Newbie Question(s) so dumb, you're afraid to even ask!

Volume @TriForce - not a glamours answer but that's how they do it. Pick a range of product keywords where you could achieve the goal based on total volume.
 
What's a good opt-in percentage to aim for a popup?

This was a good question, and of course it varies widely, but with enough data you can average it out pretty well, which is what Sumo.com did in this post over 520,000 sites. They said:
  • 1.95% average
  • Top 10% get 4.77% average
  • For popups only - 2.9% average
  • For popups only - Top 10% get 6.5%
inventory: 100 twitter accounts created in 2009
I think each has a profile pic, and is following 20 people or so.... any intrinsic value due to age?

I think Twitter is getting a bit better at detecting bot activity, where age isn't a determining factor any more. What they're doing is locking down accounts and forcing you to give them your phone number to verify some pin number. I don't think, but don't quote me on it, that age has anything to do with it any more.

Okay so I'm pretty green but here goes - I get that many people use the Amazon affiliate program given how popular Amazon is but how on earth do people run businesses on such thin commissions?

Crunching some rough numbers, at roughly 5% commission, I'd need to do a pretty high level of sales value to be able to do this full time.

I'm not put off - just trying to understand if it's possible?

Volume and Item Price.

It's not just "getting people to Amazon" and hoping they buy something. Depending on what the items are and the price, you need to pre-sell on your landing page well. If it's Google traffic, there are certain types of keywords (all covered in Day 6 of the Crash Course) that have "user intent" already built in. Someone searching "lawnmower" is far less likely to buy than someone searching "lawnmower reviews" or even "lawnmower coupons."

I see people regularly do 5% to 10% conversion rates, and I even know someone getting 30%+, which drives me bonkers but it's not high priced items. I vary between 2% to 3% and earn a full time living from it, among other monetization methods as well. Took about 2 years to ramp up to that level on this project, but I've been around the block quite a few times. It's very possible. It's very possible to become obscenely wealthy on ~5% commission rates.

Then again, there's also much better methods. Amazon is to product sales affiliates as Adsense is to display advertising affiliates. It's bottom barrel for sure. You can do CPA forms where you collect a name, address, & phone number and get upwards of $25 a pop or even much higher. I do Pay Per Call leads and get $350 a pop. There's a lot of stuff that makes Amazon look silly, but where Amazon succeeds is volume and being consistent and not randomly shutting down or not making payments.
 
@Ryuzaki - thanks for going into such detail on your answer. I guess it's a mind shift that I need to adopt - businesses can be made through volume not just through a few high paying clients.
 
Google is increasingly not returning useful results for me (anyone else notice?), so I will ask here instead.

Has any studies been done on what verticals people buy at which times of the day? Surely such studies have been done, but Google doesn't seem to understand.
 
I'll add my own really stupid question.

Used to be that I could see "Product clicks without orders" in amazon reports.
Can't find it anymore.

Dead for good, or just well hidden?
 
Used to be that I could see "Product clicks without orders" in amazon reports.
Can't find it anymore.

Dead for good, or just well hidden?

This was deprecated in late February, 2018. There were some tears shed on the official Amazon Affiliates forum. Here's an example.

It's always the same 3 or 4 faces though up in arms, blaming Amazon for Google algorithm changes because they don't know how to look up stream and don't have enough data and sales to make sense of anything, which I suppose is why they moaned when a useful piece of data was removed from the dashboard.
 
On my one niche site I refer to a product (otc meds), which seemingly is very price elastic. The one supplier with a low enough price to sell online, has now been out of stock the entire month, meaning close to zero commission for me on that site.

I sent about $5000 revenue last month, so I thought seriously about going into ebiz and simply selling it.

Of course life is not that easy. I contacted the usual Indiamart supplies and they could hook me up at like a $1 pr. serving, which would make revenue = profits. That was naturally a pipe dream as when you begin to research archaic laws for selling otc meds. Horrible, just horrible. Set up to clearly protect brick and mortar pharmacies.

Such bs!

Anyway, do you have any recommendations in such a situation (monopolized price elastic product)?
 
