Failing to Build a Side Income Stream Through Amazon Affiliate Marketing
Theoretically simple, the reality is a brutal grind.
I have written previously about how I built a side income stream by writing a book. That post was by far my most popular yet and has to date earned me over 80 subscribers and 10,000 views, most of them from Hacker News:
This post is the complete opposite and I will tell you how I failed to build a side income by doing affiliate marketing. Twice.
A Brief Primer on Amazon Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is conceptually simple and seem very attractive from the outside. Basically you create a website or blog and include links to other websites. If someone clicks one of the affiliate links on your site and makes a purchase, then you receive a percentage of the purchase as a commission. One of the most popular websites for affiliate marketing is actually Amazon. You can read more about Amazon’s affiliate marketing scheme here and posts on how to get started with it here. As you can see, it doesn’t sound very complicated, so why did I fail at it?
You can buy entire courses about how to build an Amazon affiliate business but it distills down to some pretty simple steps:
Find a niche topic that you know lots about.
Find some Google search phrases that are sort of popular but perhaps don’t have the highest quality results (more on this later).
Write high quality content and share it widely.
E-mail other websites in your niche who are more popular and well respected than you and ask them to link to your site.
That’s pretty much it. So what makes it hard?
Finding a niche isn’t difficult, but the barrier to entry for affiliate websites is so low that it is highly competitive. You therefore need to find something that you are interested in, know a decent amount about but isn’t too narrow that you can’t write tons of content about it. For example, “2002 FIFA World Cup footballs” is way too niche, you are not going to be able to write enough content about it. “Football” is too wide of a niche and you’ll struggle to get the attention of search engines. Something between the two might be a good bet if you can find some decent keywords to target.
So how do you find keywords? You use websites like Ubersuggest, Moz or Ahrefs. Ahrefs is the gold standard but they know it. It’s more expensive than the rest and there is no free trial.
On any of these sites, you can type in your niche here and then filter for keywords that have a decent search volume (how many people search for it regularly) but the top results have a lowish Domain Reputation.
Domain reputation is how Google determines how reputable a site is. This Substack currently has a DR of 91. That’s because it lives on the substack.com domain and lots of high quality content is posted and shared on Substack. If I was to buy fatengineering.com and front this blog with that, the DR of that site would initially be zero. Building Domain Reputation is difficult and its not a science; the aforementioned sites can actually only guess what Google’s opinion of DR is for your site is since Google does not publish it.
DR increases by other highly reputable domains linking to you. You can get some initial DR by engaging in forums for your relevant niche and dropping relevant links on your page now and again but the best way comes down to link building. To link build, you email sites with higher domain reputation than you and try and convince the owner to link to your site. Some people take advantage of this and try and charge you for it. There is lots of strategies on how best to do this, but they are way beyond the scope of this post. Also, I’d be the wrong person to teach you about them since I didn’t successfully implement them myself.
As well as all this, there is some other things you need to do to ensure your page ranks on Google. This is following good SEO practises which involves making sure your page loads quickly on poor connections amongst other things.
As you can probably tell by this point, although simple conceptually, it is time consuming and making a worthwhile income from it can be really challenging.
Now we know the basics, here’s my story.
Failure one - the ambitious CS student trying to get some beer money.
The First time I decided to start an Amazon Affiliate site was in University. I decided to target fitness technology as my niche and bought a domain. I didn’t want to pay for hosting so I ran Wordpress on my laptop and just left it on all the time (yay for all inclusive bills. In hindsight, I should have used the “free” electric to mine Bitcoin).
Getting Wordpress setup on my laptop and exposed to the world was fun and a good learning experience as a budding CS student, however this was a dangerous thing to do from a security perspective. Furthermore, all the above I just shared about how SEO and search ranking works is not something I learnt until last year. I just figured if I just copied and pasted other people’s work and included my own Amazon affiliate link I would make money eventually. After about a month of writing crappy posts and running my laptop very hot, I decided to call it quits. I had spent about £10 on a domain and made zero. However, I did learn a lot about building and running a site so I think it was time well spent.
Failure two - the full time SE that should know better
The second time was last year when I saw a post on Reddit about someone who was doing an AMA and claimed they made $24k in a single month from Amazon Affiliate marketing. At this point I was a little more aware of how the Internet and search worked. I also figured I could be a bit more successful this time since I had learnt a few things the first time, already had an Amazon affiliate account (they are stricter about allowing you to have one these days) and was willing to invest some money to use tooling to hopefully give me more chance of being successful than the other budding Computer Science students who were strapped for cash. I also thought if I can have just 1% of the success of the Reddit poster, I’d be very happy with that.
