Welcome to BeerMoneyForum.com - BIGGEST MAKE MONEY FORUM ONLINE

Overview

My first journey was a flop, but I learned a great deal from that:

• Sauna porn tube site (August, 2017 - 2018).​

My second journey has been a success for a nice side income:

• Hobby site (3rd of March, 2018 - 2019+),
• 1st Affiliate site (5th of April, 2018 - 2019+).

With the experience I've gained from those projects, I'm embarking on yet another journey.

• 2nd Affiliate Site (7th of June, 2019).

This affiliate site will be monetized with Amazon; outdoors sports.​

PLANS
This will be the 1st affiliate niche site in my ambitious plan of building an affiliate niche site EMPIRE in order to secure a financially more stable future for myself. One where I wouldn't have to worry about money (I'm not an abitious type of person and can live frugally if I knew that I could always use the money if something went wrong). One where I'd let robots do the unfulfilling work me or something like that.

(In the ultimate scale, I hope the climate change doesn't become too big of a problem nor that a comet or a superflare hit the Earth in my lifetime - imagine the chaos if either did; I'd need to have a backup plan involving settling somewhere like the Kingdom of Bhutan in that case, if they'd welcome me that is ^^)

I'm going to build this niche site following the layout of this niche empire site's pillar post: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; except that I'm not going to neither use such an overall content plan nor will I link such sites together because I feel Google algorithm at one point will catch on to this shady tactic sooner or later. I'm in it for the long-term benefits.

The GOAL is for the site to start generating around 300€ a month, which is not too much to ask for I've learned to know. The bigger plan is to have multiple these sites each generating 100€+ each month. If I'm getting enough money with these sites, I will have the capital to invest it in other baskets as well so that I wouldn't have all the eggs in a single one (because if something were to happen to... idk, to Amazon, I'd be toast).

The only and only problem is that I work at a snail pace... This is a problem I somehow need to overcome I guess.



TECHNICAL
The domain is bought via Namecheap for 1 year. It's hosted by Host Goala premium shared hosting plan ($20 per year, starting from next billing cycle it will be $26 per year due to Cpanel price increase). I've implemented https for this site and it's using a relatively optimized simple free theme (Roseta).

I love simplicity, minimalistic feel to things. Less distractions, more focused mind...

(this quote is not directly related to what I said above)​

SEO
Compared to my 1st affiliate site's niche, this 2nd affiliate site's niche is a little more complicated to work around. Similarly to the 1st affiliate niche site, the competition for this one is also relatively low - although this time there's less room to snap untouched keywords due to the nature of this niche, I'm sure I can snap a few if I do my research thoroughly.

The on-page SEO for the affiliate site will follow the same principle as it is in my 1st affiliate site:

• keyword research is completed;
• 1500-4000+ word articles with pictures, short paragraphs, useful content, etc are planned;
• interlinking to useful and relevant sources within the site itself with ultimate pillar content for each bigger money keyword is the method;
• [user friendly - useful yet simple and pleasant overall feel of the site(s)]

The off-page SEO is not something I'm overly concerned about. I feel like there's no need for it in all actuality. I'm pretty sure that simply having better content will do the trick over time. This site is also summer-seasonal, so I hopefully won't feel the desperate urge to push my content with scammy backlinks because they won't have the needed effect outside the season anyway.

MONI
This time around I've payed only 1 year in advance. This is in case the niche turns out to be harder to rank for than it seems. I'm fairly certain that it's sure to make at least some money now that I know it's something in the realms of possibility. Just needs content and time...

This time I do have a small budget from the 1st affiliate site's monthly earnings for oursourceing content from this second affiliate niche site, BUT I'll try to create the content myself, at least at first, in order to learn about this niche and come off as trustworthy for the readers (I personally hate the obvious affiliate sites that just don't provide any actual value).


Expenses:

• 1 domain: $9.06 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• hosting: $20 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• total: $29.06

Earnings:

• not monetized yet

INSPIRATION

Did I miss anything? I hope I didn't...

On a sidenote...
My current 1st affiliate niche site can lose its profitability overnight.
I'm well aware that this niche site Empire project can very easily fail too.
These are few of the reasons behind building enough income sources - to mitigate potential drawbacks in life in general.

