Another month, and another installment of Niche Dreams. A lot of effort went into my niche website this month. I feel confident that all of the hard work I’ve put in will pay off in the near future. What surprises me the most is the positive feedback I’ve received for this blog series. Honestly, I didn’t expect much awareness of these posts since I’m not really promoting them. I submit them to Google and fully understand that they will get buried in the search results for other case studies of Amazon affiliates.

I owe many thanks to the Niche Pursuits team. When I submitted my results for the first Niche Site Project 4 report, I included the full URL to Part 2. I certainly didn’t expect that to be listed with my results. It was more for the NP team to get a better understanding of my tactics, not a way for me to self-promote. However, I’m grateful none-the-less!

After the first couple of days of being listed with other affiliate hopefuls, direct traffic to Part 2 soared. Notice I said direct traffic? My blog URL wasn’t hyperlinked. It was listed in plain text. That means many of you took the time to copy and paste that lengthy URL into their browser address bar. I find that very flattering! I’ll be certain to use a URL shortener from here on out.

I did want to make clear that my goal with Niche Dreams is just to record and share my learning experiences in this endeavor. I have no desire to monetize this. I’m figuring out things along the way like you are. The pro’s at Niche Pursuits have proven successful if you’re seeking guidance.

Current Metrics and Statistics of my Niche Website

Trust/Citation Flow and Domain/Page Authority

ROOT DOMAIN

TF: 12
CF: 23

HOME PAGE

DA: 17
PA: 23

Observations

There has been a slight increase in Moz and Majestic metrics from last month. Not much, but I haven’t really put any work in linking building for the month of September. If you recall from last month’s post, I mentioned that the scholarship backlinks hadn’t appeared in Google Search Console. Ironically, a day after that post, all of them were listed. It’s a bit of a relief as that is a resource I can continue to tap into. Perhaps this month I’ll hit the spreadsheet again and find some more colleges to email.

Keyword Rankings

Aside from the 4,400’s, not much movement occurred

Observations

For organizational purposes, I’ve sorted the keywords by volume. You’ll notice that a new 70 volume keyword has been added too. This keyword showed some activity in the Search Console tab of SE Ranking that warranted tracking. The screenshot displays the keywords in listed mode but I’ve also grouped them into General and Longtail folders for better sorting. At some point, as I expand my tracked keywords, I’ll probably group them into narrower ranges. Perhaps something like: micro, small, mid, large, macro.

Not much has changed from the rankings a month ago. This might have something to do with the lack of link building for the month. The website is still most likely stuck in the Google sandbox as well. The 4,400 singular/plural keywords went up 10-15 spots though. It is noticeable, as the overall impressions have increased by a lot for them. For the 74,000 and 12,100 keywords, the keyword flashing phenomenon was recorded again on Oct. 3rd. Of note is the jump from flash-to-flash of the 74,000 keyword from a month ago. It went from position #196 to #164. I’m still on the fence if anything valuable can be learned from tracking these flashing occurrences.

Amazon Affiliate Earnings

A great 2nd month! Even got a bounty commission

Observations

Pay no attention to the click spikes on September 9th and 25th. Those were audit days where I was checking inventory status for the products I’m promoting. Compared to last month, I estimate 100 more legitimate clicks. As you can see, that’s translated nicely into earnings.

There is a little overlap from the last reported Amazon earnings range I posted by a few days. The reason for this is that I’d like to get this blog finished for the next Niche Site Project 4 report which is due asap! I should be on track to display these earnings in 1 calendar month from here on out.

Crunching the numbers reveals an approximate 240% increase in commissions earned. Someone signed up for a Amazon Free Channels Trial account which gave me a $3 bounty. Obviously, this is something I didn’t even promote. Of the 22 total ordered items 9 were promoted products and 13 were other items. That right there shows the importance of just getting visitors to click on your links.

This report doesn’t include earnings from the most expensive promoted product that was ordered yesterday. A $189 product to be exact. The commission for that should be a hefty $10 or so. That order came on a day with zero clicks. I believe this was possible thanks to the 24-hour cookie.

$20 isn’t something I’d normally get excited about making, but it’s all about perspective. I’m getting very little traffic but getting a good conversion percentage. I have high expectations for earnings in October. I’d like to make at least $50 but would be extremely happy with $100.

