Amazon Affiliate Niche Sites: The Definitive Guide

What is an Amazon Affiliate Niche Site?

In simple terms, this is any site that earns from the Amazon Associates Program via affiliate links/banners placed throughout their site. The term 'niche site' itself can be pretty broad, as  what you consider as a niche site may differ from person to person. In general, I'd like to think of it this way: if a website earns most of its revenues from Amazon's affiliate program, then it can be thought of as an Amazon niche site.

For example, TechTage is NOT a niche site, because Amazon isn't its primary source of income. On the other hand, sites like BestReviews and TheWireCutter can be considered as Amazon niche sites because they mostly make their money from Amazon's affiliate program. Even though they both are huge authority product review sites, they still rely on Amazon to earn most of their revenue, so their earning model is pretty similar to that of the smaller niche site's.

Now, those are two in a million sites, and not everyone has the time, money or energy to build such large sites. So, what most people do is to build smaller niche sites that focus on a particular type or category of products. For example, someone might have a site about toasters, or ceramic cookware, or baseball accessories, you get the drill.

Of course, you can create a broader site. Say, you create a site about all sorts of sports equipment, be it water polo, golf, billiards, or paintball. Can such a site work well for earning through Amazon? The answer is, yes, but it'll require you to invest a lot more time, money, and effort up front than creating a simple single-topic site.

If you have a topic in mind, it usually takes less than 2 weeks to set up a complete niche site with all of its contents.​ But obviously, that's half of the total work. The other half comprises of promoting the site, ranking the site on search engines like Google, optimizing target pages for better conversions, nurturing it properly, and scaling it even further once you start getting some positive returns. So, in this in-depth guide, I'll guide you through each major step below:

1. Finding a Suitable Niche for Your Site

I can't stress how important this step is, because 90% of the times, this is the what single-handedly decides whether you'll fail in your pursuit of ranking your niche site or not. There are 3 broad types of niches:

Now that you know about the 3 standard levels of competition when it comes to niche sites, you need to learn how to find a suitable niche for you that has the following properties:

Finding Product Ideas

Now that you know about the competition level's of a niche and the positive traits of a suitable niche, how do you gather enough product ideas so that you can analyse the competition (more on this later) and research about it to make sure you really want to create a site in that niche?​ Here are a few ways of doing that:

Browse Amazon Product Categories​

​There's no better way than manually browsing through product categories and sub-categories on Amazon using their site directory. To avoid wasting time on uninteresting niches, you can only browse the sub-categories that you seem to have an interest in.

These are the criteria that I stick to while brainstorming for product ideas:

You can browse the XML sitemaps or on-site browsable sitemaps of large sites that specialize on product reviews. You'll get a ton of niche ideas that way. Even though you can't compete with them for what they've exactly covered in most cases, you can still get ideas about a broad category of products (for example, I can see some key product names like "modem", "printer", "router", "fitness tracker", etc. in the image above) which you can use to narrow down to smaller sub-niches under those broad niches and perhaps rank for those instead.

Use SEMRush to Get Niche Ideas from Top Sites

​You can plug any big site that publishes product reviews into SEMRush and apply a couple of simple filters to get a lot of keyword ideas, and also see which keywords are bringing them the most traffic.

In the above screenshot, I've used BestReviews​ as an example, and applied the simple filter, "include keywords that begin with 'best' ". Similarly, you can apply the filter, "include keywords that end with 'reviews' ". In most cases, this will return only the pages of their site that are actively targeting a product review term, so that you don't waste your time scrolling through tons of other unimportant pages.

Analysing the Competition/Difficulty of a Niche

Now that you have a few product ideas on your head, it's time to move on to analysing Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) to find keyword competitiveness. Manually checking the first page of the major keywords of any product is always best to get an accurate overview, but it's very time consuming to check the SERPs of hundreds of keywords manually.

Keyword Research and SERP Analysis with LongTailPro

This is where LongTailPro comes into play. It not only pulls all the needed data, be it the monthly search volume, average CPC, the first page of the SERP for that keyword with Moz metrics, site age and other data, but it also utilizes its own clever algorithm to come up with a keyword competitiveness score (KC) for each of the individual ranking pages for that keyword, and displays the average of that as average KC.