To safeguard myself mentally from a possible failure.
Nobody really knows what they're actually doing, even if they seem to have it all figured out.​

 

[ThulfWaatu]

So I've been thinking of polishing my content plan.

...mindmaping this entire niche...

...creating "lists" of niche products where everything is categorized and explained to paint a clear picture...

Additionally, I'll write separate reviews for the "cheap" category products and leave the expensive products with summaries only on those lists. (there are more categories, vertically, if it makes sense when I put it like that). There's some depth to things... ^^

 

[ThulfWaatu]

So I was "mindmapping" the niche and... It's too much work.

There are literally hundreds of products from just one brand alone. And then each of those brands has multiple "product lines" of the same product type. NONE of that is documented though.

Each year they come out with a new product for each product line like that and just slap an additional number to its name or whatever based on their own made up criteria. And they won't drop the prices of the old models until they've become really old and even more useless because they know how https://www.beermoneyforum.com/ useless these things actually are in general. And the more they make new ones, the more useless stuff they add to it to justify the price. Good the https://www.beermoneyforum.com/ luck figuring it all out. There's no documentation of anything really. I don't think they want anyone to actually understand what's going on. All those brands are probably teamed up as well to keep things as they are. It's somewhat comparable to iPhones that get a new model every year for no https://www.beermoneyforum.com/ reason. And then they conveniently drop support for the older models as they release new ones without having made those old ones the best they could have been.

All in all, I'll ditch the idea I had about organizing the niche. They've become a luxury item, more or less... A few generation older ones do the trick just fine, except the prices won't be dropped for them.

But I don't want to build backlinks still...

I'll just create those supportive info + review articles and then just come out with the "best cheap [niche products]" pillar article, and then move on to the next site.

It's already hard enough to find suitable products for this pillar article because of the way things are in this niche. I'd say the "practical" products are the cheap products nobody talks about.

Every time somebody asks for a cheap product in community hubs/forums, all they get is the good old "I have [insert the latest product] and I like it" mubmle jubmle just to justify their overpriced relatively useless compulsive-like purchase. Or they give a slightly older model as an option but which is still priced way too high because prices are not dropped until they're not being actively supported anymore....


It's truly a shitshow on a whole new level. I don't quite understand how this was allowed to happen in the first place. Heavy milking going on. Disappointed in humanity kind of...

 

[ThulfWaatu]

I can already imagine how this "best cheap [niche products]" pillar article, if done right, might stir up the market landscape of this niche by quite a bit.

​

Because let's face it... People have a real problem that nobody has actually addressed yet.

But... I might be wrong. And this fear of being wrong really cripples me right now going forward with the plans.

 

[Banglashi]

great for you, congratulations on you amazon journey, while my journey to amazon is a sad one.
i have an affiliate link i left like 100 dollars in coupons there and i left like a sizeable amount of money, i don't want to cash out first since it's still small in my opinion, im making it bigger.

and then i became a kdp ebook publisher at kdp.amazon.com

my mistake i was not able to read full terms and i published my affiliate link on my ebooks that i published on kdp and it's a big no no, so amazon terminated my affiliate account for good, but im still a kdp ebook publisher so sad.

Overview

My first journey was a flop, but I learned a great deal from that:

• Sauna porn tube site (August, 2017 - 2018).​

My second journey has been a success for a nice side income:

• Hobby site (3rd of March, 2018 - 2019+),
• 1st Affiliate site (5th of April, 2018 - 2019+).

With the experience I've gained from those projects, I'm embarking on yet another journey.

• 2nd Affiliate Site (7th of June, 2019).

View attachment 54061
This affiliate site will be monetized with Amazon; outdoors sports.​

PLANS
This will be the 1st affiliate niche site in my ambitious plan of building an affiliate niche site EMPIRE in order to secure a financially more stable future for myself. One where I wouldn't have to worry about money (I'm not an abitious type of person and can live frugally if I knew that I could always use the money if something went wrong). One where I'd let robots do the unfulfilling work me or something like that.