Google Analytics Traffic

Minimal increases and decreases across the board

Observations

I’ve made the decision to post information from the raw filter of Google Analytics. This includes traffic from myself and bots. At the end of August, I did create a filter to exclude my IP address, and more recently, ticked the checkbox to exclude known bots on that filter too. Unfortunately, since I have nothing to compare to the previous month, I’m forced to use the raw filter. However, I think I will be sticking to using data from that filter going forward.

Why would I show data with artificially inflated numbers? It’s not to give the impression of better performance. Rather, I don’t like the inconsistencies I’ve seen from false positives on my exclusion filter. There have been several instances where legitimate traffic did not match up from one filter to the other. I have no idea why. This happened even before I checked off the bot filter later in September. To me, it is more important to eliminate the possibility of missing real traffic than it is to exclude illegitimate traffic.

As the website grows, my traffic and those of bots should dwarf real direct, organic and referral traffic. I have no faith that these false positives won’t grow exponentially more as the website does. Therefore, I’d rather capture everything than risk missing a large chunk of data. This is just my opinion though and I would suggest you check your own numbers before making any conclusions.

Wait a sec.. something doesn’t add up

One lingering question everyone probably has is how the hell is the jump in affiliate earnings accounted for? You’d think that with not much of a traffic boost, the earnings would be similar to last month. I don’t have an answer, just a theory. It has to do with restructuring of my product pages and integrating AAWP.

Anatomy of My Product Page Links

Anyone who has been following this blog should remember my love for AAWP. It’s aesthetically pleasing and highly functional. Since adding callout boxes on all of my product pages for each product, it’s helped to build trust with my visitors. Seeing these professionally designed boxes and really incorporating the Amazon brand (without breaking terms of service), goes a long way. They allow me to hone in on buyer intent in addition to other links on the pages that are for the more inquisitive visitor.

I won’t give out exact details just yet. I don’t want to jeopardize my website by revealing it at this point. However, I will categorize and explain all of the links so that you may use a similar format if you wish. I believe something as small as the wording on a button can make an impact on deciding whether a visitor clicks on it or not.

Last week I went through the painstaking effort of adding Google Analytics tracking code to all of my product links for each category, save for one. The hope is to use the information gathered for some A/B testing to further improve my conversion ratio. Below is an example of how I tagged my links for Google Analytics Events.

There are 3 tags you can customize to your liking: event, event_category, and event_label. I’ve created an event called standard-click to differentiate it from AAWP’s automatically tagged click action event. The category, text-link, was made to determine what type of link was clicked on while the event_label is simply the product name. Not too confusing is it?

AAWP Links

As far as I can tell, there are 3 links within an AAWP callout box. An image link, product title text link, and a button link. My focus is squarely on the button link.

Displaying it in such a way, as shown above, should leave no question of what to expect when the visitor clicks on it. The price is clearly indicated on it. The customized text “Buy on Amazon” makes it known that they can purchase it from Amazon. The prime status icon also indicates that they can get that item quickly.

For the month of September there were 42 AAWP click events. I have no way of knowing how many of those converted into sales, but for such a small amount of traffic, that number is encouraging.

Text Links

When I say text links I’m not talking about links within the body of paragraphs. I mean product title links that I have contained in a header tag. The font size is large and the color is different so as to stand out from the rest of the content.

While I don’t use external links within paragraphs, I do link internally to other pages when appropriate. Not only does this lead the visitor to additional relevant product pages, but helps Google navigate your site better too. There is always the possibility of passing link juice to the linked pages as well.

Image Links

Directly below the product title text link is a large image of the item. Since I have this embedded through visual composer, I don’t have the ability to add tracking code. The images are big enough whereas it isn’t necessary for visitors to click on it for an enlarged version. Thus, I don’t expect there to be any accidental clicks.

Button Links

The last piece of content for each product section is the Visit Product Page button. These are directly below the AAWP callout boxes. Even though it does the exact same thing as AAWP’s “Buy Now” button, I suspect some visitors might be hesitant on clicking on Buy Now. It is my goal to convert those people. Maybe they don’t end up purchasing that item but shop on Amazon for other things.

Time Will Tell How Each Perform

Once I’ve gathered enough data from the performance of each link I can optimize accordingly. I probably won’t touch these pages for a while. The primary goal now is to increase traffic to the website. I want Google to be the main source of that traffic. However, it would be foolish not to work on other ways to generate interest in not only my website, but brand as well.

