So if you are from Germany, and you visited at 1:25pm this afternoon after searching Google.de for an “Amazon rank tool”, you were my 2,000^th visitor to this website.

I thought I would take this opportunity to thank you, my readers for visiting this website.  There appear to be about 60 of you that visit every month and whilst I am writing my income reports and other posts for my own benefit in the main, it is nice to know that others read what I write as well.

And if you are interested, all my websites use WordPress and I use StatCounter for all my visitor stats.  The following two images show my visitor statistics since I created this website in the last week of January, but there is much more information available at StatCounter so if you are looking for a good website visitor statistics system, I strongly recommend them.  And the great thing is, StatCounter is Free!

StatCounter visitor graph

StatCounter visitor numbers

The other great thing about StatCounter is that you can view the visitor and page view statistics for all your websites from the one screen which I find handy.  Check it out.

Lastly, whether you are a regular visitor to this website, or visiting for the first time, I would love to hear your comments.  What is it that you like, or don’t like, about this website?

“No great thing is created suddenly”

Well that is what is keeping me going at the moment.  The knowledge that it takes time and effort to build a successful ‘anything’ – in this case, a successful internet marketing business.

I don’t know what went wrong this month.  It was my worst month since the terrible month I had in February – for both income and website traffic.

And to add insult to injury, I was ‘hijacked’!

Someone decided to use a robot of some sort to click on every link on three of my websites.  This resulted in my Amazon.co.uk click through results looking absolutely terrible – with just a 5.71% conversion at Amazon and an incredible 26.77% click through rate from my UK websites to Amazon.co.uk.

The picture to the right shows my Amazon clicks for one of the effected websites.  On 24 and 25 July the clicks skyrocketed.  When I checked my website traffic reports the visitor numbers were normal indicating that some sort of robot obtained the links from the website – i.e. the website wasn’t actually visited by 29 unique visitors who clicked on 105 of my links.

Anyway, I am feeling a bit despondent at the moment.

I am way too busy with my day job to focus much effort on affiliate marketing, my website traffic is down, my income is down, an idiot is causing me problems with my analysis by stuffing up my Amazon click ratios, and right now I am about ready to put this whole thing on hold.

But, like I said at the start of this post, and have mentioned previously, building a successful online business will not happen overnight, but it will happen if I keep working at it.

So I will be back again next month with another income report.  But due to other pressures I don’t expect to be putting too much time into this over the next month unfortunately.

A quick summary of my July income:

Amazon.com:

$4.00 from one sale which was actually made in June but despatched in July.  No orders in July.

Amazon.co.uk:

As per the following summary, after eliminating 140 Amazon clicks from the analysis table:

Amazon.co.uk income analysis - July 2011

Footnote:

The purpose of these Amazon Income Reports is for me to one day look back and remind myself how far I have come, and how hard it was in the beginning.

If you, as the reader of this report find benefit from it, then that is an added bonus.

Until next month,

Richard

The states affected so far are California, Illinois, Colorado, North Carolina, New York, and Rhode Island.  And apparently several other states (including Arizona, Hawaii, Minnesota, Mississippi and Vermont) may also introduce similar new tax laws related to affiliate programs.

My Offer To You:

I am reasonably new to affiliate marketing and am still learning, but some of you may now find yourself in the position whereby you had a successful website/s that were generating good amounts of affiliate income, and now, all of a sudden, that income is gone!

You received a message from Amazon stating “… As a result of this, contracts with all California residents participating in the Amazon Associates Program are terminated effective today, June 29 2011.  Those California residents will no longer receive advertising fees for sales referred to Amazon.com …”

“Oh shit!” you say.  Or maybe something else along those lines.

You have suddenly found that your Amazon affiliate income has completely dried up.  You still have the website/s and they are still driving visitors to Amazon.com, but you will not earn another penny from all your years of effort.

Or …

Talk to me.  I may be new to affiliate marketing, but I am a businessman and I have an idea that will be win-win for us both.