Is KC a definitive metric? No. Is it a fair indication of how competitive a keyword is? In most cases, yes.

What I personally love doing with LongTailPro, is importing a bunch of different keywords and bulk checking their KC scores. That way, I can filter the high-KC stuff beforehand before moving on to checking the SERP analysis of ​the low-medium KC (I recommend sticking to keywords with a KC of 30 and less) keywords. It really saves me a lot of time, and speeds up the whole keyword/niche research process.

Also, LTP gives you the option to generate thousands of keywords from just a few seed keywords. You can even pre-filter the generated keywords by specifying how many monthly searches you're looking for, which words the keywords should contain, etc. For example, I can specify LTP to only return keywords that include the word "best" and have between 1,000 to 3,000 monthly searches. This way, it's a lot easier to avoid junk keywords before even having to go through them.

As far as SERP analysis is concerned, I tend to pick keywords that has the following first page SERP characteristics:

I've noticed that most other guides on Amazon affiliate marketing advise people to avoid keywords where there already are niche sites on page 1. I'm completely against this reasoning. When I see a fellow niche site ranking inside the top 3, that means I can do the same, if not better than them.

A Few Other Points about Keyword Competition Analysis

From time to time, you'll come across niche sites that rank really well and sit comfortably in the top 3 above authority sites in that niche. They might not have much domain authority, dofollow links, and yet rank that well.

The reason behind this might be the fact that they're using Private Blog Network (PBN) links that are hidden from common link crawlers. So, popular tools like Moz and Ahrefs can't really crawl those backlinks, but they're there nonetheless.​

Before you finally decide on a niche, you can check the link profiles of each individual ranking page in detail using Ahrefs, because it has a bigger and fresher dataset than Moz.​ If I find strong, contextual links pointing at a page on an authority site, that's a negative signal for me and I really think hard before I can tell whether I can outrank that particular search result or not. The screenshot (taken from Ahrefs) below shows the top referring domains of a high-authority Amazon niche site. These sites are generally very hard to overtake.

If there are a lot of high DA sites on page 1, I still look at how aggressively they've targeted my target keyword. Most of the times, big authority sites miss out on including the exact keyword in both page title, URL, and meta description as they opt for fancy titles instead, which include variations of the main keyword.

From time to time, you'll see multi-million dollar review sites like TopTenReviews and ConsumerReports ranking well for the keyword you're looking at. While they are really a bit hard for a beginner to beat, I can assure that they're not unbeatable. In fact, one of my niche sites rank above both of them for a fairly competitive keyword. Was outranking them easy? No, but it was possible nonetheless.

However, big sites like those will trouble you less when they themselves haven't got many page-level links, because at the end of the day, page-level links are still the #1 ranking factor on Google, keeping all other things equal.​

Calculating the Earning Potential of a Niche

​I use a simple, free, web tool called AmaProfits to determine how much money a niche site can potentially make in a particular niche. It's not amazingly accurate, but it generally gives you a good indication of how much earning potential your niche site has once you put in the data.

Here's what successful Amazon affiliate marketer Al-Amin Kabir, of Marketever fame, has to say ​about the earning potential of Amazon affiliate sites:

2. Choosing a Domain Name

Now that you have chosen a niche, it's time to pick up a great domain name which helps your site to identify with the target audience.​

Brandable or Exact Match?

When choosing a domain name, the trade-off is between two things:

Keyword-stuffed domains like BestProductReviews.com aren't really brandable. They don't sound professional and might attract penalties from both Google and Amazon themselves, easier than a brandable domain, like ProductAuthority.com or ProductGuide.com

Besides, from my personal experience in the last couple of years, I've seen that the impact of having the target keyword in your domain name has kind of reduced. So, it​ doesn't really make sense any more to stuff the whole keyword in the domain name.

Which Domain Name Extension to Pick?

There are a few major top-level TLDs - .com, .net and .org are the most popular. Though there are a lot of new TLDs available and they rank just as well, I wouldn't recommend going with a new TLD because most people would have a hard time trusting a site on a brand new TLD.

