You finally found a niche, and a seemingly profitable one too!

After you’ve found all the long tail keywords with your keyword tool, created a website using the Amazon Affiliate Blueprint, and creating epic review content for your products, you’d think you’re all set to convert any of your visitors to a click to Amazon and rake in the commissions.

You see daily traffic stats going up, but for some reason, your tracking tool tells you that nobody’s clicking to Amazon and they’re just leaving your page.

Head-scratching ensues, and you wonder what went wrong.

Calls To Action – Tell Them What To Do!

In every, single page or post you create, you must have a clear instruction on what you expect your visitor to do. You need to have one and only one call-to-action (CTA) for your visitor.

Don’t tell them to “Check Price” and “See Reviews” with equal weighting. Be clear on what you want them to do at that point of their site visit.

When your traffic is a cold-lead (like from SEO), odds are, you won’t be the last and final website they’ll visit before making that purchasing decision. So make sure that your non-review pages (informational, general articles) have CTA buttons leading towards more reviews on Amazon or within your site.

For actual review pages, you can have one single CTA button telling them to find the latest discount on Amazon rather than making them commit to “Buy Now!”.

Remember, the goal of your site is convince them to click to Amazon so you get the tracking cookie credit.

CTA Related Resources

I’ve compiled a great list of articles and tools for you to create compelling CTA buttons, make good use of them and see your Amazon check grow!

• Master the Design of CTA – Hubspot

• CTA Button Best Practices – Smashing Magazine

 Tools and Graphic Packs

1. Massive Marketing Graphic Package PLR
2. Marketing Graphics Toolkit Package

Optimize your CTA messaging and buttons now! Small changes can bring massive conversion benefits, so don’t skimp on this.

$$$ and Traffic – Gone with a Cache

I just had a big and costly revelation today.

Since the start of this month, I saw a drastic drop in earnings on my photography site (http://www.iphotocourse.com) but I didn’t see anything strange.

So I did what most webmasters do, I tweaked the layout a big, arrange the ad units and CTA buttons, etc.

No effect.

Then I looked at my web analytics and I was shocked that the site lost about 85% of traffic overnight!

We’re talking about from 4-digit daily down to barely 3-digits!

I never knew why and thought some new Google update thing occurred and I got bitch-slapped again, so I just let it be.

I couldn’t figure out what’s wrong as everything looked normal and unchanged since last year.

Today’s the 18th, so after almost 3 weeks, a friend of mine asked me why my site is all garbled.

I checked my site with my own browser, and I don’t see anything wrong, so I opened an Incognito window in Chrome and checked the site again and I was horrified to see this on my screen!

WHAT LANGUAGE IS THIS!?

My site’s dead!

Whether you’re accessing the home page or inner page, that’s all the users see!

I checked all my other niche sites and websites and to my horror, 2 of them had similar problems!

Traffic and Income Loss

One of the sites was pretty much a dead site, so I didn’t care, while the other one is a seasonal (summer) niche, that’s why I never paid attention to the health of the site because it was winter in the US.

However, the damage done to my photography site was pretty bad.

Take a look at the analytics stats for iPhotocourse:

Statcounter – Note the tail-end drop

Google

The traffic just plummeted around Feb 7.

For the other site, it was the same thing.

Statcounter

Google Analytics

As I’ve mentioned, the 2nd niche site was seasonal, so the gradual drop of traffic in December was expected, but it basically flat-lined around January.

Reason for Garbled WordPress Site – Plugin Flaw

So I went into my plugins folder, deactivated everything and checked the sites in Incognito mode, and sure enough, everything was fine again.

I had to activate the plugins one-by-one to see the culprit. Here’s the weird thing.

You’d assume that the ‘lesser known’ plugins will be at fault, right? So I started activating those plugins one at a time, refreshing the page in Incognito every time – no errors.

Then I activated the security plugins, again, no errors.

Finally, I found out the offending plugin. W3 Total Cache!

Sure enough, removing this plugin and replacing it with another caching plugin solved the problem, you can see other people having the same problem as well.

It’s not just this plugin as well.

One of my other sites had a database backup plugin being back-doored by hackers, a lot of users experienced their homepage being hijacked to a different website because of the security issue.

Be careful!

Check your sites often! I probably lost a couple of hundred bucks just for this stupid issue.

You’ve probably seen how much I love Squidoo in my old article and a lot of you have emailed me your success with your Squidoo lenses as well, telling me it’s the fastest method you’ve tried to earn from Amazon.

