It took me 3 months to make my first sale as an Amazon affiliate. Once I made that first sale I was hooked. I took what I did on my first website and repeated it over and over again. But not everything worked as well as my first site. Let me show you what worked extremely well and what was a complete failure.
My Epic Failures
When someone tells you they have good news and they have bad news, which one do you want to hear first. You always start with the bad news. Well here is the bad news that I learned as an Amazon affiliate. Not all niches you select are profitable. Sometimes you fall flat on your face. I am no exception.
My first failure as an Amazon affiliate started with one of the first three websites that I created. I was working through a course where you emailed your results to the instructor and then he gave you feedback on your website. Well instead of creating just one website I decided to create three.
Two of the three websites I started were because they were promoting products that I had a first had experience with. The last one I picked because my younger sister raved about the product. To buttress what she said one day I was in Sears and I went by the department that sold this product and it was packed with women buying this one product. That is how I chose this nice.
Epic Fail #1 – Stand Mixers
It is rare to walk into a home today and not see a stand mixer sitting on the shelf. When you look on Amazon the Kitchen-Aid stand mixers have 2,000+ or 2,500+ customer reviews. Remember the rule of thumb is Amazon will sell 500 products for every 1 customer review. 2,500 customer reviews x 50 = 125,000. That is a lot of stand mixers that are being sold.
The problem with this niche is that every person and their brother and sister and mother and aunt and grandmother was promoting it. There was nothing I could ever do to get my website ranked in the top 100 for any keyword.
Epic Fail #2 – Baby Diapers
This niche started out following some very logical thinking on my part. People have babies regardless of what the economy is doing. In other words this is an evergreen niche which makes you money every month of the year.
If you have ever had a baby then you know that they go through an enormous amount of diapers. Plus they are buying them like once or twice a month for years. How can you fail with such a market with high demand? Well trust me you can fail worse than you can with stand mixers. I NEVER got ranked in the top 500 for diapers so I dropped this niche.
Epic Fail #3 – Bike Carriers
This niche started out quite well for me but dried up. People in my family are very athletic. We are doing 10k, half-marathon and tri-athlons all the time. In fact last year at Thanksgiving 7 members of my family went for a 10 mile ride after eating Thanksgiving dinner. We always talk about the different bike carriers we have on our cars, vans and SUVs. This was a logical niche for me to enter.
For a while I was getting some decent income from this nice. Though I was ranking for the lesser known and purchased bike carriers but once they got to my site they could read about other carriers and purchase them. I am not sure which Google update it was but this site literally dried up overnight. In fact I didn’t make a single sale from this site in over 6 months so I dropped it.
My Epic Successes
Now for the good news. I have three niches that have always been my biggest profit makers. I can pretty much count on these sites without fail each and every month. If you are an affiliate for Amazon, you want to create websites like these that are very, very reliable. I hope that you find your own profitable niches. Here are my most successful Amazon niches.
My 3rd most successful Amazon niche
I am an avid mountain climber. In fact my goal is to climb the 7 Summits which are the highest mountain on each of the 7 continents. I have already climbed 4 of the 7. This niche started out as an evolution of my climbing passion. I started with a website promoting tents. It didn’t do well so I moved to promoting sleeping bags. Eventually this morphed into a winning niche and that is camp furniture.
Regardless of whether you car camp or camp over night by carrying your own gear, you need furniture at your camp site. This websites promotes items like camp chairs, games, water purification system, tables, hammocks, plates, camp stoves, utensils and even Frisbees.
Yes this means I am selling lots of low priced items. But I am selling lots of them. When people go camping they will buy utensils, sunscreen, water purification tables, Nalgene bottles, bug spray, hammock, couple of chairs, table and water bottles. So when a person goes camping it is not unusual for them to end up buying multiple items for their trip. Since they got to Amazon from my link then I get a commission for all those items! Plus it helps to move me up to the higher commission brackets each and every month.
My 2nd most successful Amazon niche
This niche is very seasonal and I only see revenue from it during just a few months of the year. But the products people are buying are expensive products that they MUST BUY. That is why this niche has been so successful for me. This niche is very simply snow blowers.
Yes it only is purchased by people unfortunate enough to live in those colder climates so it is limited to only half of the United States. Automated snow blowers which you plug in and just push it like a lawn mower are very much in demand in the Northern part of the United States. Even selling those oversized snow shovels sell well.
At the start of winter every year I see a run on people purchasing snow blowers. The best thing for me is when there is a big blizzard or huge snow fall. My sales literally double the very next day on my website. Every time the news reports that there is going to be up to 12 inches of snow falling somewhere I cheer because that is money in my pocket.
The tradeoff is that I sell absolutely niche during the summer months. But when I do make sales it is a lot of them and they are on expensive products. Most of my sites make 60% of their income from Thanksgiving to Christmas. This site provides a steady stream of income after Christmas which is nice.
My most successful Amazon niche
This site was something I got into like the camp furniture site. It was an offshoot of my climbing passion. I had a website promoting backpacks that hikers and climbers would use. I started to notice that people were clicking thru to Amazon from a backpack I had reviewed but they were buying backpacks in a different category that I was not promoting. Well this happened enough times that I decided to shift gear and start promoting that product.