Among the 3 tried and tested ones, .com is the most popular and it's what people are able to most easily connect with.​ So, in short, if .com is available, go for it without a doubt. If you are very pleased about a particular domain name but the .com extension is unavailable, only then choose .net, but I won't recommend going for .org at all as it's generally geared towards non-profit organisations, which your site isn't.

How to Generate Domain Name Ideas​

I personally use NameMesh to generate domain name ideas when I myself am out of ideas.​ You can also use alternatives such as BustAName.

Apart from that, you should always try to come up with unique, brandable domain names yourself because your brain is still the best name generator on the planet.

Which Domain Name Registrar to Go With

I usually go with NameCheap for all my domains because they are a very reputable company and they also offer Free WHOISGuard for the first year which renews at only 99 cents with a coupon.

WHOISGuard is very important here because if you are dealing with multiple niche sites, you don't want to keep your personal domain registrant details as a footprint between them (which will allow advanced SEOers to find all of your niche sites if they manage to find one).

3. Choosing a Fast Web Host

One of the most crucial aspects of building a niche site is choosing a decent web host. Choosing a cheap, low-quality host is one of the most common mistakes people make.​ Not only does a cheap host offer terrible page load times and overall uptime, they also suck in terms of support and flexibility, leaving you stranded with a broken website, with no one to complain to.

Anyway, I'm actually an enthusiast when it comes to web hosting, and that is pretty evident from the web hosting reviews that I publish here on TechTage. If you are a regular reader, you pretty much already know some of my recommended web hosts, but here are three web hosts that I regularly use to host my sites:

• SiteGround (my review) - excellent performance, great support, solid uptime.
• A2 Hosting (my review) - very fast servers with decent uptime & support.
• MDDHosting (my review) - fast performance and support, transparent service.

Honestly, it doesn't make sense to use a cheap web host when it's literally the backbone of your site. And also especially when you also aren't spending less in other areas like content and promotional strategies.

I've heard of pretty horrible stories about cheap web hosts ruining the process of niche site building for beginners. One of them even told me that his web host had demanded over $100 just to restore an earlier backup, after his site was compromised. That's pretty much as bad as it gets.

Fast hosts not only ​make the overall experience better for your visitors, and help reduce bounce rate drastically, they also help you achieve slightly better rankings due to Google giving preference to fast websites on its SERPs.

4. Setting Up Your Niche Site

Now, you're finally ready to put your niche research data, domain name, and web hosting service to some good use. You'll finally be able to set up the actual site that'll hopefully be a big earner in future. So, let's get started with the site creation process!

Which CMS is Best? (WordPress all the Way)

The heading really makes it clear. There isn't really any other option that's as functional, flexible and useful as WordPress, especially for niche sites. Because, you want the site set up process to be as easy, fast and seamless as possible, and WordPress makes exactly that a reality.

​WordPress has grown a lot since its humble beginning. It now powers even some of the most popular websites on the internet, and even constantly-updating ones like newspaper sites. Not only that, according to a survey, it powers more than a quarter of ALL websites on the internet.

Setting up a WordPress site is ​pretty straightforward, as well. In fact, you can set up the basics of a WordPress-based niche site in just 10 minutes, as my friend, who is popularly known as hekke, shows in the video below:

Optimizing Your WordPress Site for Speed

​After you're done setting up the basic structure of your WordPress-powered niche site, you need to apply some basic optimizations that'll create a fast framework upon which you can build the rest of your site (theme, plugins etc.).

Since I've already written a pretty comprehensive guide about optimizing WordPress sites for speed, I won't rewrite any of those tips here, as you can refer to that post directly for speeding up your site.

Which Theme to Use?

Design is a very subjective matter, and design choices vary from person to person. But, in general, I try to follow the guidelines below while choosing a theme for a niche site:

These days, I prefer using Thrive Themes on all my new niche sites, along with their proprietary Thrive Architect plugin. Not only does this combo allow me to create absolutely SLICK looking sites that look no worse than a proper authority site, but it also has a very positive impact on conversions.

I don't really recommend using a generic free theme for your niche site, because instead of helping, they really have a negative effect overall on your site's brand.