Do you think it lowers conversion when you make a link early on the landing page like:

"Click to see all Red Gadgets at Amazon"

vs a link only with the products:

"Click to get best price for Red Gadget X at Amazon"

I know the second converts better, but I am asking if you should refrain from using links the first. Could there be a risk of leading the visitor to the vendor too early. Like if they click early in the article, they might check out the product, but haven't been sold enough to make a decision. They might not go back and read the rest of the product recommendations.
 
If I were to add an affiliate-tagged link to Amazon in my site's nav bar, is that something Amazon would get their panties in a bunch over, or is it a safe move?

Thanks.
 
Do you think it lowers conversion when you make a link early on the landing page like:

It depends on the type of product. Is it a logic-based purchase (more expensive, technical product) or an emotional-based one (cheaper, affects their status or place in culture, etc.) Both of those things can be dictated by marketing they've already seen too. Like Apple should be a logic-based purchase, but they market based on being a part of their culture and subtle inclusion/exclusion that it's an emotional purchase.

Considering all of that, yes, you need to pre-sell for logic-based purchases more and start disarming them, maybe even hit some of their emotional buttons. For emotion you're better off just getting them to Amazon ASAP and letting Amazon do the work.

However, the ultimate goal with Amazon isn't always to sell what you promote. It's to drop the last cookie and make money on whatever they buy. So sometimes getting more clicks is worth a drop in conversion rate when it equals more money on your side. It's def worth a test.

In most cases, more clicks ends up equaling more money. But you can get those clicks in better ways than "see all of this type of product" and linking to a search result. Comparison tables at the top are an example of better ways to still funnel traffic straight to a product while getting more and more clicks. You need to squeeze them down the buying funnel. "See 10,000 possible options of tennis shoes" isn't really doing that.

If I were to add an affiliate-tagged link to Amazon in my site's nav bar, is that something Amazon would get their panties in a bunch over, or is it a safe move?

I think it entirely depends on the anchor text, where you send the traffic, and if the traffic converts. I don't think Amazon tolerates broad and generic links, say to their homepage, that isn't using one of their own creatives they give out for those reasons. They also don't like... for example, a site about wood working tools sending traffic that either never converts or only ends up buying groceries.

There is an expectation that you'll get them conversions on what you're promoting. Otherwise they're giving you a commissions for traffic arbitrage, on sales they'd likely have gotten a large chunk of anyways.

Now if Amazon is constantly running a sales section on their wood working tools lander and you linked out to "Current Sales," that might fly. I'd definitely explore the ToS before doing it.
 
I am Just starting out are there any good thread you guy would recommend
 
Does anyone have any examples of high-quality blogging-style affiliate landing pages they can share?

Thanks.
 
Does anyone have any examples of high-quality blogging-style affiliate landing pages they can share?

A great resource for this kind of thing is to hit up the e-marketing section of Clickbank. It's the really cheesy "used car salesman" style of selling online, like you see all of the people on Warrior Forum trying to emulate.

It looks really stupid to us because we know the game and feel like we need to be more sophisticated, but the reality is this stuff works like gangbusters on normal people. Of course you'd change it up depending on the niche and then split test, but this should get your neurons firing.

Code:
http://dayjobdestroyer.com
http://clickbankuniversity.com/go/offer/

Here's a couple I grabbed. They aren't specific ones I'm endorsing. I didn't even read them. I just looked for a visual style that I wanted to share. On the 2nd one, make sure you use that specific URL, otherwise you end up in a video squeeze page.
 
Anyone have any tips for beating Disqus? I know they're strict, and like to ban entire domains if you get too careless.

I have an account with 500+ comments, and 6,000+ upvotes. Do you think this is established enough to where I can aggressively promote my site?
 
I noticed there was a line through a few peoples names, what does that mean? banned? I seen emp migrated over here but has a line in his name, did zingo ever make it over here?
 
Is buying stock video worth it?

I was very surprised to see $100 for even the cheapest 20 seconds cut, which was just a static background.

Is it really not possible to get pre-made video for less than several thousands? If so, you might as well just hire someone or get animation done.
 
Is buying stock video worth it?

