs. For all your keywords, do this :-

Note down all the sites on page 1 that are review sites. We want the sites that will link to review sites, not ones that are linking to manufacturers, videos or informational type posts.

Check the DR and RDs of each of them. Save those in your competitors spreadsheet tab.

You can create a list of 100’s of keywords, so you’ll end up with a LOT of sites to research here.

Next, in Ahrefs check the “Competing domains” of each of those competitors. Add relevant ones that are review sites.

Step 3

Go to Ahrefs and view the backlinks of one of the competitors. Sort by UR(the default). Now open the backlinks and look for the articles.

Save them all in the opportunities tab. Just the page URL for now. All you want to do just now is save the URL of the backlink if it’s an article. Nothing more. Save and close.

Each time you store all the article backlinks for a competitor domain, mark it as green in your competitors tab so you can keep track.

Step 4

Now go through each URL in your opportunities tab. Open it up and look at it in more detail.

Has it been created by the site owner, or is has it been created by an editor/author? Generally bigger sites will have author accounts and small/medium will usually just be the site owner. If there’s no author listed, it’s the site owner.

If it’s the site, then just write “owner” in the Author column. If there’s an author, then write down the name of the person.

You need the contact info now. If it’s just the site’s article, then find the contact us, or about us section on the site. Look for an email, but if you can’t find one you’ll have to use the contact form on the site. Either note down the email in the spreadsheet, or the URL for the contact form.

If the site has a Facebook/Twitter you can note that down and sometimes contact the owner through that if you can’t get in touch via email or the contact form.

If the article is created by an author, which you’ll find is common on the bigger sites, then see if their contact details are in the author box or available by clicking on their name on the article. If not, google their name and search for them on Facebook/Twitter. If you can find their contact details, add everything you’ve found in the spreadsheet.

Step 5

After you’ve gone through your opportunities list and filled in all the contact info it’s time to do the outreach.

We do this whole process systematically, so first you get a huge list of keywords, then a huge list of competitors, then a huge list of opportunities, then find the contact info for those opportunities and finally contact your opportunities.

Your approach will depend on whether you’re contacting the site owner, or an author.

Step 5a: Contacting Owners

This is super easy, don’t overcomplicate it. You don’t need some fancy template. You just want to write a simple, friendly, to-the-point email. Something along the lines of :-

“Hey,

Would it be possible to write a high quality article like http://his-site.com/the-exact-article-you-found for your site and in exchange get a link in it back to my fitness site? If not, would you accept this for a fee?

Thanks a lot,

Your Name

“

Here’s an example where I asked about niche edits and guest posts on a DR 66 tech site with over 2000 referring domains that ranks for 40k keywords with 37k per month organic traffic.

Really casual works best. If you come across formal then they often won’t respond, and you NEED to mention the article otherwise they’ll think it’s an automated email.

After you’ve sent the email, mark the row in your opportunities tab yellow. When they reply, mark it green for success or red for a no. For successful responses add them in a new spreadsheet called “Guest Posts & Niche Edits”.

Inside that spreadsheet create the columns:- Domain, Niche, TF, DR, DA, RDs, Organic Keywords, Organic Traffic, Guest Post Cost, Niche Edit Cost, Need Supply Article, Contact Type, Contact Name, Contact Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Notes

If they don’t do niche edits, just put N/A into that column. “Contact Type” is owner or author as above. The rest is self-explanatory. Over time you'll tweak this based on your own needs and experience.

If a site offers multiple options, just add a row underneath with the domain, cost and relevant info in the notes and make it a different color so you can see it’s part of the 1 site. Simple and organized!

Step 5B: Contacting Authors

This is a little different than contacting the site owners. For starters authors will always require a payment. You won’t just be able to write a high quality article in exchange for a link. It’s not their website so they don’t care about that.

You’ll often be able to make contact with them via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn too. They won’t always have an email address listed. A big plus to finding authors as opposed to website owner created articles is that they’ll write for multiple sites.

If they’re open to accepting a payment for a link in an upcoming article, or writing a full guest post for you then they’ll probably have other sites they can get you a link on.

When contacting them, as always, just be casual and to the point. If you’re messaging on social media just a simple “Hi, I saw your article on some-site.com and I was wondering if I could pay you to add a link to my fitness site on your next article?” This will get the conversation going and from there you can negotiate and ask if they write for any other sites.

They will be unlikely to do a niche edit since that would alert the site owner they’re taking payments for links.

If you're emailing them the only difference is you’ll go into a bit more detail in the email, telling them your site you’d like the link on up front.

And that’s all there is to it! You now know how to find 100’s of guest post and niche edit opportunities without paying websites that charge huge fees for it. Easy when you know how eh?

High Quality PBNs

Buying Posts on Existing Networks

A cheaper way to get PBN posts is to buy individual posts on existing networks that others are selling posts on. Most networks out there are pretty low quality and you need to be careful not to damage your website when taking this route.

I recommend sticking with networks that are charging you a monthly fee as they are far more likely to be high quality. For a network where you're paying yearly, don’t get anything under $30 per year.