Basic Plugins that I Use on Almost Every Niche Site

​Here are a few fundamental plugins that I use on almost every niche site:

A few things to keep in mind:

6. On-Page Optimization for Your Niche Site

Now, you have your site set up, with content in hand. Next, you need to figure out how to properly post the content and structure your site to ensure optimal on-page optimization. Without this, your site will have difficulties in ranking, even when you build powerful links later on.

Structuring Your Site from an SEO Perspective

I won't talk too much about structuring your niche site, because, honestly, there are many ways of structuring it, and you can browse other niche sites across multiple different industries to get an idea of what other successful sites are doing. Still, I'll discuss a bit about the fundamental types of structures that niche site builders like to use.

​The first type utilizes a static homepage which targets the biggest keywords. An example would be the homepage being treadmillexpert.com which would target "best treadmill" and related keywords. This means a content-heavy homepage, with contextual, menu, and sidebar links to internal pages that target secondary keywords.

The second type may or may not utilize a static homepage, but the difference is that the homepage itself doesn't target any keywords. Instead, the homepage is used as a showcase to display other internal pages which target keywords.​ An example would be treadmillexpert.com targeting the keyword "best treadmill" through the dedicated page treadmillexpert.com/best-treadmill/

Either of them work, but I now prefer the second type because it enables me to create broader sites that target a lot of different types of products within a common broad niche (let's say, multiple different things under "Gardening").

I've seen a lot of people worrying a lot over advanced strategies like silo-ing a site. Not a single one of my own sites is silo-ed and they rank very well, so I don't see a reason why you should at all be worrying about stuff like that when you're just starting out.

Robots Meta Optimization for Different Types of Pages

I use the Yoast SEO plugin to add a meta robots "noindex" tag to all of the unimportant pages of my niche sites, to ensure that none of them get indexed and create duplicate content issues. Here are the pages I generally apply the "noindex" tag on:

I also add the rel="nofollow" attribute while linking to unimportant pages like "privacy policy" from menu or sidebar. This signals the search engines that they are unimportant pages which the webmaster doesn't want to get ranked for anything.

Optimal On-Page Optimization for Key Pages

Now, we're talking about optimizing a specific page for it to rank well for its target keywords. This is a crucial step and ​Yoast SEO makes the job a lot easier.

Here are a few points to keep in mind to ensure you're neither under-optimizing nor over-optimizing your page.

Now you finally have a fully functional niche site that you can proudly show off! What's next? Making sure that it's visible to real people searching for topics related to your niche site. And the easiest way of doing this is to make it rank on search engines like Google.

​This is where link building comes into play, as it's inevitable for making an amazon niche site rank. No matter how good your content and site structure is, your site simply won't rank that well until it has up-votes from other sites in the form of links.

Apart from that, these links help to diversify the overall anchor-text profile of my niche sites. When "author name" anchor text dominates over keyword-rich anchor texts, it's easier to use keyword rich or exact match anchors without worrying about getting hit by the Google Penguin algorithm.

Keep in mind that more than 90% of links obtained from blog commenting will be nofollow'ed links. This means that they themselves won't pass on any link juice to your site and actively help in your ranking your site. But still, they work very well in diversifying your anchor text distribution and building up a natural-looking link profile.​

​Here is one of my favourite ways of searching for relevant blog posts which have a high chance of accepting new comments.

What this basically does is, it returns blog posts having my target topic in its page title, and has somewhere between 2 to 20 existing comments. So, this ensures that these posts are both relevant to your site and are also known for accepting blog comments while not being unmoderated to host hundreds of spammy comments.

​If this seems too time consuming and boring for you, you can easily outsource this to a Virtual Assistant (VA) from a freelancer site like UpWork.

Now, let's move on to the next strategy, and this one is a crucial part of my overall link building strategy for niche sites.​

Community Site Links

These are one of my favourite type of links. Mainly because, they are dofollow, contextual, and are placed on high-authority sites. Thus, these high-quality links are usually very effective in ranking your site.

