in this video I'm going to tell you about an Amazon affiliate niche site
that made six thousand four hundred and fifty two dollars in one month and then
overnight it went down to about a hundred dollars a month and I learned
my name is Doug Cunnington I'm the founder of a niche site project I write
about Amazon affiliate marketing and talk about productivity talk about
project management as well if you're new to the channel take a look around at
some of the other videos and if you like what you see please consider subscribing
let me tell you a little bit about this site so as I mentioned it's an Amazon
affiliate niche site and if you're unfamiliar with that kind of a site it's
a site that has reviews on it and it refers people over to Amazon if the
visitor makes a purchase on Amazon after he or she goes through your affiliate
link then you get a small Commission like between one and ten percent so I
had one of these sites going and it was doing well was actually my first Amazon
affiliate niche site and it started growing pretty quick in fact let me
describe the earnings for you over the couple months I wrote them down so I'm
just gonna look here I started the site in July of 2013
and by August it made $20 September made about a hundred and twenty dollars and
then October it made five hundred dollars November of 2013 it made roughly
$2,800 and in December it made six thousand two hundred and fifty-two
dollars and I thought this is great I'm gonna quit my job but it didn't work out
so well I think you could take this sort of as a cautionary tale you know I had
this asset this website that was doing awesome but there was inherent risk
involved and I didn't realize it at the time I was so new to Amazon affiliate
marketing now let me rewind just a little bit and give you a reference
point because it's sales you know I just described the earnings went up to 6,000
dollars and then January of 2014 it dropped down to about a hundred dollars
it was because I got a google manual penalty on the site for you know poor
SEO practices now let me explain how I ended up at that point I got started
with online marketing after I found the smart passive income
podcast by Pat Flynn I didn't know anything about marketing before that I
didn't even know you could make money online and in fact when I first listened
to a few of the episodes I thought it was a total scam I didn't believe Pat
Flynn when he was talking about the money that you could make from these
niche sites well I was obsessed and I listened to like 50 or 60 episodes in
about a week I had a corporate full-time job at that point so I was in the car
often and it was able to listen to a lot of podcast while I was commuting and
then while I was at the office I actually I had quite a bit of free time
so I listened to a bunch of the episodes that smart passive income had out in
fact I caught up on the full you know back catalog and also found Spencer
Hawes at the same time so he writes at niche pursuits and Spencer has a podcast
as well so I was really into this niche site idea back then both Spencer Hawes
and Pat Flynn were gray hat SEO s so they used private blog networks or web
2.0 x' i remember one of the first articles that i read at smart passive
income was about using link wheels and link pyramids and look nowadays neither
of those guys are doing any sort of grey hat activity their white hat and you
know they follow the rules that google outlines but back then in 2013 they were
you know doing what everyone else was doing which was grey hat tactics now
eventually those tactics stopped working as well and you definitely you know if
you use them today you're more risk than if you don't use them and you have to be
very methodical about how you're doing it now I'm not a grey hat either mainly
because of this story going into January things were great like I said the site
made $6,000 and I thought this is fantastic
I feel confident telling my friends about it which you know up until that
point I was a little nervous to describe what I was doing because I thought they
would make fun of me or something by the way if you ever get that feeling let me
know in the comments I have an idea that it's kind of
common thing where we're embarrassed to tell our friends what we're working on
we're putting all this time in we don't know if it's gonna work but once I made
six thousand bucks in December 2013 I thought hey I'm confident enough to
share that stuff with them it's a cool story right well in January of 2014 I
got an email from the google-like search console team or webmaster tools as it
was called back then and it said your site's been flagged for unnatural links
and there's a manual penalty on it they gave you a little bit of a guide to you
know remove the links and they pointed you towards documentation and let me
know that I could apply for a reconsideration request after I cleaned
up the backlinks and took some action well I was never able to recover the
site the deal is almost all of the links that I had that were boosting the site's
rankings were basically gray hot if I remove those links the site wouldn't
rank anyway so I removed some links the rankings never came back and that was a
sad day that was a sad month because I thought maybe I could recover it but it
was never able to here are the seven things that I learned and I'll go sort
of into detail on each one and hopefully you'll learn lessons for me and you
won't have to make the same mistakes so number one things change fast with a
business model like affiliate marketing with affiliate marketing especially this
sort of Amazon affiliate niche site idea most of the traffic comes from Google
Google has organic search traffic that they send over to a niche site that's
the primary you know 70 to 90 percent of the traffic comes from that source for
my sites and most of the people I know so the problem on the front end is we
don't control the traffic so if Google penalize is your site for example you
have no traffic and even if you have great content a lot of content and
engaging content if you don't have Google sending traffic to you you're in
trouble now sure there are other models out there but my focus is on organic
search and organic SEO that said when we look at the other side the affiliate
marketing portion of it in the affiliate program and
controls that so two main areas you don't have control over so if one of the
companies or one of the entities changes their policy you can't do anything about
it so if Google takes away your traffic because they don't like the way you're
doing link building you can't do anything about it
you can try to you know fit within their rules but there's really not much you
can do you have to play within their rule set
same thing with Amazon Amazon has the terms of the agreement and the operating
agreement and basically if you do anything wrong the amazon does it like
they can you know get you out of the amazon descent Asiya program so it's
volatile and things can change fast quick example is in March of 2017 Amazon
changed the commission structure none of the affiliates could do anything about