High Quality Directories

Directory links are still good if used sparingly and you stick with the good ones. How do you know if they’re good? Usually by looking at it. How many sites does it have, ie is it saturated? How easy is it to get a link?

Can anyone submit or is it moderated? And lastly check the amount of organic traffic it has on Ahrefs. If it’s dead and only has a few hundred visitors per month, don’t bother.

If you are at all in doubt about the quality of a directory, just avoid it and stick with contextual (your link in an article).

Web 2.0 Links

Web 2’s used to be a lot more powerful than they are. These days they are pretty weak, but it’s worth creating a few of them for brand new sites.

There are dozens of web 2.0 and you can search Google to get big lists of them. It’s worth trying out several if you’re looking for free backlinks. Here’s a list of the top Web 2.0’s to get you started :-

301 Redirects – Relevant Only

Rather than build a PBN on a domain you can just do a 301 redirect of your aged/expired domain to your site. This can be good because you don’t have to bother setting up your PBN.

It’s also quite powerful to have 2-3 very strong domains with a 301 to your site. The rules to follow here are, an absolute max of 4-5 301 redirects, ideally 2-3. They must be relevant. You can 301 a site that was about fitness to your fitness site, but don’t 301 a site that was about laptops to your fitness site for example.

I also recommend making your 301’s as strong as possible. Since you can only use up to 4-5 of them, it’s a waste to use a cheap expired domain with 15 linking root domains. Stick with strong domains, DR25+ and 100+ linking root domains for your 301 redirects. Don’t add more than one 301 redirect per month to be on the safe side.

Sitewide Links – Relevant Only

A sitewide link is a link that appears on every page of the site. Usually it’s in the footer. These were very popular and powerful several years ago. Today, they’re riskier. They can still work extremely well if you follow these rules :-

Also, stick with strong sites for a sitewide link. Don’t waste them on weak sites.

Business Profiles & Social Media

Finally, these types of links are useful. Having business listings and citations helps builds trust with Google.

It makes you look like a real, long term legitimate business and not just a website out to make money.

They aren’t particularly powerful and they won’t push you up the rankings, but they will help you build your brand in the eyes of Google. Business profile links are any sort of business listing where you’re adding in your business name, site and address. Always have an address associated with your Amazon review site so you look like a real business.

Social media helps make your site look more active.. That’s about it for SEO. Some will say its very important for SEO, but my personal experience is that it doesn’t make much difference.

I still recommend encouraging people to share your articles and creating a Facebook page and Twitter profile for your site. It’s more useful for sites built on fresh domains rather than aged/expired domains.

It’s quick and easy to do, so it’s worth the time spent. Beyond creating your basic social media profiles, getting a few likes/follows and posting some of your articles, there’s not much you need to do.

Now you’ve learned all the details about building and ranking your site, but, you’re probably still feeling a bit lost. That’s where this 12-month blueprint comes in. I’ll show you, month by month what you need to get your site ranked and making you money.

If you have an aged domain, you can start at month 4. Fresh domains start at month 1.

Month 1

Use only brand or naked anchors.

Build social profiles and business listings. As many as you want as long as you're building them manually.

Build a few web 2.0’s. 1-2 per week. Add links to your social profiles in them too. These should be like brand pages for your site talking about what the site is about.

You can add 1 or 2 guest posts.

Month 2

Still all brand and naked anchors at this point.

Add 2 contextual links per week. Either PBNs or guest posts.

You can add some more business listings if you still have some to create.

Month 3

Add 2 to 3 contextual links per week. In total, 1 generic, 1 LSI and the rest brand/naked.

You can add some high quality directory links or niche directories. Brand/naked only for these and no more than 4-5.

Do a press release if you can afford it. Brand/naked anchors only and don’t go crazy. Just a small press release.

Month 4

If you want to do 301 redirects, you can add 1 now.

4 to 5 contextual links per week. PBNs or guest posts. About 15-20 over the month. 2-3 LSI, 2 generic and the rest brand/naked.

Month 5

You can add another 301.

If you have the opportunity for a sitewide link you can add 1 now. Brand/naked only.

5 to 6 contextual links per week. PBNs or guest posts. If you’ve been adding ALL PBNs then at the end of month 5 you’ll have around 60 PBN links. This is a lot. If you want to take the risk, keep going until you hit 100, otherwise stop adding PBN links now.

Month 6, 7 and 8

6 to 7 contextual links per week. Around 25-30 per month, or 1 per day is fine. Your ratios should be mostly brand/naked, with 2-3 LSI’s, 1-2 title, 1 partial and 1-2 generic.

You can add another 301 each month and 1 sitewide each month. No more than 5 301’s or 2 sitewide links. An absolute max of 3 sitewide links if you’ve got a 3^rd you want to use. Remember these MUST be brand/naked and very relevant sites.

Month 9, 10, 11 and 12.

You can crank things up now. Your site is sufficiently aged. This is month 9 for a fresh domain, or month 6 for an aged domain. Your aged domain you can even start cranking it up at month 3 if it’s a 200+ RD domain.