Basically, you post a piece of content (with your link embedded)​ on a community site where anyone can register and post. How do I find such sites? There are a few ways, and one of them is looking at the link profiles of some other currently ranking niche sites. A percentage of them will use community site links. You can use your link crawler of choice for this task, but my favourite is Ahrefs.​

​Even though I could share a list of community sites that I use for this purpose, I won't feel comfortable to share them here, because the moment I do that, some people would start spamming the hell out of them, eventually closing the doors of them all to the general public, or forcing them to make all outbound links nofollow.

Basically any community site, that allows you to register as a member and keep a "blog" under your profile qualifies as a community site link source.

If it's too much for you to do yourself, you can check out some third party services that provide links of this type.​

Link Building Using Infographics

For some of my sites, I invest on infographic creation, so that I can leverage it to build some solid links.​ I've actually written a solid post in the past on infographic link building, but I'll discuss the process here in short.

If you have no clue about infographic creation, ​and don't know where to start, I'd recommend outsourcing the whole process to any reputable infographic designing agency.

​Basically, after publishing an infographic on your site, you can submit them to sites that are known to share infographics (infographic aggregators). Also, you have to get in touch with sites that are known to share infographics on the same topic as yours.

As the sites that'll post and link to your infographic will link to the page that has the infographic, I recommend placing your infographic somewhere within a money-page. So that, when the infographic sharers link to that page, it'll get benefited directly and achieve better rankings.

Here's the entire process in short, if reading the entire infographic link building guide that I linked to above is too much for you to read:

​This is a fairly popular strategy and as a result, it's often used improperly (and thus ineffectively). Firstly, let me get you a basic idea of what Web 2.0 sites actually are. They are basically the ones that let you blog freely within their platform and yet allows you to freely manage your site. A few examples would be, WordPress.com, RebelMouse, Tumblr, Weebly, etc.

It's very easy to mess up web 2.0 link building by doing stuff like using spammy/copied/low-quality content, stuffing tons of links in a single web 2.0 site, etc. To make sure your web 2.0s actually help you to rank your niche site instead of getting it penalized, try to ensure the following:​

Also, keep in mind, not all Web 2.0 sites provide dofollow links, you need to ignore the ones that don't, because all this much effort isn't worth it when the link is nofollow'ed. In addition, here is a relevant guide on Web 2.0's, that'll help you massively in case you decide to rely a lot on this type of link building:

• ​​How To Get Backlinks From Web 2.0 That Rank Your Site [Ultimate Guide] - Marketever
  

If you want, you can outsource Web 2.0 creation to a VA, as well. There are many VAs on platforms like UpWork who are already aware of how to create, design and post in a Web 2.0 site. You can just provide them the guideline I posted above to ensure they don't do anything risky.

​Niche-Relevant Forum Link Building

What I mean by niche relevant forum link building isn't spamming all your niche relevant forums by posting useless posts and stuffing in your link. You should just create profiles in the top 4-5 forums in your niche, and add your website URL in the "URL field" of your profile.

For most of the forums, this link will be nofollow'ed, but that's still helpful not only in anchor diversification (as these will be naked/branded links)​ but also in driving relevance to your niche site.

Just don't go overboard in your efforts and set up profiles on a hundred different forums within a week and link out to your site from all of them. I recommend sticking to only a handful (4-5) of them, as this works best when done in moderation.​

Guest Posting

No matter how many "SEO gurus" tell you that guest posting doesn't work any more, you can be pretty sure that they hardly know anything about the reality. Not only are links from guest posts one of the most powerful type of links​, they work just as well these days.

What doesn't work, however, is low-quality guest posting.​ You basically need to reach out to real, high-quality blogs, and supply them interesting content. Think of it this way, you're providing a fellow blogger some high-quality content which is bringing traffic to their site, while also fetching your own site one or two links. It's practically a win-win situation for both parties.

Here are a few ways to ensure a high conversion rate for your guest posting campaigns. This guide was posted by Venchito on the TechTage blog a while ago, and it's still very relevant. In addition, Brian Dean has an awesome guide on guest blogging that you can refer to before starting out on your own campaign.

One of the most important elements of a guest posting campaign is the pitch - the email you send to the blog owners enquiring about the possibility of publishing a guest post on their site. From my experience, you shouldn't be too pushy in your first email. You can just ask them whether they are accepting guest posts at all, instead of sending them a bunch of topic ideas in the first email itself.

