A few days back I posted on how I made my first sale on Amazon, in it I briefly explained some lessons that I learned during the last 6 months of link building and optimizing trying to gain targeted traffic to my affiliate link  (it was a review with an Amazon affiliate link in it).  In this post I will explain what I did in more detail.  It’s something so simple and I learnt this tip from this post on Warrior Forum.  A massive thanks goes to Warrior Forum user ThereIsAlwaysHOPE who wrote this post, it completely changed the way I look at keywords and finding the right sort of visitor.  I will be using the information from this post to tell you what I did.

For affiliate sales you really want traffic that is going to convert the best.  For this you need to find laser targeted keywords that are most likely to convert when a user comes to your pages.  Keywords can be split into 5 stages

[fancyheading]  Unaware > Aware > Interested > Desire > Purchase [/fancyheading]

Before I read this post I was going after ‘Aware’ and ‘Interested’ keywords.  I optimized my page and started link building to these keywords and waited to get onto Googles first page.  I was receiving good traffic to this page and was in position 8-15 (not good I know but I was getting traffic from these positions) for a number of keywords, the problem was they were all ‘Aware’ and ‘Interested’ keywords.  As you can see from the screenshot below I was getting clicks on my Amazon affiliate link but no clicks were converting….not good.

[image width=”500″ height=”” link=”https://outsprung.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/affiliate-program.amazon.com-2011-12-24-11-25-40.png” lightbox=”true” title=””]https://outsprung.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/affiliate-program.amazon.com-2011-12-24-11-25-40.png[/image]

After reading ThereIsAlwaysHOPE post I decided to stop targeting these ‘Aware’ and ‘Interested’ keywords, I knew that if I wanted to get my clicks to convert better I needed users who were in the ‘Desire’ or ‘Purchase’ phase and ready to buy the product, all they needed was some gentle swaying in the direction of purchasing the product.

Not surprisingly these keywords were easier to rank than the broader product keywords which meant that as I had been doing link building for 6 months to this one page (it had a pr3, higher than my home page) my page was ranking immediately in the top 15.  A few weeks I was top 10 and now for 5-6 buying keywords I am position 1-5.

The traffic is a lot smaller for these keywords, which is actually a good thing because it means there is a possibility my competition hasn’t optimize their page for these keywords which makes them ripe for the picking.  Most of these keywords receive 50-400 exact searches per month, more than 10 times less than what my original keywords were receiving.  But numbers don’t matter when you are looking for laser targeted keywords.  Any amount of searches per month is good, and they are easy to rank for, so don’t dismiss any keyword that falls into the desire or purchase phase.  They are all gold.

I couldn’t believe something this simple could change my bad luck I had been having with Amazon, I thought I would never make a sale as an affiliate but now I have dismissed that mental block and can now think about other products I can review.

Again a massive thanks has to go to ThereIsAlwaysHOPE for writing this amazing, eye-opening post.  He is giving away a great list of keywords as an example of how to optimize your keywords correctly.  You can get the spreadsheet here, all you need to do is enter your email.