Building Referral Traffic

According to the Acquisition data from Google Analytics, referral traffic made up 20% of overall traffic for the month of September. This is less than the 32% of direct traffic, and of course far less than the 45% organic search traffic.

I’m a little surprised that direct traffic is more than the referral. Even switching to my excluded IP filter showed a similar gap in percentages. I don’t do any email marketing or offline promotion. Perhaps traffic whose origin can’t be determined is lumped in with direct? I know there are plenty of ad-blockers and other browser extensions that might mask where visitors are coming from.

Anyways, for this month I had 3 platforms I wanted to use to establish some referral traffic. Unfortunately, I was only able to do 2. Other priorities in life took precedence but I should be able to do the 3rd one later in October.

So what am I referring to? Disqus, Pinterest, and Quora. After ignoring Quora for some time, I finally did research on how to capitalize on driving traffic from that site. I just didn’t have the time to implement my strategy. I don’t want to half-ass it, so it’ll have to wait a little bit longer. However, both Disqus and Pinterest have proved to be interesting.

Disqus

Disqus is far and away the leader for referral traffic

It’s a little confusing to see Duckduckgo and Pinterest listed as referral traffic. The former I would expect to be under organic sources while the latter should fall under social. Duckduckgo has been catching my eye recently, but there is little information available on how to optimize for it.

So what is Disqus? It’s a popular commenting system that can be integrated into any website. In fact, I use it on this site! While it does have some pitfalls (namely some questionable scripts and redirects causing minor website slowdowns), I think that the benefits outweigh any negatives. Since it is so popular, people don’t need to create a separate account to comment on different websites using the platform. A lot of websites uses it as their preferred commenting system from big-name news sites to smaller personal blog sites.

There are two sources listed as referral traffic from Disqus. Visiting disq.us greets you with the notice that the domain serves as a tracker for outbound links in comments that were posted. This makes sense as I was able to find a high-authority website where I could drop a link in a comment that fit the topic of that particular post. I can’t be positive, but I believe that all of those users are coming from that one link.

Disqus.com referral traffic is probably coming directly from that domain from one of the channels I posted in. A channel is nothing more than a group message board for various topics. You can see how popular a channel is by looking at the number of followers. Typically news channels are at the top of the list. However, they don’t really make sense for posting stuff about your niche.

Is Posting in a Channel Worth the Effort?

I would say no. I wrote a 700-800 word article with a picture and video embedded and posted it to a broad niche-related category with about 80,000 followers. The first time I tried to submit it, the system auto-flagged it as spam. While channels do have moderators, there is no direct way to contact them. So I just left comments on recent threads that several moderators were listed in, hoping that they would remove that spam marker. No one responded.

I ended up just copying the entire article in a why-the-hell-not moment and reposted in that same channel. This time Disqus allowed it. What pissed me off is that other blatantly advertised posts were all over the place in this channel. Lawyers, doctors, plumbers all wanted you to know about their services. Yet my carefully crafted article got the shaft.

While I was happy that my post went through, it ended up being all for nothing. A few people commented in detail and appreciated it, but it’s been dormant ever since. Most likely due to it being buried under newer posts. I guess I expected a kinda Quora effect where good and helpful information would be rewarded with visibility.

Even though Disqus channels let me down, a well-placed comment has done wonders for me. It’s not as easy as you think and you should exercise caution as well as respect for the website you plan to post on.

The Wrong Way for Getting a Disqus Comment Backlink

As a user and moderator of my own Disqus system, I’ll tell you that when a comment contains a hyperlink it will usually go to pending status. A message is displayed to the administrator that a link is embedded. So if you’re expecting to go on a commenting spree in the hopes of building referral traffic, you should think twice.

There shouldn’t be any SEO value from these comment links as they are tagged nofollow. But if you’re smart about it, you’ll get some clicks by offering supplemental information to the original article.

I think it would be in poor taste to post a comment link on a direct competitors website. Say, for instance, you’re promoting dog collars. Don’t go on another post that is promoting those products in the hopes of steering those visitors to your website. Not only is it rude, but I guarantee there is no way that comment will be approved.

Now if you find a broadly-related post about a topic, perhaps pet health, then have at it. As long as that website doesn’t extensively cover your niche on another page you should be okay. That’s exactly what I did.

