Reached $400 With Amazon for August

Wow just checked today my Amazon account I’ve reached and passed $400. It won’t be much more than that for this month given that the month is about to end, however this is a new milestone for me, which I simply have to note down. It’s amazing what 7% can do for the earnings. When I first reached 7% commission at Amazon, I only had around $260 or so. In just a few days, with a few extra sales, I’m now over $400 for August.

There are really a couple of things I’ve noticed that worked for me to reach this. First of all, the new plugin that I’ve started using, Phpzon and the Amazonian Profit Plan. I have to say that these really pulled in their weight. Another thing that seemed to help is me going away from the Xfactor style sites. While this microsite system was great to get me started, without realizing, I outgrew it and now I”m going on my own path. And the further away from it I go (without having to start all the times new sites over and over again just to keep the momentum going), the more my earnings seem to be.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally grateful to the Xfactor system, as this allowed me to finally leave behind my 9 to 5 job. But while my Adsense earnings were slowly growing (very slowly), nothing else seemed to move. This is because this system focuses completely on Adsense and on making quickly MFA style sites that - now that I think about it - don’t really give much value to the site visitors.

Recently, however, I’ve started to simply go in another direction, simply because I realized that I was no longer happy with the types of sites I was creating. If you notice, the last few sites I’ve sold at Flippa, were a bit different from the typical Xfactor style. I had already more than the usual 5 pages of content and the content was also useful, with tips and hints and FAQs and really articles focused ON THE READER instead of on the money, as Xfactor’s system does.

That is indeed a short term plan that gives you the glimpse in what all you can do when creating sites, and gets you started. And that is perfect for its purpose, and I’m forever thankful to John Xfactor for starting me on making money online in a more consistent way.  However for the long term, I’ve proved to myself that my way is much better, as I can now also grow my Amazon income AND my bounce rate at Google Analytics is much lower as well, meaning that my visitors really read what I have to say. And that pleases me more than an extra click or two from Adsense - and as a matter of fact, it turns out that my Adsense clicks are not lower at all. Actually I’m already over 600 Euros from Adsense (around $750 or so) for this month, but I’ll post separately on that soon.

So what I do now is a sort of a hybrid system. I still focus on EMDs (exact domain matches) as they still pull their weight heavily with Google, and I pretty much use the same keyword numbers (at least $2500 exact searches per month, but I usually go for higher now). And I mostly use various forms of article marketing for backlinks, the best being at this point Ezinearticles.com.

However that’s pretty much all I’m using from the old, by now dated Xfactor ebook. Everything else is more in line with making niche authority sites. I add various how to articles, such as How to clean your xyz product, or how to repair it, or FAQs on the product. I also add specific pages with product reviews, whereby I mix a bit of Amazonian with phpzon. It is so easy but now I effortlessly provide VALUE to the readers and they thank me by buying more Amazon products through my links and clicking more happily through Adsense. I’ve even received at times emails asking me various things about the products I’m talking about on my site. That has never happened while I was religiously following the Xfactor method.

And don’t forget, with the Xfactor method there are lots of people who get their Adsense accounts banned. It has never happened that to a person who focuses on writing good quality articles with the visitors in mind (not with the search engines in mind) to lose their Adsense accounts. This is because they simply offer to their visitors what Google wants as well:  a good quality user experience, instead of a ‘let me run away from here fast’, as the Xfactor green black MFA style sites seem to incite in people.

Oh and for the pure authority sites which I’m also testing now but I’m still in the early stages, I’ve  joined SBI, but on that, in another later post