Well hello there! Do you have an affiliate site or have you seen my Amazon Affiliate WordPress guide? This is a follow up post about the trials and tribulations of my test site, PerfectChristmasPresents.com, to let you know how it’s going and give you a few extra tips that I’ve picked up. In fact this post was actually prompted by a twitter follower, so many thanks for nudging me in the right direction Cormac.
@RobertRyanDotie Hows about an update on how "PerfectXmasPresents" is going? Interested to read that article :) #Amazon #affiliatemarketing
— Cormac O Kelly (@cormacokelly) November 30, 2014
Amazon Affiliate WordPress Guide – Must Read Follow Up
So, the first thing. Have I made a ton of money? No, not at all, not even a cent to be honest due to account suspensions but not a complete failure. My first foray into Amazon affiliates has helped me lean a ton about Amazon, let’s break it down.
I was completely unaware of this issue when I started the test site but having products on your site from different Amazon regions, eg. .co.uk, .ca, .com etc causes issues. Try limit yourself to choosing and promoting affiliate products from just one region alone. This makes things pretty messy as if you get a visitor from say America and you only have Amazon products from .co.uk then the suppliers of those products may not ship to America and you’ve lost an affiliate. This is kinda lame but it is what it is. Amazon.com also don’t like listing their products alongside Amazon.co.uk for example and this actually resulted in my affiliate accounts being closed. Yes, Amazon closed my account .com affiliate because I was promoting Amazon products from other regions.
you’re entering a legalese laden minefield of tight lipped, script reading semi conscious automatons who, whilst feigning a helpful tone, are anything but.
And here is the really frustrating bit. Once you stumble upon an issue with Amazon you’re entering a legalese laden minefield of tight lipped, script reading semi conscious automatons who, whilst feigning a helpful tone, are anything but. It really is a joke. In the unlikely event of someone from Amazon reading this please sort it out. From Googling to try find a way to resolve the issue I came across many forums with people similarly exasperated at the lack of decent support from Amazon.
2) Less Products, More Content
Our .co.uk Amazon affiliate ran aground due to content. For pages where you have an Amazon affiliate product Amazon want it so that the content that is found on the Amazon site isn’t the only content that is found on your site or affiliate product page – and I guess that makes sense. The issue I had with the test site is I ran before I crawled. I got excited and started adding loads of products (have about 100 on the site at the moment) but I didn’t spend the time to wirte accompanying text for each product and allowed too much automation. I was adding content separately via blog posts but it seems like Amazon don’t just want their product listing replicated on affiliate site – and that makes sense to me.
So, to remedy this issue take time to choose products that you can write a couple of hundreds words about and pace yourself as you’re adding them. Focus on quality over quantity with products and ensure each product you add gets some unique accompanying content.
3) More Tightly Focused Affiliates
When starting out keep your products very focused. Using my PerfectChristmasPresents.com test as an example it is still too broad as Christmas Presents can be for mums, dads, brothers, sisters, geeks etc etc – a better approach would have been giftsforgeeks.com or similar as that is very tightly focused. Having a tighter focus will help with your sites SEO but will also force you to apply no.2 above. I’ve got plans in mind for another affiliate test site and have secured the domain RedEspressoMachines.com. I chose the domain as it’s very focused, espresso machines can be pricey enough and if someone searches for “red espresso machine” it’s clear what they are searching for whereas a “perfect christmas present” is still quite subjective.
4) Look Into Different Affiliates
Amazon aren’t the only gig in town and you should try seek out other affiliates. There are sites like Affiliate Window where you can find a range of different types of affiliates that are available to promote, some of which pay better than Amazon and have an easier conversion path. What I mean by that is if someone doesn’t have an Amazon account having to set up an account to complete a purchase may be a bridge too far and so you lose the affiliate. If someone can complete purchase without having to create an account then that makes it a much smoother transaction.
5) Ways of Integrating
Another thing to look at is how you go about integrating your affiliate into your WordPress site. The WooCommerce and Amazon plugin combo I mentioned in the previous post is a nice way to get up and running but there are other approaches. One other service for affiliates which I’ve used recently is DataFeedr which allows you amalgamate a variety of different affiliate sources into one tool and then use the tool to add them to site. You can see this approach in use on IrishWhiskey.com and HaigWhisky.com. The advantage of this approach is that you’re not locked into using a WooCommerce set up and each affiliate is listed on a page as opposed to product listing which gives you more control of layouts etc. The sites mentioned combine affiliates from Amazon as well as from whisk(e)y specific affiliates. The conversion rate for non Amazon affiliates is much much higher than Amazon (as per reasons mentioned in no.4) and we’re going to look into completely dropping Amazon on those sites.
6) Traffic to Site
As the above image shows the site has racked up almost 30,000 product views since September, approx 10,000 product views per month say. Not an earth shattering amount but not altogether terrible – especially as my blogging wings got clipped for the site about 2 months ago when Amazon closed the affiliate accounts. I think if the affiliates were still active and I kept blogging I could have got a lot more traffic. Organic traffic to the site is actually surprisingly good and so the approach I’ve taken for URL slugs and categories is something I’ll do again. I also think I’ll start to revive the site again next year during the summer to get it fully prepped for next Christmas. In the back of my mind when I started this experiment I never had any hope or expectation for anything to come good this year, but maybe in a year or two.
Amazon Affiliate WordPress Guide – Must Read Follow Up
So, has the PerfectChristmasPresents.com project been a failure? I honestly don’t think so at all. Should I wish to I could try sell the domain on the likes of Flippa and I’ll more than likely break even but I’m going to hold onto it for a while for more tinkering next year.
Also, on the back of the PerfectChristmasPresents.com experiment and blog post I’ve wound up as one of the whisk(e)y barons of the web (self appointed, indulgent title ;)) with my involvement in IrishWhiskey.com & HaigWhisky.com – two sites which are both doing very well and have a lot of on and offline potential. My PerfectChristmasPresents hustle allowed those ventures to come along so I think that’s a good ROI on the time spent on Perfect Christmas Presents.
The other cherry on top is that my blog post about Amazon affiliates ranks well for some related search terms and I’ve received a few e-mails from people looking for help with affiliates which is awesome. It’s something I’d like to get into more and the more traffic and inquiries that post generates the more opportunities that will come along. If you’ve an affiliate idea, get in touch!