What I am proposing is that :

• You sell me your website/s and in return I will pay you a fee for the ‘training’ that you will provide me in future months/years. 
• The fee will be based on the amount of revenue that the website/s I purchase from you generate in Amazon commissions.
• The websites will be transferred into my name and to my US based web hosting company.
• You will continue to earn an extremely high percentage of the revenue that the websites, that were initially created by you, generate in future revenue for ever and a day.  The more revenue they earn, the higher the percentage of revenue that will be paid to you for the ‘training’ that you will be providing to me.

Or, you do nothing.  Amazon have cancelled your affiliate agreement.  Your income is zero.

Why am I offering you this opportunity?

As I mentioned above, I am a businessman and I think I have seen an opportunity for both of us to benefit.

Without this opportunity your affiliate income is zero.

Sell me your website and enter into a contract to provide me with affiliate ‘training’ and you continue to earn an income.

How can I afford to do this?

If you have a successful affiliate website then you must know what you are doing, and I need your assistance and knowledge as I am not succeeding as fast as I would like to.

This offer will make money for me.  It will not cost me.

But it will also make money for you.

How can you contact me?

Please complete the contact form at the bottom of this page.

More about the Nexus Tax

Basically the new tax law requires that Amazon, and other affiliate companies, pay a sales tax on all sales generated from affiliate leads that come in from the state in which the affiliate is based.  i.e. You live in California.  Someone clicks on your affiliate link and purchases something from Amazon.  Amazon must pay sales tax to the State of California.

Amazon, and other affiliate companies, have made the decision that this no longer makes it viable for them to have affiliates in the affected states – hence the problem that you may now have.

Is there another option?

Of course there are other options.

• You could sell your website to someone else.
  I don’t know that you would find as good an offer as I am making elsewhere though.
• You could do nothing.
  Your Amazon affiliate income is gone!
• You could relink to other affiliate programs, but they may also eventually decide to follow what Amazon has done – the new law applies to all affiliate programs, not just Amazon.
• You could set up a business in another state.
  I recommend that you get legal advice before doing this as it may be seen as tax fraud to do this.  And what is to say that the state you set up your next business in doesn’t end up introducing a similar law.
• You could become reseller rather than an affiliate.
  Find appropriate merchants and sell their products directly through your already successful websites.
• And I am sure that there could be other options available as well.

But if you would like to discuss further, please complete the contact form below and I will call you to discuss.

Richard

Time is something that I just don’t have enough of at the moment and I wondered whether that is reflected in my results this month.

I have done absolutely no backlinking during June and I think that to keep building traffic during the early life of a website, backlinking is important.

In fact the only thing I did during June within my IM business was to create one new Amazon.com affiliate website which I haven’t had time to complete, and convert one UK website which was promoting another merchants products to now promote Amazon products.  And again, I have not yet completed this job either.

So in a way, I guess we could say that my June income really is “passive income”.  It is 100% earned from websites that existed before the start of June, which I have not touched at all during the month, and have not even created one backlink for either.

So how much did I earn in June?

My Amazon Affiliate Income is now coming from both Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and in June it amounted to £69.30 and US$20.48 (approximately £12.80) so about £82.10 in total.  This is down on May, but as mentioned above, it is 100% passive income.

My analysis of both .co.uk and .com income is below:

Amazon.co.uk Analysis - June 2011

Amazon.com Analysis - June 2011

What I see from this analysis is that my June .co.uk income decreased for two reasons:

1. The average sale value was down significantly at just £19.06 which in turn decreased my average commission per sale to just £1.05.  It had been averaging around £1.50/sale over the previous four months.
2. Traffic to my Amazon affiliated websites was down by 20% on last month, although the conversion of website visitors to Amazon.co.uk was up on recent months.

At the end of the day, this just confirms that it is all a numbers game.  Generate high traffic volumes and the flow on effect will be affiliate income at the other end.

It is way too early to do any analysis of my .com websites and income but hopefully next month.