it in most cases affiliates made you know somewhere between twenty and thirty
five percent less sometimes as high as forty eight percent less just because
the Commission rate structure changed number two is if you break the rules
your risk is higher now I know even nowadays in 2018 people use private blog
networks and web 2.0 links and other grey hat tactics and they get away with
it but their risk is higher they're literally like breaking some rules now
if you use white hat techniques like guest posting and you know pure outreach
and networking and that sort of thing you may still have risk but it's
definitely lower than if you do you know grey hat tactics that literally break
the rules so on the Google side you don't want to break rules there if you
want to keep your risk lower and on the Amazon side they have their operating
agreement and a whole set of rules around that so you need to follow the
rules and in both cases if you don't you probably can get away with it people can
get away with it for a long time but at some point you could get in trouble the
risk is just higher if you break the rules so I've learned don't break the
rules and you'll be a little bit better off number three is I'm patient I'm not
interested in taking shortcuts I'm not interested in trying to do anything that
the cheapest or the fastest or the easy way if you're trying to take a shortcut
you're usually you know doing things that are on the edge of like ethical
sometimes it could be just riskier so if you're doing anything that seems like
you shouldn't be doing it you probably should do something else so
in general across the board you know if I explore my options and I see that you
know something is really easy or something's really cheap it usually
makes me nervous that usually means it's not going to work or be effective so
from the perspective of like using a private blog network some people may
think hey I'm gonna use a pbn because it's easier and it looks like it's
actually cheaper - and logic tells us if it's cheaper and it's actually easier
everyone would do it right everyone would do that thing so so I learned I'd
rather take it a little bit slower I'm patient and I can take advantage of the
fact that I'm a minute for the long haul so I believe you know taking a white hat
approach has more longevity sure it might take you a little longer but your
site will be more valuable in the long run to other people that may want to buy
it and then it will probably be less risky overall number four don't panic be
calm and when I first got the email from Google I was freaked out and a little
upset right I had this site that was making hundreds
of dollars per day and it evaporated overnight it was very scary so I didn't
like that at all but the thing is if you're panicked if you are making
irrational decisions because you're all worked up it's not gonna help anything
so I'm generally pretty calm I had not been in a business situation like that
where I owned you know the resolution to the problem and it directly hit my
income you know my other full-time job the performance wasn't directly related
to your pay which is kind of weird but that's just the way the corporate world
works so in this case I owned it and I did remain calm there were probably a
couple days or a few hours on that first day
where I was very upset but eventually if you can make rational decisions treat it
as a business decision take your emotions out of it you'll be in better
shape number five if something's cheap or easy it's probably not going to work
so back in the day like I said I remember reading some stuff on smart
passive income or on niche pursuits where it said yeah you may be able to go
to Fiverr you may be able to buy some links and
it'll be you know five dollars or maybe you could upgrade the gig and pay a
little bit more but essentially it's super cheap and it's a shortcut so kind
of going back to the point I said before if something's cheap or easy or fast or
it's too good to be true it's probably not gonna work and I take that to heart
now there's so many tactics that people try and throw out and tell you hey you
know you can do a bunch of social sharing and you can do you know web 2.0
blogs and get links to your site is it something you could do for cheap sure is
it actually gonna help anything probably not and most of the time if people are
recommending something and it you know it doesn't add up or they say it's gonna
be you know cheap and easy you know all you have to do is pay a few bucks a
month they're probably selling something
they're probably selling you some product and whatever case study they're
sharing with you supports you buying that product right like they're just
trying to sell you something number six being the boss isn't easy as
I mentioned before I hadn't been in a situation before where my decisions
directly impacted my income but this was exactly that if you have a job you have
a person designated to help you deal with tough decisions and guide you it's
your boss or maybe it could be bosses I know when I was working ahead like four
or six bosses at any given time but someone is guiding you through you know
tough decisions but if you're an entrepreneur or if you work for yourself
in some capacity number one you're the only one to blame
number two you have to figure it out you're the only one that can make the
decision and number three not only do you have to make the decision but
usually you have to make a decision with incomplete data that happens constantly
we almost never have all the information we need and then as
goes on we may find out that we made assumptions that were just playing
incorrect or wrong so it's not easy to be a boss and number seven you probably
know already I learned that I didn't want to use grey hat tactics anymore
the risk was just too high and I'm a fairly risk-averse person and if I have
the option to do something that's less risky then I'm probably gonna do that
so I actually continued to use grey hat techniques for another few months until
I got penalized again that is another story for another day
but overall I learned that I didn't like getting that email where I had this
asset that was probably worth over $100,000 tremendous amount of money was
worth so much money and it literally went away overnight and the value went
down to almost nothing sure I had some content but that's only content it's
it's very cheap compared to the overall value maybe a few hundred dollars so I
learned that I didn't want to use grey hat stuff anymore my name is Doug
Huntington I'm the founder of an intersect project if it's the first time
on the channel have a look at some of the other videos if you like what you
see please consider subscribing my question to you the question of the day
is have you had a site penalized if so were you able to recover it let me know
in the comments below and be sure to check out the comments some of the best
ideas and answers and stuff like that or from the community not me
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