This is a guest post by Ellen C Braun
After following Wanda and Paula’s advice about how to write a product review from the Amazonian Profit Plan, I spent about three full days creating my review page. The word count hovered a bit over 3,000, there were lists of bullet points, and a compilation of the product’s pros and cons. I drove to a local store that carried the product I’d reviewed and took detailed photos from every angle, which I used throughout the review. This gave my product review an edge above standard reviews that simply use the stock photo of the item from Amazon or the manufacturer.
My product review was friendly and informative, and I knew that it was really good. However, after all that work, I had many days of the week pass by with that dreaded “There is no activity for this period” message from within my Amazon dashboard as I logged in each morning to check on yesterday’s stats. There is nothing quite as depressing as seeing that the prior day had been a zero-sale day! Thankfully, I did not give up. In fact, as of this writing, I think it’s been over four months since I’ve had a day without any Amazon sales at all!
The key to my success, I knew, was to get traffic to my wonderful product review. And the key to traffic was going to be keyword research.
The first thing I did was attempt to optimize my page for ‘product name’. Let’s call the page “Square Widgets Review”. I spent a nice chunk of time and money creating a variety of backlinks with the anchor text “square widgets” pointing to my review page. After several weeks, I was glad to see that I was in position #5 in Google, with the first four positions all taken by the widget manufacturing company. That company had a strong website, and I was unsure if I would be able to outrank them for the name of their popular product. Additionally, there were often Adwords ads at the top of the SERP’s, so that my #5 position in Google that I’d worked so hard to attain was below the fold! In fact, although “square widgets” showed 9,000 exact monthly searches, due to these factors, my page received only about 2 or 3 daily visitors from that keyword! Trying to make a living from a handful of visitors was not going to work, so it was time to rethink my keyword strategy.
I noticed that a lot of people had questions about the differences between two of the most popular models of widgets, let’s call them the square widget and the rectangular widget. These two models were very similar, so potential buyers wondered about what the differences were and which was better. So I decided to be helpful to the end user and create a page called “square widgets vs rectangular widgets”. I pointed a handful of backlinks at this new page, and within four or five days my new page was the #1 position in Google for the keyword “square widgets vs rectangular widgets” which Google’s tool showed to have 400 exact monthly searches! My website got about ten daily visitors from the keyword “square widgets vs rectangular widgets” and my traffic was also increasing for similar keywords like: “What is the difference between the square and rectangular widget?”
Then I noticed that there was another company that sold something very similar to widgets, let’s call them blidgets. I created a page called “widgets vs blidgets” and once again started getting a nice amount of daily visitors to my page from that exact keyword. There was one very high end widget that we’ll call the Platinum Widget. It was the highest priced widget that existed, and I noticed people commenting on my site, “Do you think the Platinum Widget is worth the money?” So I created a page whose title was that exact question, and on the page I outlined the benefits of the Platinum Widget while also reminding users that the standard widgets could serve them nearly as well. Of course, I included lots of detailed photos, all of which I linked to the product page on Amazon.
The point of this article is to take a step back from your keyword research and look for obscure questions that people are likely to have about your product. Create a page focused on that question, and point a few backlinks to that page. When people type their questions into Google, your page is very likely to rank high up there in the SERP’s very quickly because your page title matches the visitor’s query exactly, or nearly exactly, and there is probably no competition for this type of long tail keyword!
Put yourself into your potential buyer’s shoes and think about questions that he or she might have about the product. Are there similar products on the market; would she want to understand the differences between the various models? Read the reviews of the product on Amazon to get ideas about the types of questions people are likely to have about your particular product.
The people who are researching the differences between two different model numbers are very likely to be people who have their wallet nearby and ready to hit that BUY button through your affiliate link! Although there might not be a lot of traffic for ‘this widget vs that widget’ terms, the traffic that does come to your site from these kinds of keywords are highly motivated to buy the item, rather than just being serial researchers! And those are the types of people who make our Amazon accounts say that lovely sound: KA-CHING!
Ellen Braun is a stay at home mother of three and affiliate marketer. She recently started offering Amazon affiliate marketing coaching services within a membership forum on her new site OnlineGelt.com/coaching. She looks forward to working with you! Below is her August Amazon screenshot. What is noteworthy is that she spent a lot of August abroad on vacation – here’s to the power of passive affiliate marketing!
We are
Wanda & Paula - 2 friends who successfully operate a number of online internet businesses. In fact we have over 20 blogs and websites making money. We have learnt a lot over the years particularly in the area of natural search, SEO
and traffic generation. If you want to make a living online then we are here to
help. 