Recently, I received an email from Mary. She’s based in Indonesia and her question peaked my interest, here’s a snippet of it:

“Hi Dave,

I bought the WSO you’ve recommended a few months ago and I’m happy to report I earned my first 3-figure check over the holidays. My first check in 2 months off 2 Squidoo lenses, that’s awesome and thanks!

I noticed that Squidoo has a lot of moms hanging around and the homepage of Squidoo often features recipes, party themes and kiddie projects more than gadgets and things like that. Should I build lenses for those instead?”

That email from Mary got me thinking, my Squidoo lenses that worked well have always been kids toys and theme based items, like Lego, Star Wars, Bratz, and the like.. I’ve never tried “mother-centric” themes.

Then I got another email the other on a new way to do keyword research just to look for themes for female-dominant Squidoo audience and you can see it with the link as well.

Mary’s hunch was right, and as a man, it was a big wake-up call for me to never forget to match your Amazon promotions to the marketplace. Squidoo is a very family and female oriented platform and projects and themes dominate apart from recipes.

Every season, every occasion, as Amazon affiliates, we can create highly engaging lenses showing people how to complete the themed projects they had in mind. Things like scrapbooking, room decoration, parties, showers, etc.

The options are endless and relatively evergreen as well!

If you want to learn more on how to approach the keyword research and new Squidoo Lens designs for your Amazon promotions, check this product out.

Ideas, Ideas, I need Ideas!

It seems daunting to see how much opportunity niches there are out there, and you’re not alone.

As a guy, it’s not easy for me to appreciate women niches, particularly stay-at-home mom projects. But I have yet to see a arts & craft store catering to moms close down quickly. They all stay there, pulling in loyal customers year after year. So if you need ideas, I strongly suggest you checked out Ideas Xpress.

Ideas Xpress comes in a plethora of great lens niche options and the keyword research you need to make your lenses popular on Squidoo, which in turn, makes you money!

Click here to check out Ideas Express 

Email me when you find niches you’re excited on building and share us your Squidoo URL!

The goal is to make a sale right? Definitely not! I’ll tell you why.

As an Amazon Associate marketer, my end-goal is, of course, seeing the “Orders” column in my Amazon dashboard have 3-4 figures of sales made from my website. That’s what we’re all aiming for, right?

But after a year of being an Amazon affiliate, I noticed a disturbing trend from my Amazon dashboard. The websites I have that have content that pushes a sale performed poorly compared to my other sites!

That’s a bit annoying for me to realize as those are the content that I’ve spent decent money for, while the websites where I just ‘wing it’ in content are doing so much better.

Build and They Don’t Come

So what’s different? What went wrong?

The main difference is the context of my content. Selling vs. Engaging… Engaging always win.

The Amazon affiliate product websites or Squidoo lenses that I’ve created with “making a sale” in mind have lackluster results compared to my content where I type casually and in a conversational manner.

When I finally learned this aspect of writing, all my other content sites have performed at least 100% better than my hard-sell sites.

As a writer and a marketer, it’s a big shift in mindset for me to not going straight to features, features, benefits, benefits… But as an affiliate, that doesn’t work.

Being an affiliate marketer means you’re PRE-SELLING and lowering the guard of your visitors before they commit to buy.

Amazon will do the job of the actual sale, let them do it! They’re a multi-billion company concentrating to make sales anyway!

Remember, I’m a seasoned writer like myself (I manage a dozen of writers myself the past decade!) could improve on my writing, I’m sure it’ll be easier for affiliate marketers to implement as well.

I just haven’t found this secret sauce!

Writing Proper Reviews with Reviewers Edge

So where did I learn how to write reviews properly?

I was fortunate enough to stumble on Erica Stone’s Reviewers Edge that pretty much is my gold-standard recommendation for Amazon associates.

If you’re interested about how to write proper Amazon review site content, you can check it out with Erica Stone’s Reviewer’s Edge.

After implementing Reviewer’s Edge style myself, I used the tips inside to give specific instructions to outsourced writers and now, it’s a breeze for me to scale and create high-converting content for my profitable Amazon sites!

The main gist of the product is to write content that persuades your visitors to consider and want the products you’re promoting WITHOUT SELLING.

Your job is not to sell, your job is to pre-sell and being their adviser so they’ll consider buying.

Try modifying your under-performing pages that are getting traffic already with the new writing format, you’ll see a significant bump in clicks and actual sales conversions pretty quickly.

I’ve experienced this myself again and again, you can’t go wrong if you stop being a pushy salesman. Just check out Reviewers Edge and you may find that this could be the turning point in your Amazon commission journey.

Grab Reviewer’s Edge Here

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