My goals for next month:

I have decided that from now on, each month when I publish my income report I am going to write down my goals for the next month, and maybe beyond.  I have read and heard on many occasions that writing down your goals is the first step to achieving them, so here goes:

• Outsourcing
  I don’t have the time to do what I need to do.  I have two partially completed websites, both created using WPZonBuilder, and all that really needs doing to complete them is the addition of keywords on some 400 product listings and categorisation to enable easy searching by website visitors.
  I have put this out as a job on Elance and have had a few proposals back.  All I need to do now is speak with the person I have selected to do the work and for just US$55 he will complete these two websites for me.
• Backlinking
  I have started building backlinks again over the last two days.
  I have five methods for building backlinks (which I intend to write about soon – when time permits) and have broken this goal down into sections.
  The first three methods I use are reasonably easy and my goal is to spend 20 to 30 minutes running through these methods four or five days a week.
  The other two are more time-consuming and produce significantly less backlinks, but probably much higher quality links, and my goal is to spend one hour, once a week, working with these two methods.
• Articles for this website
  I want to write two more articles for this website during July.  One will be on backlinking and one will be about my experience outsourcing the completion of my two websites via Elance.
• One more new website
  The guy who will be completing my two half finished websites has offered to do three websites for the $55 so I either need to get a new website through to the stage where they just need the keywords and product categorisation done, or maybe refurbish another existing website and point it to Amazon products rather than to an existing under-performing merchant.

And they are my goals for July.  Nothing about income as I think that if I do the work, the income will follow.  That said, I would like to get back over the £100 mark in the UK and ideally US$50 from mu .com sites.

Amazon income reports:

One day I will be earning some decent money from this ‘hobby’ and I want people to see that it is all about perseverance and belief in the potential of internet marketing.  So whilst I think the real useful information that I provide in these monthly income reports is what I have already written above, the following are screen shots some people may be interested in.

Amazon.com

Amazon.com Income Summary - June 2011

Amazon.com Income Summary - June 2011

Amazon.com Tracking Analysis - June 2011

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.co.uk Income Summary June 2011

Amazon.co.uk Income Summary - June 2011

Amazon.co.uk Tracking Analysis - June 2011

Until next month,

Richard 

I also thought I would create one or two new websites but make them .com websites linked to Amazon.com rather than .co.uk which is what I have been concentrating on for the last four months.

Little did I know that I was going to become extremely busy with my day job and not have anywhere near as much time as I wanted/needed to spend on my IM business.

I am not too concerned though as, at the end of the day, it is my day job that pays the bills and IM is still a hobby that I hope will expand to a stage where I can start replacing some of my normal income and therefore justify spending more time doing IM.

So I created my first .com website in the first week of May, and created a second the following week.  I also spent about an hour a day building backlinks (I will discuss further in my next blog post) until around the 15^th of May and then I just ran out of time to do any more IM work.

The first .com website I created was pretty much an exact copy of my best performing .co.uk website.  This was a website I developed using WPZonBuilder in January to promote something that I had purchased online as a Christmas present for my wife last year.

As you can see from my analysis of this websites performance from January to May below, after an initially slow first two months, Google discovered it and it has started generating a nice passive income for me with no additional work.

Website analysis - January to May 2011

I am hoping to now do the same with my .com equivalent which I have also built using WPZonBuilder.  In both cases the websites took about three hours to build from start to finish, and now, the .co.uk website is bringing in good monthly traffic and converting reasonably well to Amazon click throughs – with 7.26% of all page views resulting in a click through to Amazon.co.uk.  This is slightly below my overall average, but I think it is acceptable.

Someone, a while ago, left a comment on this website along the lines that he thought I was over analysing my website traffic, click throughs, sales, etc, but in writing this report today I have just realised that my initial concern about my .com equivalent is nothing to worry about at this stage.

