Building and Selling Amazon Affiliate Websites

Last year, I sold my most successful Amazon affiliate website on Empire Flippers. I paid a $297 listing fee and they also got a 15% commission fee after the sale. Yes, it’s a considerable sum of money paid out to them, but the overall selling process was generally painless.

I had to provide proof I owned the site. I gave them access to my Analytics and my Amazon backend (and other affiliate sites I’ve earned money on), so they can verify the traffic and income.

After verifying the site was clean, they listed it on their Marketplace and sent an email blast to their email subscribers. After a few hours, the site was sold! All this happened while it was the middle of the night in the Philippines (I tried to sleep, but I was too excited haha). All in all, it was a pretty smooth process.

So, anyway, if you’re wondering about the site I sold, here are some details:

• It was 2 years old when I sold it.
• I worked on the content for about 6 months.
• I had about 3 or 4 cornerstone content (my so-called ‘money posts’) with more than 5,000 words each. Then, I had individual product review pages (1000+ words each) which I linked to the money posts. I had most of my traffic from the ‘money posts’ because these ranked pretty well on Google.
• The domain name was expired. I checked the Internet Archive (archive.org) to see if it was a spam site. Fortunately, it wasn’t. It was a legit site that was actually related to the niche I wanted to build content for. It also had strong backlinks from high-DA sites, so I guess I got pretty luck on that domain name.
• I was really fortunate because I found a good keyword with not much competition. I used a tool called KWFinder to look for profitable keywords (I made a detailed review about this on my blog – check it here).

Now, that I’ve sold that site, I’ve started working on another Amazon affiliate site. It’s a long, uphill battle for me. I love writing, but it does take up lots of time. And I do all the work myself – writing, editing, uploading and formatting on WordPress, the technical stuff, etc. The only thing I outsourced was the logo and the icons I used on my site. That’s it.

Anyway, I’m not expecting the site to rank for a few more months. I think Google sandbox still exists. Fortunately, I’m in no hurry. I can wait and client work pays the bills for now. I’m just looking forward to the day when my Amazon affiliate dashboard will, once again, come alive.

So, to give you an idea of the kind of site I’m building right now:

• It’s in an entirely different niche (I can build a similar site to the one I sold, but that would be unethical).
• It’s in a fairly popular niche and I’m targeting low-hanging keywords, i.e. not too much traffic and competition
• I have 3 money posts with over 5,000 words each and 30+ individual product review pages (1,000+ words each). I’ve been working on this site for 2 months now.
• I’m using GeneratePress premium as my theme (it looks great and it’s really fast!) and Thrive Architect to format my posts.
• This site is built on a brand-new domain, so it doesn’t have existing backlinks. I’ve got my work cut out for me, but I won’t take shortcuts and buy links. I’m too scared of Google, so I’m definitely not trying any blackhat stuff. A single Google penalty and I can say goodbye to months of hard work.

Why Amazon?

I know other affiliate platforms offer much higher fees. But Amazon is such a popular brand and it’s one that many people trust. I’ve tried directing people to offers on Clickbank, but it converts so poorly. So, most of my content is geared towards converting Amazon traffic. I also use Geniuslink so I get affiliate income even for non-US Amazon marketplaces. I find it much better than Amazon OneLink.

Building an Amazon affiliate site from scratch isn’t easy, but it can be incredibly rewarding if done right. Sure, you need to work hard for the first few months, but after that it can pretty much bring you passive income. Plus, you can sell it later on if you get bored with it. :-)