There's a misconception among people that guest blogging is not that effective for niche sites. This isn't fully true. Of course no one would want to link to your site if it screams "AFFILIATE!". For other site owners to link to your site without a doubt, you need a good site design, structure and lots of informative or other genuinely useful articles. But we've already covered that before.

Resource Page Link Building

​These can be both powerful and relatively easier to get for an amazon affiliate niche site. In the last two months alone, I've secured more resource page links than I can count just by sending a simple email.

Basically, this is a two-step link building method. Firstly, you need to find out relevant resource pages within your niche that link to other sites related to yours. Next, you need to reach out to the webmasters of those pages asking them whether it's possible for them to link to your site too.

​You can use the searches like the following on Google to find out niche-relevant resource pages:

• ​[topic] inurl:resources
• ​[topic] inurl:links

Once you've curated a list of potential link targets, you can send them an email like I did, as shown in the image above. Or you can use a template:

Curated List Link Building

This is a fairly uncommon link building strategy for niche sites, and not many people actually know about this. This is mainly a sub-type of "ego-bait link building". What you basically do, is look for and curate a list of top sites or resources within your niche that are genuinely helpful for anyone who's looking for content related to that topic.

It isn't hard to come up with at least 10-20 such sites or content pieces that stand out among the rest. Once you've created the list, it's time to create a new, dedicated page on your niche site with a title like "Best Sites/Content on [Topic]​".

Once you've created the page, ​you just need to email the site owners whose sites/content you've featured on that page. Though this doesn't guarantee a 100% conversion rate in terms of link acquisition, you still should get a few links or at least a fair number of social shares in return. Not that bad for a fairly simple and less resource-intensive link building method, isn't it?

Other Link Building Strategies for Niche Sites

​Apart from the ones I've already mentioned, there are a few morelink building strategies that you can use, but they don't need any detailed explanation either because they're pretty self-explanatory or are just not that important in my opinion.

If you have invested in high-quality, interesting content, you can leverage social media to get some targeted visitors to your niche site. Of course, not all niches are suitable for promoting in social media. But, for niches that have quite a bit of a presence on various social platforms, you can try utilizing the social mediums to bring in the first batch of visitors to your site before it even starts ranking.

I tend to focus mostly on Facebook these days, because that's the only platform that has consistently provided much higher returns than the meagre sums that I invested to get organic and paid visibility on its platform.​

From my experience, Twitter is mostly used by business people and not your average consumer who goes on a shopping spree on Amazon.​ On platforms like Reddit, it's very hard to push a site that has a lot of affiliate-links-rich content. But Facebook is used by almost everyone. This is perhaps why I've seen the best results from Facebook.

You can, however, create a page on Google+ along with Facebook. You can use a plugin that'll auto share any new post of your site on both Google+ and Facebook.​

In short, for small Amazon affiliate niche sites, social media isn't the most important thing. You should rather focus on on-site aspects and search engine marketing.​

9. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Strategies for Niche Sites

​A good site structure and SEO will get your site visitors. That doesn't guarantee that your site will be able to convert those visitors into actual paying customers on Amazon. CRO is the bridge that takes your visitors from your site to an Amazon product page and makes them click that "buy now!" button.

Here are a few tried-and-tested CRO techniques that I personally use for my niche sites and get great results from:

Once your site starts earning decent amounts of money and you want to grow your site, you need to​ have a proper plan to scale up your site to increase its earnings further. When it comes to scaling up an Amazon affiliate niche site, these are the few fundamental things you can do:

One thing that I must mention when it comes to scaling up a niche site is, as the site ages, it'll generally perform better and better on the SERPs after the first 4-6 months. A lot of people attribute this to the infamous Google sandbox. So, if your site is already earning decently in within its first 4-6 months, you can be pretty much sure that it will automatically start getting even more visitors in the coming months even with no new action from your end.

The screenshot below (taken from SEMRush) shows the rapid growth of one of my niche sites in the past few months even though I published no new content or got no new links.

I personally revisit my sites entirely once they hit the $1,000/month mark. I check analytics and SERP rankings thoroughly and determine which pages are ranking just outside of page 1 or at the bottom of page 1. Then, I try to get them to rank higher by getting more links, or updating them to add more content.