In the first 4 weeks of the .com version of the above website I had 202 visitors, 364 page views, 38 clicks through to Amazon (a rate of 10.4%) and one sale – an Amazon conversion rate of only 2.6%.  But when I look at January and February in the above table I actually see that this is better than I was doing with the site that is now performing well, so I don’t think I have anything to worry about.

My second .com site was also built using WPZonBuilder and has had 64 visitors and 122 page views, generating 23 clicks through to Amazon.com.  Again, a good click through rate.  But no sales yet.  It is promoting a much higher priced item that any of my .co.uk sites, with an average price of around $250.  Because of the cap on Amazon.co.uk sales there really isn’t any incentive to promote such high value items as an Amazon.co.uk affiliate, but I figure that one or two sales a month at $250 each would make this website satisfactory and I think I can do much better than that.  That said, it is a seasonal product and will only sell during the summer.

My next .com affiliate site though is likely to be a replica of a .co.uk site I created in December last year promoting a winter seasonal product.  In January of this year that website earned me £49 in affiliate commission in just its second month, and then winter ended and it hasn’t earned much since.  But the plan is to get it’s .com equivalent up and running soon so that when the US winter hits, the website will hopefully already be well ranked on Google.

My May Income:

And now for my income report.

In keeping with the format of previous months, the following summary shows my monthly earnings for each month this year.

Amazon.co.uk Summary - May 2011

I finally broke through the £100 commission barrier.  Something I expected to do in February based on my January results – but I have already discussed why this didn’t happen above.

Website traffic was up 67% on April and over double March’s traffic, and while the Amazon conversion rate was slightly lower than March and April, at 8.5% it is still very good.

My percentage click through rate (Amazon clicks over website page views) remains steady at 11% and overall I think things are progressing nicely.

I have actually done a bit more analysis and I am now even more certain that this (Internet/Affiliate Marketing) is all a numbers game.  For the last three months my number of sales divided by the number of website page views has been consistent at between 1.01% and 1.10% – effectively meaning that for every 100 page views I get on my websites, I will make one Amazon sale.  And if I work that out at a per website visitor rate the percentage is consistent at between 1.79% and 1.91% – meaning that I need between 52 and 56 visitors to my websites to generate each Amazon sale.

So what does this mean?

 It means that in order to generate 100 sales I need between 5,200 and 5,600 website visitors.  In May I had 3,693 unique visitors.

If my average commission per sale remains at about £1.50 (and my aim is to increase this, especially with a focus on the Amazon.com market) then those 5,200 to 5,600 visitors will generate me an income of £150 – or £0.027 to £0.028 each.

That doesn’t sound much, but if I can generate 100,000 visitors per month to my websites, then I will be earning £2,700 to £2,800 per month.  Now that is what I call a good passive income.

Or in other words, I need to get 36 website visitors for every pound I want to earn.

So what do I need to do achieve this?

More websites plus more backlinking equals more visitors.  Simples!

Review websites versus WPZonBuilder websites

I referred to this subject last month.  I know that I only have one ‘review’ website, and that to be honest I really need to put more time into this and write some more reviews, because it is only currently reviewing two models of one product together with a comparison table of about 8 or 9 different models, but in May the review website didn’t product any income at all – from 48 Amazon click throughs.

The WPZonBuilder website I have that promotes the same products earned me £21 from 38 click throughs and three sales.

Go figure.  The gurus say that review websites are where the money is, but my experience is telling me to develop hundreds of WPZonBuilder websites – with each one taking just a few hours to build which is much less time that that required to research and write reviews.

So that is what I will do.

Other summary reports:

I would prefer to supply too much information than not enough in these monthly income reports, so the following screen shots are the other reports that I have been including in each months report up to now.  I have included both UK and US reports:

Amazon.com:

These results are for two brand new websites created this month.

Amazon.com income summary - May 2011

Amazon.com earnings summary - May 2011

Amazon.com tracking analysis - May 2011

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.co.uk income summary - May 2011

Amazon.co.uk earnings summary - May 2011

Amazon.co.uk tracking analysis – May 2011

In this article I just want to tell you a little about backlinks.

