How do you like the headline? Enticing?)) 🐒 💵
Easy money. Let’s look at that first.
50 rubles per 1k traffic. Don’t give up, only forward.
I worked in many areas of websites. I had info sites targeting school kids. Guess what the yield was? Don’t bother—about 50 rubles per 1k traffic. 😒
At that time, I didn’t see other ways to earn money. I understood that foreign markets existed, that there was a different life, but my level of awareness was stuck on these school kids and these 50 rubles.
Was it hard to churn out these sites? Quite. Dozens and even hundreds of sites, I bred them like crazy, driven by the urge to make money. Recently I looked at past tasks for employees and realized that these sites are gone. Everything I was working on turned to dust.
Were they bad sites if they generated income and I lived off them? Not really. You could say I was making crap, but there was a result.
The main question is AMOUNT OF EFFORT SPENT and INCOME. 💵
It’s really hard to calculate because ROI might not reflect all the effort and agony before the income started coming in.
Here I rely purely subjectively on my own feelings.
Satellite sites for foreign markets
As you’ve gathered, I professionally build and scale site networks)) My next direction was satellite sites for the foreign segment. I can’t go into details, but here I wrote about content indexing speed in Google for them, but the point is that I realized I could work in foreign markets, just coming at it from a different angle, not from Amazon.
And I did it. Surprisingly for me, the sites took off, but again there are 3 problems:
- Long ramp-up time for sites in Google—you can’t make any mistakes at all, or all efforts go to waste. Decent results come 8–12 months from the start.
- Income isn’t quite what’s needed, but already better than school kids 😁
- I got banned on satellite sites in June 2019 🆘 and lost most of my income
It took almost a year to rebuild this direction, to survive these bans. I got very lucky that I do analytics and can find other people’s sites, including fairly well-known people. They give huge food for thought. I quickly understood how one guy achieves better quality on his networks than the market average and rebuilt the system, writing tech specs for employees to fix errors on the sites.
I have now restored this direction thanks essentially to analyzing other people’s sites—I take many ideas specifically from other sites—BUT!
Do I consider it promising and worthy of allocating further effort? No, because there are more profitable options for less effort.
Foreign physical products without Amazon—pretty much what I was looking for
I started making purely white-hat foreign sites for people. By the way, I took a course by Diggity where he mentioned not getting fixated on Amazon, but trying to find other affiliate programs. And I found them!
Surprisingly, I started testing options and finding only those that actually convert.
The revenue here was even higher than what I was doing prior to this point.
Again, my ratio of effort to income got better. Could I have stayed and kept making sites for school kids as before, earning jack shit from them? I could have, but I realized there were other options.
And now moving on to Amazon
Why easy money on Amazon came to an end this year?
If you feel that the effort you put in and the income you get from Amazon is the best option for you, then keep doing it. Amazon is everything, it’s a huge company, well, you get the point. Why not?
Only I see one tinyyyyy problem here:
You can create articles the same way, build links the same way, and earn more for the same amount of effort if you choose another niche with more money.
Let’s break it down with examples.
1. Coffee Niche — Amazon
https://app.centurica.com/marketwatch/listing/8223/ — https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/37123-affiliate-coffee-home-brewing-resource-52k-gross-mo
Revenue per 1k traffic — $74
2. Pet Care Niche — pet care directly through affiliate programs without Amazon
https://app.centurica.com/marketwatch/listing/7965/ — https://empireflippers.com/listing/46740/
Income comes from non-Amazon affiliate offers 59%, 1% Amazon, and 40% ads
Revenue per 1k traffic — $50
3. Equipment Niche — Amazon
https://app.centurica.com/marketwatch/listing/8262/ — https://empireflippers.com/listing/46740/
Revenue per 1k traffic is around $116.
4. House, Garden, Home Niche — Amazon
https://app.centurica.com/marketwatch/listing/8270/ — https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/38738-affiliate-home-house-and-garden-702k-gross-mo
Before the commission cuts, it was doing pretty well—$200 per 1k traffic. I don’t know what it’s like there now, maybe someone will drop a note in the comments on the current situation, but right now everything got slashed
Income before that was $200 per 1k traffic—one could make a living on it
And I can give you tons of such examples. The point is the same—there is money, but you can’t say it’s a lot.
Now let’s look at more attractive listings.
5. Technology Niche — Direct Affiliate
https://app.centurica.com/marketwatch/listing/8261/ — https://empireflippers.com/listing/48289/
Revenue per 1k traffic — $1200
6. Education Niche — Direct Affiliate
https://app.centurica.com/marketwatch/listing/7270/ — https://empireflippers.com/listing/47639/
Revenue per 1k traffic $1000
Returning to our mantra:
You can create articles the same way, build links the same way, and earn more for the same amount of effort if you choose another niche with more money. That money simply goes straight into your wallet.
This is clearly shown in these examples.
You can churn out content, build links, but earn $1,200 per 1k traffic in the tech niche instead of $74 from the coffee niche
Real foreign markets — almost at the goal
And here we come to the main point. You can build the exact same sites, spend the exact same time, but the monetary result will be different. And why? Because of the NICHE. There are people and they have needs.
In some niches, these people are ready to spend A LOT of money, while in others they buy like a coffee maker and that’s it. You won’t make much off that.
My goal is to find precisely those human needs where people are ready to spend a lot, while I keep doing my work just as I did before.
Then my effort will pay off completely. BUT! That doesn’t mean that doing low-yield satellite sites is entirely bad.
If there is diversification, that’s great. Some directions are super profitable, others less so, but that’s experience, and I can apply that experience to higher-yielding directions.
The only problem is not doing ONLY LOW-YIELD ones, which Amazon may be right now. I don’t know, I showed you examples, think for yourself where the money is. Maybe in Amazon…
I kind of scribbled a lot and got tired)) 😁 I was reflecting mostly for myself. If anyone finds it useful, I’ll be glad)
Unfortunately, there won’t be a Porsche story because I’m tired (( But in short—in Moscow everything is designed so you don’t need personal transport, it’s simply more convenient.
All photos are mine, by the way.