At this stage you can start placing 2 to 3 contextual links per day. Up to 100 per month is fine. It’s unlikely for your first stage you’ll have anywhere near enough budget for 100 high quality links, but for your 2^nd and 3^rd when you're reinvesting you'll know that at this stage you can push HARD.

Focus just on contextual links. They are what will rank you. Don’t worry about diversity. When your site is ranking you'll pick up a bunch of natural links, many of which will be junk, but that gives you the “natural” link profile. It’s very hard to fake that. If you try to build out a bunch of low quality links to diversify, you’ll end up tripping the algorithmic unnatural links penalty.

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Ok, so you’ve built your site. You’ve added plenty of content. You’ve done your link building and followed the 12 month blueprint.

Your site is making anything from $500 per month to $2000+ per month. 1 year is the strong point for your Amazon review site. It’s now well established and aged, and you’ll notice that new articles will start to rank almost instantly on page 3-7. Within 3-4 weeks they’ll be bringing in a little traffic, and after 6-8 weeks they have solid rankings.

It’s at this point you must make your decision on what to do next.

Option 1: Sell up after 1 year

Websites and online businesses sell for around 18x to 60x their monthly revenue. The figure is usually the average of your last 6 months of earnings. If you have a seasonal site that makes most of its money, let’s say, at Christmas time, then you'll sell based on the average of the past 12 months.

50-60x revenue is quite rare and more for SaaS businesses, but it’s not impossible.

18-25x is more typical for sites earning $500 to $1000 per month. They’re not quite as popular, and generally you’ll get around $18k to $25k for a $1k/mo site. They tend to be higher risk for buyers too since just because a site is making $1k per month doesn’t mean you can easily scale it up. But of course, this depends on your niche and how much room there is to grow.

$1500-$2000 per month is where you’ll be able to sell for 25x-40x revenue. If you’ve used PBNs you’ll be looking at 25x-32x, and if you’ve kept it cleaner, 32-40x, however, even ones that have used PBNs will still sell very well.

I recently watched a video by one of the Empire Flippers staff where he said that the difference between the sale price of one with PBN links vs no PBNs is only 10%.

I would personally recommend using clean PBNs. You'll rank faster, but don’t go crazy. 10-20% of your link profile as PBNs is fine.

The best 2 sites for selling Amazon review sites are Empire Flippers and FE International. Empire Flippers charges a listing fee of $297 for first time sellers and $97 afterwards. It’s refundable if your site doesn’t sell. They both take 15% of the final sale price as commission.

This may seem like a lot, but if they both provide a full service. These aren’t just sites like eBay where you stick your site on and hope for the best. They work with you every step of the way and value your site for you. It’s going to be extremely difficult and problematic to try and sell a site for $40k-$300k or more yourself unless you already have a large amount of buyer contacts.

The biggest advantage to selling your site is that you can immediately start building another. Let’s say for example you sell your site for $20,000. You’ll get $17,000 after the broker fees. You can then pay yourself $7,000 and invest $10,000 in your next project.

This time you’re armed with more experience, so imagine what you can accomplish in another 12 months. Your second site will potentially sell for $50,000 or more next time. This is a very fast way to become a millionaire in less than 5 years, and I'm talking having a million of your own personal money, cash in the bank, AND, having your business re-investment fund.

Option 2: Grow another 6 months before selling

If you’re making less than $1500 per month, I would strongly recommend growing another 6 months so you can squeeze the maximum valuation out of your site.

The sweet spot for Amazon review sites is about $5k per month. Why? Still lots of growth potential and it’s a proven earner. You’ll get 35-45x ROI for a $5k per month site. That’s up to $225k.

If your site is earning about $2k per month after 1 year, then you can reach $5k/mo in 6 months very easily by reinvesting that $2k each month.

Option 3: Keep the site long term

This is my least favorite option. You can make far more money by selling a $5k per month every 12-18 months than you can growing your own. People who are buying the $5k per month sites already have surplus capital and are usually buying more than 1 site to grow. Ie, they can buy 5 sites at $200k each, invest another $50k into the SEO for them, and turn those $5k per month sites into $20k to $50k per month sites and net $2 million per year.

But, when you only have 1 site, and can’t throw $50k in SEO at it, you’re better selling now, taking some cash for yourself and reinvesting in another. Eventually you’ll have excess money, and will be better off holding onto those $2k per month sites and scaling them all the way up, or maybe you’ll be the person buying others’ sites for $200k.

If you decide to keep the site, then just keep doing what you did in the final months of the 12-Month blueprint. More content and more quality links. Reinvest as much as you can and grow grow grow.

The more money you have to invest into your SEO, the higher quality links you should get. It’s always quality over quantity!

Final Thoughts

Now that we've come to the end of this definitive guide. Making money from your niche sites with amazon affiliate marketing is not hard that many people think, if done the right way. I’ve tried to explain all the terms and step by step procedures to make thinks easier for you to start and grow a niche site that can enable you to make a passive income online.

I hope you find this guide useful. If I've missed anything or if you have any questions, let me know in the comments below. I'll be more than happy to answer all of your questions.

As always, happy affiliate marketing.