That niche is children’s backpacks. These are backpacks that they would wear to school. Children’s backpacks have evolved into an art form. There are backpacks with Hello Kitty, super figures to amazing graphic designs. Kids always want a backpack with the latest fad on it. Since fads change they will sometimes buy multiple backpacks during the year.
I do make sells on this one website every month of the year so it is almost evergreen. I do make most of my sales during June, July and August as people are buying items they need for the start of school. This provides me with a nice income during the slower summer months. It is nice to get this income before the Christmas income starts to arrive.
Lessons Learned
As you can see from my experience not every path you follow has a pot of gold at the end. Sometimes the path is a dead end. The best thing you can do is evaluate what is working and what is not working and make changes. I don’t have children so I would NEVER have thought about promoting children’s backpacks. Luckily I kept tweaking sites that I had created until I found that pot of gold.
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hi Jenifer
I like how you think, and your approach to niche site building…
Cannot believe you’re revealing your niches, and share both winners and failures… when most people are only revealing one of their money-makers, and keep quiet about the rest
I look forward to reading more from you. Keep them coming, I like what I’ve seen so far.
Codrut,
Thank you so very much for the vote of confidence. I believe in sharing the good, bad and the ugly because the tagline of my websites says it all “My Internet Marketing Journey.” I invite everyone to come along on the journey with me and watch and learn from my successes as well as from my failures.
Be sure to share my website with all your friends and invite them to join the journey.
Jennifer
Hey Jennifer,
I to agree that it is awesome to hear about both the good and the bad. I recently purchased and started applying a course on getting very low cost per clicks on FB ads. In the course, they make it look pretty easy… just do what they do and you’re on your way. Well… the real world never seems to work out that way and I’ve been tweaking and trying different things to try and figure it out.
What I realized is that it would be SO helpful to see examples of failed campaigns and why they are failures. So I REALLY appreciate you being candid about your experience with Amazon.
Do you spend a lot of time/effort/energy trying to rank pages on your Amazon sites or do you just go after the organic traffic that finds it’s way to your site?
Again, AWESOME post Jennifer!
Lance
Lance,
We might have purchased the same course – does it cover selling t-shirts on Facebook? I am working my way through it myself.
I share my successes and failures because the journey is not always an easy path and sometimes you take the wrong turn when you come to an intersection. It helps to see what didn’t work and why,
Jennifer
Awesome post! I really like the transparency. Most people are scared others will take their ideas but usually the people stealing niches won’t last long anyway.
I’m really interested in your bike niche. If it was making money at one time, it is probably worth remaking. Just copy the site to a new domain and start fresh, or even sell it!
Timothy,
You are right that people will try to steal because you have shown them what works. But if you want to complete with me I guarantee you that I will out work you.
I no longer have the bike carrier website any more. I have heard many people say with the latest updates if their website ranking has fallen then copy all the content to a new website and it will rank. Wish I still had it now but oh well.
Jennifer
Do you think that the reasons why your stand mixer and baby diaper websites did not do well were because you did not choose the proper keywords and your websites were penalized because of link building instead of really high competition?
John,
I am not an SEO expert but my guess would be no. When I had this website it was before the big Google updates that punished people that had purchased many backlinks to their website. So when huge backlinks helped you get ranked, I couldn’t get ranked with my stand mixer site.
Jennifer
Hi Jeniffer,
May I know where you outsource your content? You success very inspired me.
Thank you
Dynn,
I use elance.com to outsource all of my content. If you read my post about increasing your income on steroids I show exactly how I found writers to outsource my content and links to their profiles so you can use them yourself.
Jennifer
That’s great Jennifer. Thank you.Will read all the relevant post.
Thanks Dynn.
It’s amazing share, that i found and read, you help me to bold up my ideas. I bookmark and cant wait to read through your blog.
thank you.
Lehany,
Glad you found my website!
Jennifer
Lehany,
I am glad you found my website too!
Jennifer
Inspiring article. But I had a question in my mind while reading this article.
The question is,
How do you decide upon any Niche segment? What kind of research you do before trying any niche
Amit,
You can decide on any niche that you want. I recommend picking a niche that you are familiar with. I pick niche first because I am familiar with it, then I pick a niche that is very active and has many buyers.
Jennifer
Thank you for sharing your successes and failures. I think it would be very helpful, however, if you provided a URL to one of your successful sites so we can see a winning affiliate strategy in action. Thanks again for the excellent post.
Todd,
I share quite a few in my Amazon Affiliate Bible page.
Jennifer
Jennifer,
Thanks for the article. I’m glad you are honest that you fail as well as succeed. I have had a lot of failures, but when one your projects succeed, it is very sweet.
Paul,
You are so right that it is very sweet when you succeed because it makes pushing through after all the failures that much nicer.
Jennifer
Jennifer,
Thank you for sharing your experience. Do you think, video review can do good for amazon affiliate? I am not sure about promoting product through youtube videos.
New guy here – want to be learning and growing here. Thank you for the great info. Curious when you start something like the snow blowers or bike racks then what ? Do you buy and stock ? Or do you find someone who will drop ship the back packs or what ever the product is ?
No update for 3 years. How are things. Are you still in internet marketing?
Hlw,
Thanks for the article. I’m very glad you are honest that you fail as well as succeed. I have had a lot of failures, but this time my project is run successfully.
Thank You