It took me about 5 months before I made my first sale as an Amazon affiliate. Once I did made that first sale, I was completely hooked.
I took the steps that I did on my first website and repeated it over and over again. But I soon figured out that not everything worked as well as my very first website. Let me show you the things that worked extremely well, and what was an epic failure.
My Epic Failures
When someone is telling you that they have good news and they have bad news, which one do you prefer to hear first. You always start with the bad news of course. Well here is the bad news that I learned the hard way as an Amazon affiliate. Not every niche that you select are always profitable. Sometimes you fall flat on your face. I am no exception in that.
My very first failure as an Amazon affiliate started with one of the first three sites that I made. I was working through a course where you could email your results to your instructor and then he gave you feedback on your website. Well, I got greedy, so instead of creating just one website I decided to create three.
Two of the three websites I made were obvious for me because they were promoting products that I had a first hand experience with. The last website I picked because my friends raved about the product. To buttress what my friends were saying, one day I found myself in a shopping mall, and I passed by the department that was selling this product and it was fully packed with women buying this one product. That is how I chose to sell this nice.
Amazon Niche Epic Failure #1: Kitchen Stand Mixers
It is very rare to walk into a house and not see a stand mixer sitting on the kitchen shelf. When you look on Amazon for the Kitchen-Aid, stand mixers have about 2,500+ customer reviews.
Remember that the rule of thumb is Amazon will sell 50 products for every single customer review. 2,500 total Amazon customer reviews x 50 = 125,000 products. That is really a lot of stand mixers that are being sold on Amazon!
The absolute problem with this niche is that every person and their brother and sister and mother and aunt and grandmother are already promoting it. There was simply nothing that I could ever do to get my website ranked well enough in the top 100 for any keyword possible.
Amazon Niche Epic Failure #2: Baby Diapers
This niche started out following after some extremely logical thinking on my part. People have babies. Regardless of how the current economy is doing. So I thought that diapers is an evergreen niche which will make you good money every single month of the year.
If you have ever experienced a baby then you know that they go through an humungous amount of diapers every week. Plus they are buying them like once or twice a month for a few years. How can you fail with such a market with an incredible high demand?
Well trust me, you can fail worse than you can with kitchen stand mixers. I NEVER got ranked anywhere near the top 500 for diapers so I dropped this niche like a hot potato.
Amazon Niche Epic Failure #3: Bike Carriers
This niche started out quite well for me, but eventually dried up. Some of my acquaintances are considered to be very athletic. They do 10k, half-marathon and tri-athlons all the time. They always talk about the different bike carriers they have on their cars, vans and SUVs. This was a pretty logical niche for me to enter.
For a while I was generating some decent income from this nice. Although my website was ranking for the lesser known bike carriers, once a potential customer found my site they could also read about other carriers and purchase those. I am not sure which Google update it was but this site literally dried up overnight. In fact I did not make a single sale anymore from this site in over 6 months so I dropped it.
My Epic Successes
Now for the good news! I have three different niches that have always been my best performing profit makers. I can pretty much always count on these websites without any fail each and every month. If you are an Amazon affiliate, you definitely want to create sites like these that are very, very reliable. I hope, of course, that you will also find your own profitable niches.
Here are my 3 most successful Amazon affiliate niches:
Successful Amazon niche #3
camping furniture. Yes, Really! This niche started out as an evolution of my (previous) climbing passion. I started with a silly website where I was promoting tents. It did not really do so well at first, so I moved on to promoting sleeping bags. Over time this transitioned into a winning niche and that is camp furniture.
Regardless of whether you go car camping or camping over night by carrying your own gear, you always need your furniture at your camp site. My websites promotes several items like water purification system, camp chairs, camp stoves, games, tables, hammocks, plates, utensils and even Frisbees.
Yes, this actually means that I am selling lots of low priced items. But its the quantity that counts here. When people are planning to go camping, they will buy Nalgene bottles, utensils, sunscreen, bug spray, water purification tables, hammock, couple of chairs, table and water bottles. So when people are planning to go camping, it is not unusual that they end up buying multiple items for their adventures. Since they get redirected to Amazon from my link, I get a commission for all those items that they purchase! Plus, this really helps to move me up to a higher commission brackets each and every month.
Successful Amazon niche #2
My second niche is very seasonal and will only generate revenue during a few months of the year. But the products that people are buying are mostly considered to be pretty expensive products that they MUST BUY. That is probably why this niche has always been so successful for me. This winning niche are snow blowers.
These products are only purchased by people (unfortunate enough) to live in much colder climates. So it is limited to mostly only half of the US. Toys-For-Big-Boys like automated snow blowers which you simply plug in and just push it like a lawn mower are extremely much in demand in the Northern part of the US. I am even selling those ridiculously oversized snow shovels, and they sell very well!
At the beginning of the winter season every year I see a run on people that are purchasing snow blowers. The best thing for me is when a big blizzard happened or when there is a huge snow fall. My sales literally double overnight on my website. Every time the weather channel reports that there will be up to 12 inches of snow falling somewhere, I cheer! Because that means money in my pocket.
The tradeoff is that I sell absolutely nothing during the summer months on this website. But when I do generate sales it is normally a lot of them and they are always on pretty expensive products. Most of my sites generate 60% of their income from the period between Thanksgiving to Christmas. This website provides me a very steady stream of income at Christmas, which always is very nice.
Successful Amazon niche #1
This website was something that I got into similar to the camp furniture website. It was pretty much an offshoot of my previous climbing passion. I had a site that was promoting backpacks that hikers and climbers can use. I started to realise that people were clicking thru to Amazon from a backpack that I had reviewed, but that they actually were buying other backpacks in a different category that I was not promoting at that time. Well, this happened enough times before I decided to shift gear and start promoting that product.
That specific niche is children’s backpacks. These are backpacks that they can wear to school. Children’s backpacks truly evolved into an new art form the last few years. You have backpacks with Hello Kitty, action figures to many amazing graphic designs. Kids always seem to want a backpack with the latest fad on it to “fit in”. Since fads change rapidly, they will sometimes buy multiple backpacks during the year same school year.
I do make many sales on this one website every month of the year so it is almost evergreen. Most of my sales are made during the months of June, July and August as people are buying items they need for the start of the school year. This provides me with a good income during the slower summer months. It is really nice to receive this income before the Christmas income starts to arrive, and the sales of my snow blowers start to rise!
Many Lessons Learned
As you can see from my experience with different niches, not every single path you will follow has a pot of gold waiting at the end. Sometimes the path will lead you to a dead end. The best thing that you can do is ALWAYS to evaluate what is working and especially what is not working, and make the appropriate changes. I do not have children so I would have NEVER have thought about promoting things like children’s backpacks. Luckily I kept tweaking my websites that I had created until I found that pot of gold.
If you really want it, STICK TO IT!.
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