How to make money with Amazon

Step by step guide on how to make money with Amazon.

Keyword research

This is the most important step! It doesn’t matter how well you do the other steps if you don’t do this right you will just fail. I use market samurai for my keyword research, it’s a great program and I definitely suggest you get it.

Anyway lets get started whit the keyword research. So we are promoting amazon products, I suggest you browse their site for a while, see what they are selling and you will notice that they are pretty much selling everything! This is great for us since every product has more than 1 keyword so that gives us more than enough keywords to choose from. Now let me explain what I mean with every product has more than 1 keyword.

Lets say we want to sell a digital camera. There are alot of keywords that people search for when buying a digital camera: Digital camera, Digital camera with optical zoom, 4 inch Digital camera, black Digital camera, underwater Digital camera, wide angle Digital camera, etc ( You can hit Generate Keywords in Market samurai and it will come up with all these keywords for you ). So there are loads of different keywords that people search for when buying a digital camera, and it’s our job to find that 1 perfect keyword.

When choosing a keyword you want to look at 3 things: Competition, Searches, Price.

Competition
Market samurai has 2 great functions: SEOC ( amount of sites that have the keyword on their page ) and SEOTC ( amount of sites that have the keyword in their title ).
These are great functions when looking at your competition, I use both of them but I tend to give SEOTC a bit more value.
As a rough standard I only choose keywords with less than 75K SEOC and 25k SEOTC, and ofcourse the lower the score the better the keyword. I give more value to SEOTC than SEOC. So when a keyword has 80k SEOC and 10k SEOTC, I will check that one out.

Searches
This kinda depends on the product your promoting. If you are promoting a $50 product you want more searches than when your promoting a $500 product.
But again if you want a rough standard I would say go for 1000+ EXACT searches a month. It’s very important that you look at the exact searches and not the broad or phrase searches.

Price
I will suggest you only promote products on amazon that cost $50+. So no cd’s, ebooks or anything of that unless you can get huge amount of targeted visitors.

Things to look for when doing keyword research:
- Exact match domain: Exact match domain is great! What do I mean with exact match domain? Well if your keyword is ‘outdoor bbq set’ and you can buy the domain: outdoorbbqset.com/.net/.org than you have the exact match domain.
I would always suggest buying the exact domain name when possible because google give alot of value to this.

Things to avoid when doing keywords research:
- Product names ( example: canon mp250 ): There are 2 major problems if you pick a product name as keyword:
1). Most people who search the product name already own the product and are looking for product information.
Type ‘canon mp250′ in google and you will see that next few searches are: Canon mp250 driver, software, ink, manual.
All of the people who search this already own a canon mp250 and are not looking to buy one from you.
2). It’s most likely that the company of the product already dominates the SERP for the product name and it won’t be easy to beat them on their own company name.
In this case canon.com ranks for the first 3 results on ‘canon mp250′

The site

If you got a keyword with the exact match domain than you should definitely get it! If not I would still suggest you buy a domain with the keyword in it.
I’m not gonna talk to much on page SEO here altough it’s very important. So if you dont know how to optimize your site for a keyword I strongly suggest you read a guide about this.
But just make sure your site has a decent keyword density, and your keyword is atleast once in your title & description.

Content
When I start a site I alway want atleast 3 articles on it. I suggest your write them yourself or have a very good writer do this for you.
These are the article I always start with, I took the product wireless printer as an example:
- A general article about wireless printers: why you need it, why its so much better than wired aprinter.
- Best 3 wireless printers: 3 short reviews about the 3 best wireless printers.
- What to look for when buying a wireless printer: a simple buyers guide so people get more comfortable buying it straight away on the internet.

You can also add more article based on subkeywords like:
- Wireless printer review
- Wireless printer for ipad
And than build links to these pages and get them ranked.

The goal of your site is to get as much visitors to click your amazon link. Here are a couple of tricks I use to do this:
- Buy now buttons: I don’t know what it is but people love to click buttons. I use this button on the Best 3 products article and it works great! 
- Make all product pictures clickable and link them to amazon: People also love the click pictures, use this to get them on amazon.
- Text links in your article: this seems kinda simple but there are alot of sneaky ways to get people on amazon with simple text links.
For example in the Best 3 products article I always put a short feature list and at the end I put: Click here for more features ( link to amazon ). And this seems to work great!

Link building

I will show you the exact link strategy that I use to get my sites ranked.

I think this pretty much speaks for itself. But I will still explain everything for the people who want to know more on how to build these links.

Web 2.0 sites: These are sites like: hubpages, devhub, jimdo etc. Where you can create you own blog and post your spun article with a link to your site. There are a couple of programs that can automate this for you ( senuke ) but they require a monthly fee, if you don’t want to pay this you can just create them manually. I useally build around 10 web 2.0 site’s.

Bookmarks: You can use Bookmarkingdemon or autopligg for this. I useally build around 30 verified bookmarks. I don’t think bookmark links give that much value, but it’s nice to have some diversity in your link building.

Profiles: You can use xrumer or senuke to build profiles with a link to your site. In the first month I don’t want to create to much links to my site, so I only create 500 verified profiles. If I do a second blast I useally do more.

Articles: These are spun articles I submit to article directories and they have 2 links at the bottom on the article, 1 link to my site and 1 link to a web 2.0 site. I useally blast around 200 verified articles.

Scrapebox comments: I blast around 20k comments to the web2.0 sites and the articles. I don’t do scrapebox blast to my site in the first month because of the risk of getting sandboxed.