(In the ultimate scale, I hope the climate change doesn't become too big of a problem nor that a comet or a superflare hit the Earth in my lifetime - imagine the chaos if either did; I'd need to have a backup plan involving settling somewhere like the Kingdom of Bhutan in that case, if they'd welcome me that is ^^)

I'm going to build this niche site following the layout of this niche empire site's pillar post: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; except that I'm not going to neither use such an overall content plan nor will I link such sites together because I feel Google algorithm at one point will catch on to this shady tactic sooner or later. I'm in it for the long-term benefits.

The GOAL is for the site to start generating around 300€ a month, which is not too much to ask for I've learned to know. The bigger plan is to have multiple these sites each generating 100€+ each month. If I'm getting enough money with these sites, I will have the capital to invest it in other baskets as well so that I wouldn't have all the eggs in a single one (because if something were to happen to... idk, to Amazon, I'd be toast).

The only and only problem is that I work at a snail pace... This is a problem I somehow need to overcome I guess.



TECHNICAL
The domain is bought via Namecheap for 1 year. It's hosted by Host Goala premium shared hosting plan ($20 per year, starting from next billing cycle it will be $26 per year due to Cpanel price increase). I've implemented https for this site and it's using a relatively optimized simple free theme (Roseta).

I love simplicity, minimalistic feel to things. Less distractions, more focused mind...

(this quote is not directly related to what I said above)​

SEO
Compared to my 1st affiliate site's niche, this 2nd affiliate site's niche is a little more complicated to work around. Similarly to the 1st affiliate niche site, the competition for this one is also relatively low - although this time there's less room to snap untouched keywords due to the nature of this niche, I'm sure I can snap a few if I do my research thoroughly.

The on-page SEO for the affiliate site will follow the same principle as it is in my 1st affiliate site:

• keyword research is completed;
• 1500-4000+ word articles with pictures, short paragraphs, useful content, etc are planned;
• interlinking to useful and relevant sources within the site itself with ultimate pillar content for each bigger money keyword is the method;
• [user friendly - useful yet simple and pleasant overall feel of the site(s)]

The off-page SEO is not something I'm overly concerned about. I feel like there's no need for it in all actuality. I'm pretty sure that simply having better content will do the trick over time. This site is also summer-seasonal, so I hopefully won't feel the desperate urge to push my content with scammy backlinks because they won't have the needed effect outside the season anyway.

MONI
This time around I've payed only 1 year in advance. This is in case the niche turns out to be harder to rank for than it seems. I'm fairly certain that it's sure to make at least some money now that I know it's something in the realms of possibility. Just needs content and time...

This time I do have a small budget from the 1st affiliate site's monthly earnings for oursourceing content from this second affiliate niche site, BUT I'll try to create the content myself, at least at first, in order to learn about this niche and come off as trustworthy for the readers (I personally hate the obvious affiliate sites that just don't provide any actual value).


Expenses:

• 1 domain: $9.06 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• hosting: $20 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• total: $29.06

Earnings:

• not monetized yet

INSPIRATION

View attachment 54066

View attachment 54067

Did I miss anything? I hope I didn't...

On a sidenote...
My current 1st affiliate niche site can lose its profitability overnight.
I'm well aware that this niche site Empire project can very easily fail too.
These are few of the reasons behind building enough income sources - to mitigate potential drawbacks in life in general.

To safeguard myself mentally from a possible failure.
Nobody really knows what they're actually doing, even if they seem to have it all figured out.​

 

[ThulfWaatu]

great for you, congratulations on you amazon journey, while my journey to amazon is a sad one.

...

my mistake i was not able to read full terms and i published my affiliate link on my ebooks that i published on kdp and it's a big no no, so amazon terminated my affiliate account for good, but im still a kdp ebook publisher so sad.

Thanks to cautionary stories like yours, I've managed to avoid those pitfalls by just following their rules and not play around them for more gains.

When playing by the rules like that, it feels like nothing is happening fast enough and it can be tempting to fasten the process myself by forcing things, but luckily I have those stories of what would happen if...

 

[ThulfWaatu]

I'm now aiming for between 20 and 30 posts in total before moving on to starting the next site. So far I've got 15 posts on the site with 5 more on the way. There's like 8 relevant info posts and the rest are just reviews of the products that will be in the pillar post. Everything will be interlinked meaningfully, and I might add some more relevant info posts down the line if need be in order to make the site more authoritative and rank high enough.