I lucked out in finding a website that seems to have no Disqus moderation. The telltale sign of this can be from inane comments and possibly other spam comment links. If you find an opportunity such as this you’ve hit a gold mine! I haven’t spent much time finding another link like this but I’m sure they’re out there.

Searching for Disqus powered websites can be a little tricky. Try adding “Add Disqus to your site” to a search term in your niche in a Google query. Use the MozBar chrome extension to quickly see the DA of search results for selecting an appropriate candidate website. It may take some time, but it is absolutely worth pursuing.

Pinterest

Pinterest business accounts are free and give you access to great analytics

After listening to some of the Niche Pursuits podcasts I noticed a common point of emphasis among the guests. Pinterest traffic. At first, I found it shocking that so many entrepreneurs recommended it as a business strategy. How could a social bookmarking website catering to women boost my brand and visibility?

It turns out I was asking the wrong question. More appropriately, how could I be so ignorant for such a long time and not give Pinterest the respect it deserves? Wow, my perception of what Pinterest is and who it is for was so far off base. I suppose it serves me right for not even bothering to investigate the potential it offers.

Well, Pinterest, you have my attention now. I’m sorry for not giving you the time of day before. Will you forgive me? In all seriousness, since creating a Pinterest account in mid-September I’ve turned into a bit of a junkie.

The whole management process is a bit addictive. I have the app on my android, notifications sent to my browser, and receive all the recommended boards and pins sent to my email. I’m a Pinterest guy!

The Allure of Pinterest

It’s important to note that I’m viewing Pinterest from the perspective of building a brand and a business. While I’m sure it is just as addicting for general users, seeing the pins I’ve created get some visibility really gives me faith that it will translate into money.

So far I have 14 pins across 5 boards. Just 1 of those was created by another business. I realize I probably should be saving and creating pins on a maybe 50/50 basis. The difficult part is not necessarily creating the pins themselves, but the content they point to.

I’ve made pins for all of my major product pages as well as several blog posts. I plan to get in the habit of making pins for all of the blog posts of substance. As I much as I wish I could accelerate this process it’s just not feasible to do on my own.

The most encouraging aspect of managing my Pinterest account is seeing followers randomly appear. Sometimes 2-3 new ones a day. I have accrued 31 followers simply by creating and posting pins on my own slow schedule.

One of the brands I follow and promote in my Niche has around 8,000 followers. If I can remain consistent and dedicated I see no reason why I can’t reach that level or surpass them within a year.

What Do I Believe the Secret to Success on Pinterest is?

Dory from Finding Nemo – © Walt Disney Pictures / Pixar

That’s been my mantra ever since I created my Pinterest account. Of course, it’s a play-on-words from the popular animated film Finding Nemo and the highly quoted phrase “Just keep swimming!”. Being a perfectionist, it is hard to not want to spend a crazy amount of time creating pins. Although, I think with Pinterest you must have a balance between quality and speed (or frequency of pins).

I don’t believe the pins I make are other-wordly, but I do consider them at least average to above average. I’ve only received a few clicks to this point on all of my pins, but the impressions keep climbing. Reading about how other affiliate website owners get thousands of visitors from Pinterest a day keeps me motivated.

If any of you are serious about creating a successful affiliate site, don’t rely solely on Google. Create a Pinterest account and build up that referral traffic. I have a feeling Google is watching and might reward your keyword rankings for establishing an online presence.

Wrapping Up Part 3 Of My Niche Dreams

Oh to have a crystal ball, what I wouldn’t give to see the progress of my niche website 6 months from now. As long as I can see a steady climb in earnings from month-to-month, I don’t think anything can deter me from my goal of making it big as an Amazon affiliate.

Yesterday, I launched a resource tool on a newly created page that I have high expectations to bring in traffic. It utilizes a popular Google API, and to my knowledge, no one else has created this resource. Whether there is a demand for it will remain to be seen. However, giving the visitor something to interact with should increase user engagement for that page and on my website overall. I even dusted off my old Clickbank account and integrated a product with supplemental content on that page.

The next step for promoting this resource page will be to do some outreach as it does involve other businesses related to my niche. I might get some backlinks or even website design work out of the whole process.

The constant juggling of content creation, link building, brand building, and outreach is exhausting. However, I’ve never lost sight of the ultimate prize. I hope everyone is as passionate about their niche as I am!