If you sell 7 products then your commission goes up to 6% and as I found out today the commission is applied to the first 7 products too, for some reason I always thought you get 4% of the first 7 products and then 6% on the next 22 products and 6.5% on the next 100 products etc. I’m happy to be wrong in this case!

Another point to note is that this commission is reset each month so every month you start off on 4% and have to work your way back up to 7%. Oh yes, and the commission structure doesn’t apply to electronic goods, you earn a flat 4% regardless of how many you sell.

Phew, why do they insist on making it so complicated! Still, I’m chuffed to bits to see sales coming in from Amazon when I’m not even promoting my Amazon sites!

Still, as one online colleague put it, at least you’ve got an online income, so even though this month wasn’t quite as good as February, it’s still not too bad considering the number of hours I commit to it.

Traffic: 1,577 Unique Visitors

Active Subscribers: 924

PayPal Earnings: $876.77 (after PayPal fees)

AdSense: $13.60 – the Pound is still very weak, but doubled up from last month

Clickbank: $0 – got to make sure I get a sale next month.

Amazon: $0 – OK, bummer. Still nothing. What to do?!

All in all, I didn’t quite get to last months income, but this was mostly due to the delay in writing new articles and emailing my customers. If I had sent another email I’m sure I could have added another $150+ to the bottom line.

I also placed some AdSense banners on various sites that I own in an attempt to increase the AdSense income. This has started working and I hope that April brings even more money!

Clickbank, no sales this month, but I’m not going to get worried unless there are no sales next month. The CDR (client distribution requirement) is a real pain, they need 5 different credit card numbers from MasterCard and Visa, but I find that many people pay with PayPal which doesn’t count towards this distribution requirement. Even though I’ve made about 7 sales, I still need another 3 sales before they’ll even think about paying me!

Amazon. Oh Amazon. What do you have to do to earn a commission with these guys?! My niche stores have had hundreds of visitors, I’ve sent loads of referrals to the Amazon website and still nothing. Zip. I’m starting to think I might sack this as a potential income stream. I put less effort in to Clickbank yet make more money from it (if they ever pay me).

So, targets for April:

– Email customers at least 3 times with new article sets
– Increase AdSense income to $25
– Get another clickbank sale
– Continue building niche stores and get one Amazon sale

I have had a couple of niche Amazon stores up and running but at the moment they are not optimized nor are they making any money. I’ve sent a few clicks but nothing is converting at the moment – wrong product choice maybe?

Anyway, I’ve purchased a great guide to making money from Amazon and I’ll be following the advice and suggestions in that guide. The writer claims he’s making around $50-$100 a day from the Amazon affiliate program so I’m going to see what I can come up with – surely with all my years of experience I can at least match that!

My aim, as the name of the challenge suggests, is to give myself 30 weeks, starting from now, to make one niche amazon website each week. I want each website to earn $5 in commission each day. Do the maths (or math if you are from America) and that’s a target of $150 per day by the end of 30 weeks, or approximately $4,500 per month, purely from affiliate commission.

The budget for each site is not that large, tiny infact. I will spend $20 per website, $10 on the domain and the rest getting some social bookmarking done.

I’ll be keeping this blog updated each week to let you know overall traffic progress, earning progress and thoughts and opinions about creating Amazon niche sites. At the end of 30 weeks I want to be able to say ‘yes, creating Amazon niche sites works’ or ‘no, some people are able to make it click, but not me.’

Although I won’t be revealing my niches for free, I will let people buy my keyword analysis, competition analysis and niche profitability analysis for a small fee. All my research for a particular niche will be available, however you won’t know what the niche is until you buy it, I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot by creating too many competitors!

The past couple of weeks have been spent learning and perfecting the art of turning Wordpress in to a storefront, learning basic CSS and PHP in the process. Hmm, OK, copying and pasting CSS and PHP and seeing what happens

Right, I think that’s it, I’ll be back here shortly to update you on how it went this week. Oh yes, I had better put up my SEO analysis for the first niche as well!