Again, tools like SEMRush (apart from your analytics software of choice) are very helpful in keeping track of your site's growth and all of your secondary keywords' rankings. So, I'll recap. Once you hit your initial target monthly earnings, you can do the following to scale your site further:

These are the exact same points that I followed to scale a site from around $300-400 a month to over $1,000 a month before eventually flipping it.

After analysing a site, if I find that it's unlikely for me to grow it much more, or if I somehow lose interest in the niche due to a host of factors, I prefer selling (flipping) it and collecting more than 20X of the monthly revenue at once (which I can easily reinvest in growing more sites).

Here's what Thomas Smale, co-founder of FEInternational, a company that helps people sell tens, if not hundreds of Amazon affiliate sites every year, has to say about scaling an Amazon affiliate niche site:

11. How I Flip My Niche Sites

This is the final part. The fruit of flipping a niche site doesn't reach you until you've gone through all of the 10​ previous stages of creating, building and growing an Amazon affiliate site.

Whether to flip or continue with a niche site is a crucial and difficult decision for most people. Both have their own share of pros and cons. In short, flipping gives you a huge sum of money (more than 20 times your average monthly earning, in most cases) at once. You can reinvest some of that money back into your Amazon affiliate business portfolio, and just save up the rest.

Flipping a site means cutting off a steady (and generally growing) stream of mostly passive recurring income.​ But then again, there's no guarantee that your site will keep earning the same amount or more in monthly earnings. A plethora of things can happen (such as, your site getting penalized, its niche shrinking in popularity, etc.) that might pose a great threat to your niche site.

This is why I recommend two different things for two types of people.​

If you're a beginner who doesn't have direct connections with people looking to buy web properties such as your site, you'll find it hard to sell your site without the help of a professional website broker.

My experience with general bid-to-buy type of marketplaces like Flippa wasn't really good, so I personally always use a broker to flip my sites. Not only do they usually get me really good prices for my niche sites, they also manage to sell the sites really quickly.

Website Brokers - Considering Your Options

There are mainly 2 major website brokers that are popular for being able to sell Amazon affiliate niche sites quickly and at a great price. They are:​

• FE International - charges flat 15% on the final sale price.
• Empire Flippers - charges an initial $297 listing fee for first-time sellers and $99 for the following sales, plus a flat 15% of the final sale price.

Personally, I've used FE International and I'm a big fan of them. All of their staff that I've dealt with, have been extremely friendly and helpful to me, and that includes the co-owner! In fact, I'd emailed him directly somehow instead of emailing their support department while trying to sell a site with them for the first time. Still, I had got a reply from him within minutes, and he'd set me up pretty quickly with other staff of his from there onwards.

There are also some advantages of FE International that made me more inclined towards them, and one of the major ones is that they don't ask you to give them direct viewing access of your Amazon associates account. Screenshots and live screen sharing with potential buyers is enough to prove your earnings, unlike in case of Empire Flippers. What this means is that they don't get to see all your other tracking IDs (and hence websites) in the same Amazon associates account, while verifying the income of the one you're selling.​

I've heard good things about both from other fellow niche site builders, so I guess you can't really go wrong with either of them.​

The Concluding Chapter of the Definitive Guide to Amazon Affiliate Niche Sites

Niche sites that are monetized by the Amazon affiliate program have huge potential. You can literally take a site that is making almost nothing, and turn it into a four or even a five figure monthly earner within one half of a year. As long as you're technically sound, understand the key concepts of SEO, and have some basic website building skills, you can earn a lot from Amazon affiliate niche sites.

If you've read this far without skipping anything, you deserve a big round of applause! Really, thank you! This post took me more than 20 hours of non-stop writing, editing, and tweaking. So, if you found it useful, I'd be really glad.

I've tried to cover everything, right from choosing a niche to flipping your money making site. I tried to take as much time as possible (without getting bored) to write and expand every one of the chapters. Still, it's not impossible that I missed a few things here and there. And that's where you come in! If I have missed anything, don't hesitate to get in touch with me directly to let me know about that.