I signed up to Moz’s free trial and picked my niche relatively quickly as I managed to find 30 keywords that had a decent volume, but the highest ranks had a pretty low DR. I signed up for wordpress.com and bought a domain and signed up to the business plan, since I wanted to install plugins. This cost me £163.20 for the year. I then got to work writing content!
I stuck to a schedule of writing one post a week for around 4 months. Sometimes I used fiverr.com to get freelancers to write posts if I was too busy. Occasionally I would rank very briefly for keywords, but would always drop out; I guess I wasn’t doing a good job of answering the user’s question (according to Google).
I started hanging around in forums for my niche and posting links to pages I had wrote that answered user’s queries. This was time consuming but did work well for me. If I could manage to post subtly enough that the post didn’t get removed, I would see the back link credit show up and I’d also generate a few sales. My site was starting to see some traffic but none of it was organically from Google. At this point, I was spending hours a week writing posts and posting on forums. As an experiment, I stopped posting on forums and my traffic dropped instantly. Forum posts have a very short half-life and they eventually dropped off the front page.
At this point, I signed up to Ahrefs after completing Ahref’s academy (which is excellent, for what its worth) as I wanted to attempt link building. I stopped posting on forums and started contacting other sites and blogs asking them to consider linking to my site as it was valuable to their users for $reason. I sent around 60 emails and I don’t think I ever got a single response.
At this point, traffic on my blog had dropped to a couple of visits a day. I had made the mistake of not picking a niche I was excited about, but one I thought would be easy to rank for. Writing for it was boring and I didn’t see any real chance of it getting better. I’d also ran out of posts to make after 50+.
In early March 2023, I decided to call it quits and call this a failed venture.
Show us the numbers!
Here is the traffic over the time I was writing for the site:
And here is my Amazon payout dashboard for how much money I made:
In terms of costs, here is the breakdown:
Domain Name: £9.99
Wordpress business: £163.20
Fiverr posts: £45
Ahrefs premium: £79.00
So to summarise, I spent £297.19, hundreds of hours, and made £26.53. This was not a good use of time or money.
How did I get it so wrong?
Firstly, I picked a niche I wasn’t that excited about. If you do want to go down this path, it’s much easier to do it blogging about your interests.
Secondly, I massively underestimated how much work writing a high quality post that is ultimately trying to sell something you’re not passionate about is.
Finally, I did not think getting backlinks would be that hard.
Learning from my mistakes
Around the time I started the Amazon affiliate blog, I had considered starting a blog on personal finance or FIRE as these are the topics that interest and excite me. I ultimately decided not to pick them as I didn’t see how I could monetise such a blog. However, I never stopped thinking about it and even made notes in my phone often for post ideas I had.
Once I had decided I wasn’t going to proceed with the Amazon affiliate site, I decided to start this blog in an attempt to make me fall in love with writing again and it has. I figured I didn’t care about making money from it and just wanted to contribute to the FIRE conversation and meet some like-minded folk without trying to shoehorn affiliate links into all my posts.
Hilariously, this blog has already been much more successful thank my affiliate site. My first post got over 1000 reads and I gained 40 subscribers on my first day. I sent two emails to ask if other sites would consider linking to me; one to my heroes over at Monveator and one to Sovereign Quest where I find other personal finance posts. Both replied to me almost instantly and both of them linked to me. It’s amazing how much simpler all of this is when you actually write about a topic you are passionate about.
Here is the traffic to this blog in the few short weeks I have writing it:
And compared to my affiliate site which I put tons more effort into SEO:
It really does show that if you follow your passion and just write about things that interest you, you are likely to be much more successful.
Wrapping up
I can’t promise I’ll never monetise this blog (as the desire to monetise all my side projects seems to runs in my veins) but for now I can say that I truly just enjoy writing for it and have a list of 30 posts I’m looking forward to writing. When I watched the news and saw the fallout regarding Silicon Valley Bank the first thing that comes to my head is “I can’t wait to blog about this!”.
I hope you are enjoying my posts as much as I am enjoying writing them and to my early subscribers I say thank you :).
-The fat Software Engineer.