I don’t profess to be an expert by any means, and I am sure that many readers will know much more than I do about this subject.  You are welcome to add comments below if you do – or ask questions if you don’t

I have learnt so much about backlinks and techniques for building backlinks during the last six months, that I could spend all day writing about the subject.  But the purpose of today’s article is simply to lay a bit of a foundation for what I want to discuss in my next few articles.

So here goes …

Firstly, a further explanation about backlinks:

• What are backlinks?

  A backlink is a link from an external website back to your own website.  They are also known as ‘inbound links’ or IBL’s.

• Why are backlinks important?

  Years ago Google developed an algorithm which incorporated the number of backlinks a website has into the calculation as to where a website ranks for the keywords that the user is searching for.
  They reasoned that the more backlinks a website had, the more popular the website must be, and therefore the higher it should rank in the SERP’s (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

• Are all backlinks equal?

  No.  Another part of the Google algorithm is the PR value of the website that contains the link back to your website.
  If a website has a PR ranking of 10 (PR rankings go from 0 to 10) then the backlink carries a lot more weighting than a website with a PR ranking of 1 or 2 (or 0).  In fact I have read that a backlink on a PR 7 or 8 website may be worth as much weighting as 100 backlinks on a website with a PR rating of 4 or 5.  No one really knows because Google keep their algorithm secret, but  it stands to reason that if a website has a higher PR value then any information on that website is seen to be more authorities than lower PR ranked websites.

• What is the PR system?

  The Page Rank system (named after Google co-founder Larry Page) ranks the popularity of a website and is based almost entirely on the number, quality and variety of inbound links to your website.
  Most websites will have a PR ranking of 0, 1, 2 or 3.
  Google.com and Facebook.com are the only websites in the world with a page rank of 10.
  Twitter.com has a PR ranking of 9 as does bbc.co.uk.
  And Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk have PR rankings of 8.
  So you can see how hard it is to get a high PR ranking.
  In fact anything above 4 is considered to be very good.
  By the way, this website has a PR ranking of 0 – but it is only five months old.

• How does a websites PR affect my backlinks?

  The higher the Page Rank of the website/s linking back to your website, the more weight the backlinks carry in terms of the Google search ranking algorithm.
  As mentioned above, one backlink on a PR 7 or 8 website is worth much more than one backlink on a PR 4 or 5 website.  Possibly 100 times more.
  In addition, the quality of the backlink is less important on a high PR website than it is on a low PR website.

• Additionally, the algorithm also looks at the type of websites that your backlinks are on.  Are the websites relevant to yours?

  If your website is about ipods, for example, and your backlinks are coming from websites that are about music, sound systems, etc, then they are given more weighting than if the backlink to your ipod website is coming from a retirement village website.

• I have more than one website.  Should I create backlinks on each website to all my other websites?

  Probably not.
  Google also looks at the IP address of each website and if the website hosting the backlink to your site has the same IP address as your site (because they are on the same server) then Google will probably disregard the backlink, or even worse, it may penalise both websites for trying to manipulate the search engine rankings.
  That said, if two of your websites are about the same subject that it may not be harmful to add links, although you may want to link in only one direction as Google also looks at whether reciprocal backlinks exist and gives them a lower ranking or disregards them altogether.

• What are reciprocal baclinks?

  A reciprocal backlink is  where you have a link on your website to another website, and they have a link on their website back to your website.
  Google doesn’t link these as it sees this as a form of search engine results manipulation.

• What are ‘quality backlinks’?

  When someone refers to quality backlinks they are usually referring to the fact that the backlink is embedded into keywords within a sentence or article like this (did you see the link within this paragraph?) rather than just being included on a page of links somewhere.
  As an aside, did you know that if you search for the words ‘click here’ every single search engine will show Adobe.com as number one.  This is because there are millions upon millions of websites around the world that have a hyperlink on the words ‘click here’ linking back to Adobe.com to enable visitors to download Adobe reader in order to view the pdf’s on their websites.

