How I Got Rich

Is Cloaking Affiliate Links to Amazon Illegal?

I just read a scary post on this blog about a guy who got his Amazon associates account (and his Adsense account) banned. The reason for the Amazon ban seems to be because he was cloaking his affiliate links which is against their new TOS. Anyone else heard of this?

“In addition, you must not use a link shortening service in a manner that makes it unclear that you are linking to an Amazon Site.”

Taken from: http://www.aaronchua.com/2012/02/banned-from-amazon-and-adsense.html

Great Niche Finding Video

A good blog I’ve recently stumbled over is Nate Rivers’ Stay Blogger site. One of the latest posts is on the topic of finding good keywords to base an amazon product niche site around. In the 10 minute video he uses Market Samuari to quickly find a seed or root keyword for his site and then selects some additional keywords for the other pages that will make up the site. Its the opposite of what I do which is to write pages on individual products rather than more generic keywords. I think I like his idea better and will be giving it a try on some of my existing sites.

Its not rocket science but if you are new to affiliate marketing to want to be reminded of how easy it can be to find keywords to build a site around have a look.

Hopefully he won’t mind me embedding the video here but you can also view the video any accompanying information on his blog at:

• http://www.strayblogger.com/how-to-do-market-research-for-amazon-affiliate-sites/

What do you think? Too simplistic or a good way to research niches?

First Decent Payout

Today I received my first proper payment from affiliate marketing.  £255 was deposited into by bank account from Amazon Associates.  As Amazon pay two months in arrears this was the commission I earned in June 2009.  It was nice to see it in my account and I am looking forward to next months payment already!

Monthly report for June

Well I reached and exceeded my target for June of £150 and brought in £255 of commission.  I’m really pleased with this as its a just a little over double what I did last month and with it being only my fifth full month in affiliate marketing I think it shows I could make a living from this in the future.

£140 came from one site and the other £110 from 13 other sites.  Some sites failed to make a sale but overall most are making some money.

The main challenges for next month will be the changes to the Amazon Associates commission structure which I think will hit me quite hard.  If the new structure had been in place in June I think it would have reduced my earnings by about 45% as I make a lot of use of direct links.  But I shall not be giving it any thought as I go into July and will just work hard on getting new sites up and running and adding content to existing sites and continuing to try and find backlinks.

My target for July is £300 – wish me luck!

March 2009 Round-up

March 2009 was my second full month in affiliate marketting.

My goal was to earn on average 1 pound per day to reach a total of 31 pounds for the whole month.

I came close with 29.45 which all came from the amazon associates programme.  I had been sending traffic to other merhcants but none of them converted.  This amount came from 50 sales which shows I am earning less than 1 pound per order on average.  If I was getting 10 pound commission per sale I would be a happy man but from what I understand promoting higher priced items is a much harder game.

My goal for April 2009 is to get 50 pounds in referral fees.  Wish me luck!

Sales for March 2009