I've started working on the "best cheap [niche products]" pillar content.

This site ended up targeting a micro-niche. The niche itself is somewhat big with many different products involved as necessary components to make things work. So this site is only targeting one component of that bigger chunk of a niche and only just the cheaper stuff of that component.


So far the I've gotten 0 traffic, but I might get done with this site either in this month or by October. By getting it done I mean I leave it sit to wait and see what Google does about it. Things might work out perfectly fine after a good many months, but it might very well need some additional boost for things to get going that I missed.

Metaphorically speaking, to explain the contextual connection between this picture and the journey,
the end goal might be to simply get a good look at the sunset.

Certain things need to align for it to happen and there's nothing I can do to help it.​

 

[Banglashi]

Always play by the rules, even if it's slow, as they say slowly but surely you get into your earnings goal. Hey about this thread, can anyone create a thread with prefix JOURNEY? and you can update it everyday?

Thanks to cautionary stories like yours, I've managed to avoid those pitfalls by just following their rules and not play around them for more gains.

When playing by the rules like that, it feels like nothing is happening fast enough and it can be tempting to fasten the process myself by forcing things, but luckily I have those stories of what would happen if...

 

[ThulfWaatu]

UPDATE
September, 2019

​

I've published the "best cheap [niche products]" pillar article now in October.

Keywords seem to be rising in the SERPs, but rather slowly. I think it's because the niche is pretty old and some strong authoritative sites have been sitting at the top for many years now, so my new puny site doesn't look as trustworthy in comparison.

I'm pretty much done with this site now. I'll need to add pictures here and there, and wait for Google to do its thing. At this point, things might improve over time. If they don't, I might start building backlinks along with some filler content to make the site look "fresh".

Expenses:

• 1 domain: $9.06 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• hosting: $20 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• outsourced content: $318
• total: $347.06

Earnings:

• not monetized yet

I'll start the 3rd Amazon Affiliate niche site soon, hopefully, and I'll keep tracking this 2nd Amazon Affiliate niche site's progress.​

 

[phy1l]

Great info, it's hard to get leads, let's hope your niche is valuable enough to make profit

 

[ThulfWaatu]

UPDATE
October, 2019

Main keyword ranked on the first page and is lingering between 8th and 12th position, yay!
However, traffic is basically 0.

​

I got the main keyword where I wanted it to be, but it turns out the keyword gets basically 0 traffic. I'm going to wait a little longer for it to rank even higher before I conclude it a failure. Multiple keyword research tools gave the keyword numbers similar to my 1st affiliate site's main keyword traffic volume. perhaps this too is a summer niche site, but I kind of didn't think it was...

Additionally, given that I've invested quite a bit money into it already, I'm likely not going to just shut it down but rather go for the more competitive main keywords instead. Maybe I can make this site work out, but it's going to require even more time now... Not very eager to work on it after such a miscalculation* - who's to say the other keywords aren't dead either (in terms of traffic). It is a niche that's been on its way out over time after all.

This failure made me question the potential of the other niches I tried to make a site in. Those other keywords for those other niches seemed even more risky than this site originally was, so I just shut them down before wasting any more time on them. Thankfully I didn't outsource any of the content for those sites and was creating the fundamental posts on my own, so they were just a waste of time rather than money.

New plan is to just let this site be and see what happens while looking for new niches to start a new site in.



Expenses:

• 1 domain: $9.06 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• hosting: $20 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• outsourced content: $318
• total: $347.06

Earnings:

• not monetized yet

 

[ThulfWaatu]

It even got the snippet position for the main keyword now. Averaging 5 views per day from that. That's pretty meh...

Perhaps I can make use of that, maybe it's kind of a sign of authoritativeness in Google's eyes were I to go after other main keywords.

 

[ThulfWaatu]

UPDATE
October, 2019

​

Expenses:

• 1 domain: $9.06 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• hosting: $20 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• outsourced content: $318
• total: $347.06

Earnings:

• not monetized yet

 

[ThulfWaatu]

november*

 

[ThulfWaatu]

The main keyword lost its snippet position somewhere in the middle of November. But...

