Amazon Affiliate sites? My experience so far...

[discdrome]

I have decided to share with you my experience of Amazon AWS so far, and hope to learn some info from some of you.

As an experiment in Nov I started an Amazon affiliate site with a MR Rat script with Mod-rewrite just to see what could be done.

My Results
========

It has taken a couple of months to build in search engines, but I now (for last month) am getting 200+ uniques per day (growing) with no PPC these are all type-ins or search engine generated.

Over 50k pages indexed in google and askjeeves is doing over 6gb in crawling every month.

I also run Adsense on the bottom of each page.

I have only just started to earn revenue this month 3rd Jan onwards and so far have made $70 on Amazon and $30 on adsense. So projected for Jan is around $150.

The domain is a fairly good name but not the best.

I know this is only the 1st revenue month and not a lot to go on.

Question
=======

Just interested to know peoples opinion on these type of sites, I see some sites selling for up to 36 x months revenue ,and then some at much less.

I am quite happy building a number of small sites to make revenue, its not that difficult to do.

Do these sites have a future?

Look forward to reading any other experiences with these type of sites.

I am not really looking to sell, just interested in a bit of information exchange!

Regards

Steve

 

[OgieOgalthorpe]

I don't think these sites have a long term future - imo the market is already on the verge of saturation with a whole lot of duplicate content.

 

[darrenl]

I just recently started a couple of these. Hopefully they will do good.

 

[petertdavis]

The people I know of that started AWS sites a year ago are really moaning about how far their revenue has dropped. I don't think they're dead yet, but I wouldn't invest substantial resources in it at this point.... everyone seems to be doing them.

 

[eSology]

I have been reading off and on all day about this and it looks like a resource hog for your server.

 

[petertdavis]

LoL, yea, I just today bought a nice AWS site on the cheap because his host told him get it off the server or it's getting deleted.

 

[darrenl]

Well if it uses the perl script yeah its gonna be resource intensive. However if you make a custom one it wont or use the php script version.

 

[unholy1]

I have a couple of AWS sites with a lot of traffic. Conversion is around 6 % and with amazon commissions being so low they doesn't make much...just enough to pay for Adwords and server costs.
Without Adsense on the side I really don't think it would have justified keeping them online.
Amazon AWS on its own without Adsense and other affiliate programs doesn't stand a chance of turning a profit.

 

[discdrome]

All very interesting, as I said this was an experiment for me to see how it works.

With the mod rewrite you effectively have tens of thousands of pages that appear to the search engines to be flat HTML so yes you need a very good server that can handle the traffic from the search engines.

I am trying a new host for $20 per month, and it has been fine so far, they know what I am doing and are happy.

I can see that people who have been doing this for a year or so will see the income drop as more people do it, that is logical.

For me though so far $150 (projected/month) - $20 hosting = $130 per month profit. As I am not paying any PPC. But my conversion is lower at around 2-3%

One other reason for having this was to build back links to a site of mine, which now had 1600 odd, although all from same site.

Regards

Steve

 

[Moondancer]

I don't think these sites have a long term future - imo the market is already on the verge of saturation with a whole lot of duplicate content.

I agree with this statement... I have both up on a project site of mine, more for visitors' convenience than any hope of making money from them... there have been some click thrus on them but nowhere near worth bragging about.