Starting again, after some time, am I too late?

[StartingAgain]

Messed around in my teens and early 20's making little sites that did all the SEO tricks. Profits came and went. I never went all in on affiliate marketing and so I never really made a living from it. Always a focus on short term profit and quick results. Now in my mid-30's I regret wasting my time and cheap tricks when it was a lot easier and I had more energy to make a real business.

Now I have some time off and I want to make an authority site that brings in $3000-4000USD per month in profit from Amazon and display advertising. Am I too late? I know it takes 1.5-2+ years to reach that level, if it ever happens!

I used to work professionally as an SEO guy from about 2007 to 2013, but I burnt out and lost interest after that. I think I will have an advantage over someone who has never done SEO before, but I am sure I have a lot to learn.

I am hoping to devote 50% of my day to writing articles for the site and 50% of my time into learning to code in order to become a front-end web developer in the "real world". I cannot risk putting 100% of my time into building a site that might never take off!

Am I wasting my time trying to make an Amazon affiliate site in 2019 and beyond?

 

[mikey3times]

I don’t think it is too late. There is always an opportunity somewhere. Publishing isn’t going away, but how publishers make money is always evolving. You can’t just follow the herd. Doing what everyone else does will lead to the same outcome. And even if that works now, eventually the market gets saturated.

I do fear Amazon. I’m pretty sure that they don’t need affiliates. What value do we offer them that they can’t generate themselves? Good affiliates know how to help people choose the best product on Amazon. What happens when Amazon decides to include that on their site? In some respects they would be ostracizing some of their sellers, but they already have the “Amazon Recommends” label in many categories.

I think there is still money to be made, but I would also be thinking about what happens to your site if Amazon closes the affiliate program. How would you pivot? Or would you be ok with what you extracted from Amazon when the getting was good.

Every publication needs some form of R&D. Always try to push the envelope and try new stuff. Be a leader. Be a real business. Evolve and solve reader needs better than other publishers. Then there is money to be made.

It isn’t easy. Full disclosure, I’m not good at it, but I do see people here pushing the boundaries. They don’t reveal details (obviously) so their posts are cryptic, but you should try to think like them.

Be a real publishing business.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@StartingAgain, The best time to have started is yesterday. There's always room for newcomers. And even if it takes 2 years for you to ramp up, in 2 years you'll be glad you did, or slapping yourself if you didn't. Of course, you can bypass all this by buying an established site, or get a head start by buying a non-dropped expired domain that has great links and possibly some content you can recover. That takes some capital though.

But all of that is coming from the viewpoint of someone focused 100% on SEO, which is a mistake. There are a lot of ways of getting traffic that aren't SEO but are some of the best ways to improve your SEO. The concept of Traffic Leaking is one, doing superb Social Media work is another, and also paying for promotions on any platform. All of those lead to you getting traffic, links, conversions, etc.

But no matter what you do, there should be an SEO angle or you're leaving a lot of free traffic on the table. The fundamentals are the most important or you'll sabotage yourself before you start. Make sure your niche selection and keyword research is on point. It's okay and even good if the niche is saturated, because that means there's money flowing in it. But don't start off going for the hardest keywords, you'll get no results. Find the easy ones with little competition and slide up in there and slowly go for harder and harder keywords as your link profile is built up.

It's never too late. Every single day, some hot shot is buying the best sites in the niches you want to go into and destroying them. I see it happen all the time. Niches are always cycling through sites coming and going and ones not evolving while newcomers do. It's never too late. And if you don't start your chances of having the reward is an assured zero percent.

 

[StartingAgain]

The concept of Traffic Leaking is one, doing superb Social Media work is another, and also paying for promotions on any platform. All of those lead to you getting traffic, links, conversions, etc.

Does traffic leaking and social only give you traffic short term, or can you get enough of them that it becomes a steady, on-going source of traffic and conversions?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Does traffic leaking and social only give you traffic short term, or can you get enough of them that it becomes a steady, on-going source of traffic and conversions?

It's a snowball effect. Some leaks continue to give traffic, but most of the time it's a game of getting as many interested eyeballs on the page as you can. This leads to bloggers and journalist-types spreading your page to their fanbases, and then their fan-bloggers spread it more. In the meantime people are posting it to their social media profiles too. This lands you a ton of links and social shares that rank you and get you recurring SEO traffic.

Traffic leaking can directly bring recurring traffic. Like if you were to plant your link on highly ranked and traffic Quora questions and forum threads. Stuff like Reddit, if you hit the "top" posts of a sub-reddit you'll be there for a long time, and lots of people like to look at the top posts.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

Does traffic leaking and social only give you traffic short term, or can you get enough of them that it becomes a steady, on-going source of traffic and conversions?

My thought to add to this is that when I used to do more traffic leaking was when I was selling things that gave recurring income. Eg poker -- pre "Black Friday" affiliate deals. I could come up with some funny videos, leak traffic from popular poker forums etc, get people into my chat room, get them signed up to deals right away (direct from affil links in the article being leaked to) etc etc. Either one of those led to long term/permanent value from the leak even if the traffic only came for a short while.

That's because those affiliate deals paid recurring monthly revenue as long as the players played. Now it wasn't permanent ofc (the poker rooms got shut down... players go bust all the time... etc) but it was a 'growing baseline'. If I leaked 1,000 interested visitors/month and got say $100/month in recurring revenue each time (just round made up numbers), it grew each month as I kept the money from before.

I'd avoid investing a ton of time into leaking traffic to just sell one item unless you have a plan to capture those people for future value (retargeting, mailing lists, chat rooms, recurring revenue) but as long as you have a plan that's how you increase the long term value of short term traffic leaks.

 

[StartingAgain]

Thanks for your input guys. I will definitely try traffic leaking when the site gets up and running with at least 30 pages.

I will start a journey thread if and when I get 3 likes here too.

 

[Calamari]

Thanks for your input guys. I will definitely try traffic leaking when the site gets up and running with at least 30 pages.

No need to wait until 30. Just 5 or so pages is enough as long as they are all relevant to the page you're trying to get traffic to.