Well that brings me to the end of my first article on backlinking.

There is plenty more to tell you, and over the coming weeks I will impart more of my knowledge, but what I intend to do next is write a couple articles about what I have been doing to develop backlinks during the last six months, and especially over the last few weeks.

So check back again in a few days and hopefully by then I will have written my next article.

Cheers

Richard

The post is entitled ‘Help – Amazon Removed the Product!’ and it explains what happens when Amazon or the retailer of a product you link to on the Amazon website removes their product.

I am not going to repeat the article here.  Instead I recommend that you read it by clicking on the link above.

After reading the article I checked my Orders report on the Amazon Associates website as recommended in the article and found that in the last 16 days (May month to date) eleven of my website visitors had clicked on links for three separate products that no longer exist on the Amazon website.

When I checked back further I found that a staggering 139 visitors had clicked on links to six different products that used to be listed on Amazon (at the time I linked to them) and have since been removed.

Amazon Broken Links

How much revenue have I missed out on?

I have no idea.

When a visitor clicks on a link to a product that no longer exists they are taken to a page that shows the following:

Amazon 404 Error

This click is still attributed to me as the Amazon associate, but the question is, what does the visit do next?

Do they go somewhere else altogether, and therefore I miss out on a potential sale?

Do they click the ‘back’ button and go back to my website and then, hopefully, click on another link through to Amazon, and then make a purchase?

Or do they click on the link to the Amazon Home Page as recommended by Amazon?

And if they do this, does the attribution of the referral remain or do I miss out of commission from any purchase the visitor may subsequently make because of the initial broken link.

I don’t know the answer to these questions, and I am not prepared to take the risk of missing out on revenue so I have just spent the last hour finding the broken links on my websites and fixing them.

If there is one article worth reading before you do anything else, I highly recommend clicking on this link and reading the article on Affiliate Blog Online now! 

I now have an Amazon.com affiliate website to go with the 14 websites that I have referring visitors to Amazon.co.uk.

I have discussed the reasons for doing this already (see Amazon.co.uk pays 15% less than Amazon.com and Amazon commission caps, cookie expiry, and tiered commission structure).

While it is early days in my career as an Amazon affiliate I have already discovered that Amazon.com pays a much better commission than Amazon.co.uk.

So the other night I registered six domain names with iPage (a Boston based web hosting company who offer unlimited hosting for one fixed monthly cost of US$4.50 or £1.99).

And today I set up the first of those websites.

The six domains I registered have domain names that are identical of very close to the six highest traffic domain names I have in the UK – as I figure that if these six are getting good traffic in the UK, hopefully they will do the same in the .com market.

I intend setting up all six websites over the next six weeks (one per week) as product catalogue type websites (rather than product review websites) using WPZonBuilder. I am doing this for two reasons:

1. It is much faster to create a catalogue type website than to create a review website due to the huge amount of time that it takes to research and write good quality reviews,

2. And based on my small amount of analysis (see Amazon Affiliate Profit Income Report for April 2011) I think that short term income is likely to be higher from the catalogue websites than from review websites.

That said, I acknowledge that I have not done sufficient analysis of this yet in that I only have one product review website, and that really needs at least two more reviews written.

My goal initially is simply to establish myself in the .com market and once I have some income coming in I will decide what to do next.

I intend to continue working with my existing Amazon.co.uk websites as well but probably won’t create any new UK websites until I have the six .com websites up and running.

My other focus now is on building backlinks to both the new .com websites and my existing UK websites. But that is a subject for another article another day.

• Why am I spending so much time and energy to earn £60 in a month from Amazon when I am a reasonably highly paid computer software consultant?
• Why am I spending an hour or more once a month writing about my meagre income on this blog?
• Why am I maintaining this blog?

Well, I have a belief, a vision.