• It's back now on multiple devices and browsers I've tried.
• Some keyword rank checkers for US give it 1st page, some 2nd page.
• None of them shows a "search volume" of 0 for the keyword, so that's one positive.

This is to say the keyword is not really visible in the search query yet, so I can't yet conclude if the keyword was a big oof or not in terms of traffic.


Something my gut feeling tells me when looking at Google analytics is that it's probably/definitely a summer niche.

• I've gotten hardly any traffic from US to begin with (maybe because people from US aren't into this niche).
• Most of the traffic I've seen so far has come from the northern side of the globe for the most part where it's somewhat colder right now... (this would explain why I'm getting hardly any traffic despite what search volume metrics show. Add to that the fact that right now in winter months the search volume numbers have dropped even in the free SEO tools I've been using)

So maybe there's still hope for this site as it is.

 

[ThulfWaatu]

You know what? It might actually work out after all.

Though I won't be making much from this site as it is. This is like beermoney-worthy site essentially (though I don't drink alcohol).

 

[ThulfWaatu]

UPDATE
December, 2019

​

I should try signing up for Amazon Affiliate program in January and see if maybe it start to make even just a little bit of money. See how that goes. It is a targeted audience after all...


As for my other plans with this site... The current main money post seems to drawn in at least a little bit of traffic. What I could do is create the "best niche product", basically a copy of the current main competitors for that keyword topic, and simply tunnel the visitors coming for the "best cheap niche product" to the "best niche product" post to cover more ground in case they decided they didn't want the cheap ones but the best ones instead.


Expenses:

• 1 domain: $9.06 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• hosting: $20 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• outsourced content: $318
• total: $347.06

Earnings:

• not monetized yet

 

[ThulfWaatu]

I made this site's Amazon ID's only just yesterday evening!

First sale already!

I was seriously thinking I likely would have had to shut this site down at the end of this month.

If this site works after all... very nice... happy.

Getting closer!​

 

[ThulfWaatu]

 

[ThulfWaatu]

I should maybe start improving this site, too... It's really bare bones right now. And it kind of works.

Either way, I'm trying to figure out how to set up OneLink for this one, too. The problem is that although the OneLink is set up for the 1st affiliate site, I don't seem to get it to work for this site that's on the same account affiliate as the 1st affiliate site. This site's tracking ID does not show up in OneLink.

I can't make a new Amazon affiliate account either - I would need to ask permission from them first, which sounds bothersome. I would prefer to have all my sites on one account because the more sales an account generates, the fees start to increase, which essentially equals to more money. But lo and behold, OneLink doesn't seem work that way. Bummer...

 

[ThulfWaatu]

UPDATE
January 2020

There were 3 niche items that were sold along with some other random things. From the 3 niche products, 1 cost around $30 and the 2 other products cost around $200. One of those 200-dollar products is the one still not shipped. It was also the very first sale ever...
Literally hasn't been shipped almost for a month now!!

There's an odd issue with my Amazon account and OneLink in particular which makes tracking sales and clicks for different sites a little tricky. I can only track the US region Amazon Affiliate statistics, but not sites across other regions. In those other regions all the sites are mixed into one, essentially. Until it's only US region making all the sales, I can quite accurately track things separately there, but as soon as this sites start generating sales for UK, CA, DE, etc regions, I don't know how to continue updating this tracking report accurately anymore. It would be wiser to bring all the sites into 1 single journey instead.

For now, things are accurate.


Expenses:

• 1 domain: $9.06 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• hosting: $20 (June, 2019 - June, 2020)
• outsourced content: $318
• total: $347.06

Earnings:

• Amazon Affiliate program: 12.14 € (13.47$)
• Total: 12.14 € (13.47$)

Ahem, this is tiny bit awkward... I didn't expect this site to make any money, but it's doing something at least. I guess I'll just keep it running in the background fairly passively. Maybe it even breaks even at some point. Or maybe a light bulb suddenly starts flashing (a light bulb in my room literally died only 10 minutes ago) and I come up with a plan for this one, but for now...