It depends on how niched you're going. I was able to make the intro to my videos using footage I found here: https://videos.pexels.com

In the long run, you're probably better off buying a camera and lighting and learning to edit yourself, depending on how frequently you do it. It'll come out a lot cheaper after a few runs, except if you have the budget to blow on it and time matters more than that money.
 
Anyone ever experienced a penalty of a site just because it was added in the same search console as another site that got a penalty?

I am using different gmails for all my websites but obv Google knows which Gmail Accounts are connected.

Adding to this, general opinion on using WMT for expired domains where you recreated a lot of the old content? I could imagine that if Google ever decides to go after this practice it could lead them to all your other properties if they found one.
 
I have a question.

I have an amazon affiliate site that I manage and I use Amazon Native Ads on the site. For the past one month, I've discovered that I'm not getting any report on the Native Ads.

The ads shows without problem on my site but I'm getting zero clicks and earning in my amazon reports dashboard.

Is anyone else experiencing this? Or could this be from a conflicting plugin? Thanks
 
Anyone ever experienced a penalty of a site just because it was added in the same search console as another site that got a penalty?

People used to fear that a bunch. I'm not sure it ever happened. I never heard of or experienced a case. Like you said, Google is going to know who owns the site. They're getting us through Analytics, Search Console, Gmail, Fonts, Sheets & Docs, Adsense... there's no escape. Usually they only hit the offending site.

The only time they go through and whack everything you own is if you're doing something really atrocious like running a huge PBN and selling links. It's happened to me before. Lost the entire PBN plus all of my sites got penalized, even if they were unrelated and "unlinked" in terms of Google accounts.

The ads shows without problem on my site but I'm getting zero clicks and earning in my amazon reports dashboard.

Have you double checked to make sure the tracking tag is on it? I feel like I read somewhere that there was some issue with them and OneLink, but that could be a false memory. Are you using OneLink? And are you sure you're actually getting clicks?
 
Here's my newbie question even though I have been in SEO for a while now. When starting a new site from scratch which url style is more preferable and user friendly (which do you choose) www or no www.

I have seen arguments where www brings more trust with older users and looks more professional, then the experience argument where its easier to not type the www.

For those saying theres no difference, clearly there is although a smaller one, also when users type one over the other you push out a redirect that can add an extra half second to your page load time so getting the right one can save you some pagespeed. My guess is with an older demogrpahic stick with www with a younger one go no www?

ex.
WWW.mywebsite.com
vs
mywebsite.com
 
@tyealia, there's no SEO benefit involved with either choice. Even if someone types the wrong one and gets redirected, Google will pick that up and index the correct one.

As far as people, I don't care for the same reason. They end up at the right place. I've not had a redirect take half of a second before, but I moved away from cruddy shared servers too. I just ran a triple test where the redirect too 94ms, 107 ms, and 94ms.

I choose which to use entirely based on the domain name look and length. If it looks better with or without it, I go with that, as long as it's not really long. If it's a long domain, I'll usually drop the 'www'.

Sometimes not having 'www' can look more elegant and sophisticated, depending on the niche and site design.
 
I am reviewing the Digital Strategy Crash Course and there is mention of AIDA (attn, interest, decision, action). So let me get this straight - the bulk of my website pages should be attention grabbing pages that lead to interest/decision pages (like reviews) that lead to action pages (affiliate product landing pages or order forms), right? So what are examples of Attention pages and the difference between those pages and interest pages? So is the first "clickbaitey", the second "informational" and the third and fourth "reviews" and "landing pages" linking deeper and deeper into the funnel from the Attn pages down to the Action page?
 
@tyealia, there's no SEO benefit involved with either choice. Even if someone types the wrong one and gets redirected, Google will pick that up and index the correct one.

Sometimes not having 'www' can look more elegant and sophisticated, depending on the niche and site design.

Thanks Sam, I have hosgator cloud hosting business and drop the www vs adding it on timetofirstbyte was adding an additional 500ms for me.

I guess ill stick with www for small domains. I also read somewhere a survey was taken and 54% of people dropped the www when typing a domain now, but thats so miniscule it doesent seem to matter for the small redirect time difference.
 
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