I believe that the effort I put in last month will generate income next month.  And the effort I put in in March will also generate an income in the future months.  And the effort I have put in every week this year will contribute to my future income.  And that one day soon I will see the rewards for all that effort.

I believe that one day I will earn a decent enough passive income from the work I have done to build my internet marketing business over the last few months that I will be able to reduce, and maybe completely eliminate the need to do a job that I find extremely stressful and less and less fulfilling as the years go by.

I also know that if I don’t analyse my monthly results I won’t know what is working for me and what isn’t. 

And I enjoy my new hobby.

And as I have mentioned previously, this blog is mainly about me keeping my own diary of my progress in the world of internet marketing.  It is something that I hope to read back in years to come and remember how much work I put in to get where I have gotten to.

And maybe it might also be something that helps other people who are new to the world of internet marketing in the future.

I really have no idea how many hours I am putting in to this hobby on a monthly basis, but I can tell you that other than spending a couple hours converting one of my non-Amazon product websites to point at Amazon products in the first weekend of April, I have done very little during April as I have been in New Zealand for a combination of work and holiday.

Anyway, how did April go:

The following summary shows my monthly earnings for each month this year.

Amazon Summary - April 2011

April was slightly above March due to a 24% increase in website traffic over March and an almost 100% increase of January and February.

Amazon Click Stats - April 2011

My conversion rate once visitors were on the Amazon website was also my best so far at 9.79%.

The only downside was that my average sale value was 7% lower than March and 21% lower than February.  Obviously, the higher the average sale value, the higher the resulting commission.  Although that said, as I have mentioned a couple times now (Amazon commission caps, cookie expiry, and tiered commission structure and Amazon.co.uk pays 15% less than Amazon.com) Amazon.co.uk have this ridiculous cap on the amount of commission that they pay on an individual item which means that one of my sales this month was capped at 3.85%.

Also, my top commission percentage was 5.5% because I only managed 42 sales.  In the UK we need to produce 51 sales in a month to move to 6% commission whereas on Amazon.com affiliates only need 7 sales to get paid at 6%.

Amazon Earnings April 2011

Further analysis:

I have 14 websites linking back to Amazon.co.uk and 13 of them are listed below.  The 14^th didn’t generate any traffic at all last month because of a technical problem that I never got around to investigating.  It hadn’t produced any income, and not much traffic either, so isn’t high on my priority list to resolve.

On 2^nd April I decided to convert one of my non-Amazon websites to refer visitors to Amazon rather than the two merchants I was linking to as the website had generated reasonable traffic during February with absolutely no sales.

The result of this is as shown on the second line of the tracking ID report below:

Amazon Click Stats - April 2011

111 clicks from 916 page views – a click through rate of 12.1% which is slightly above my overall average, but a conversion rate of only 5.4%.

The five sales that have been dispatched so far produced £11.05 in commission, and there was another order placed with Amazon on 30 April which will give me another £2 or £3 in commission.

As it happens, I had to leave a couple links to the other two merchants on the website because there were three products I was listing that Amazon didn’t sell, and these links also produced two sales, so the website itself produced a total of £20 in commission – to add to the £20 it had produced between November and March.

I think converting the website to point to Amazon was the right thing to do, but to be honest I think it is too early to tell for sure.

Review sites versus product catalogue type sites:

In the above report I have put a circle around the fourth and fifth lines.  These two websites are promoting exactly the same products.  One is a product review website and the other is a catalogue type site which I developed using WPZonBuilder.

The product review site probably took 20 to 30 hours work to put together (including writing the reports).  The WPZonBuilder developed site took maybe two hours work.

The WPZonBuilder site is ranked at number 8 on Google for its main keyword and the product review site is ranked at number 9.

Also, the WPZonBuilder site is a .Org.Uk and the Review site is a .Co.Uk.

Which one is which?

Well surprisingly, the product review site is the first one listed with 36 clicks through to Amazon for the month.  The WPZonBuilder site is the second one listed with just 13 clicks, 3 orders and 2 items dispatched (the third came through on the 29^th and will pay £5 or £6 in commission when dispatched).

Life to date (the WPZonBuilder site is three months old and the product review site is two months old), the situation is similar with the product review site generating more traffic and more clicks though to Amazon, but less sales:

Review versus WPZonBuilder

Interesting isn’t it.

I have read that product review sites are the way to go but that is not what my own statistics are showing.

To be honest though, I think it is too early to make a decision on this, and I think I need to do a couple things before I can make a decision on which way to go.  I need to write some more reviews for the product review site.  It currently consists of two long (2,500+ word) reviews, a blog, a comparison page that compares all the products listed on the WPZonBuilder site in a table format) and a number of images and video clips.  But I think i need another three decent reviews on the website.

And I also think I need to create two more product review websites in order to make a comparison between the two website types.

The four websites I have marked with an ‘X’ are the four that I have created using WPZonBuilder.  I have previously written about this product and think I will be using it to create more sites of a similar nature in the future.  They are quick and easy to create, and as can be seen above, they generate revenue.

I read once that one way to make money online is to create 1,000 websites that each generate $10 per month in income.  I wonder whether that could be where I am headed.

Anyway, I am sure I will write again about this subject.

Our friendly competition:

And just before I finish, after I wrote my first income report at the end of January I found another guy, Raymond Selda, who was doing something similar.  I had earned an income of £74 in January and he had earned US$79, so I challenged him to a friendly competition to see who could generate the most affiliate income through Amazon each month.  Ray is promoting through Amazon.com and I am promoting through Amazon.co.uk (and potentially looking to also move to Amazon.com) and whilst I have enjoyed the competition to date, I am now on a 3 nil losing streak!

Ray earned US$134 in April which equates to about £80.  And year to date, January to April, Ray has earned US$505 which is about £362 versus my £199.

Well done Ray:

                                Ray:                       3

                                Richard:                0

While I wish you well, I am hoping that I can reverse the tables this month

And one last thing, I am going to be on holiday when it comes to the end of May, so it is probably that I won’t get an opportunity to write my May income report until mid June.

Until then,

Richard 

To re-cap, the maximum commission that Amazon.co.uk pay on any one sale (any one item within a sale) is £7.00.  This is regardless of the value of the sale or the percentage commission rate that the affiliate is on at the time the sale is transacted, and depending on the volume of products sold in a given month, Amazon.com pays up to 1.5% more than Amazon.co.uk.

I thought today that I was going to write a blog post to advise that I have made my first sale affected by the £7.00 cap, but when I researched tonight I found that I have actually had two other sales – one this month and one last month – that were also affected by the cap.

The two earlier sales were only marginally affected, and I hadn’t actually noticed at the time of the transactions because my commission rate at the time of the two sales was 5% and the sales were both for £133/£135 and therefore the cap didn’t apply.  But in both cases, shortly afterwards my monthly sales went past the 21 sales required to move to 5.5%.  At 5.5% my commission on these two sales should have increased to £7.31 and £7.42 respectively, but were capped at £7.00.

Last week I sold an item for £181.66 – my biggest sale to date – and received just £7.00 in commission – or 3.85%.

My intention is to increase both the quantity of products sold each month and the average sale value so I can see this happening more and more as time goes by, so I am thinking that I really need to look at moving to Amazon.com where the cap only applies on electrical goods, and is US$25 (about £15).

I have just done some simple analysis of my sales from 1 January to yesterday and the £7.00 cap combined with the fact that the commission rate paid by Amazon.co.uk is less than that paid by Amazon.com has cost me £28.00.  That might not sound a lot, but it is a difference of £210 versus £182 – or 15%.

Now, if I grow my Amazon sales at the rate that I hope to over the next year or so, that 15% could make a big difference to my income.  It could be the difference between earning £1,150 per month versus £1,000, or it could be the difference between earning US$4,600 per month versus US$4,000.  When I look at it that way, I really do need to move my efforts to Amazon.com.

Keep posted …