by After completing 175 website transactions, I have learned that one of the best easy wins for increasing the earnings and value of a site you acquire is checking the Amazon affiliate links for broken links and unavailable products. The increase in earnings by fixing these issues can result in a quick boost in the website valuation, which is ideal when flipping the site quickly for a profit or increasing monthly cash flow if you plan to buy and hold.
My go-to tool for this is AMZWatcher because it is great for checking for broken Amazon affiliate links quickly and it can uncover if a site is under-monetized with opportunities for quick wins to increase earnings immediately.
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3 Easy Wins with AMZWatcher When Buying Websites
Find Broken Amazon Affiliate Links
When buying a site on Flippa or another marketplace, I like to use AMZWatcher to scan an entire website to see if the seller has a lot of broken Amazon affiliate links or links to products that are no longer available. This presents a great opportunity to increase the earnings right away and could justify bidding higher than other buyers at auction when considering the upside potential.
There could be hundreds of links on a site that are going to products that are unavailable which could be costing the site hundreds of dollars per month in lost earnings. For every $100 increase in monthly earnings by fixing broken affiliate links, there is a $3,500 increase in the site’s valuation (assuming a 35x multiple).
For example, I used AMZWatcher to scan a site that we are brokering over at The Website Flip. According to the AMZWatcher report, 240 of the links were going to products that are unavailable on Amazon and 12 links were going to 404 pages. These broken links account for over 22% of all Amazon affiliate links so more than 1 in 5 Amazon links were sending users to a page where that will probably not result in a sale. It’s earning over $1,900 per month, despite these broken affiliate links so fixing these broken links could easily put the earnings over $2,000 per month or more.
Knowing that there is a great opportunity to increase revenue quickly by fixing these broken affiliate links can justify paying the asking price and it can help you reach the break-even point much faster.
When sites are offered for sale on marketplaces like Flippa, Motion Invest, and Empire Flippers, you can also check AMZWatcher’s proprietary “Site Health” score and a low score can indicate a quick win opportunity for fixing broken Amazon links.
With the 20,000 credits per month with the Portfolio pricing plan you could scan several sites per month to look for sites that haven’t had the time or resources to make sure all the affiliate links are up to date and in stock. A significant number of sellers report the reason they are selling is they do not have enough time to work on the site and they may have not had time to keep all the affiliate links up to date.
Find New Affiliate Programs
Another easy win is to use AMZWatcher to identify affiliate programs that offer a better commission rate than Amazon.com (especially for categories that earn a small percentage with Amazon Associates).
One of the best ways to improve the profitability of a niche website that is monetizing with affiliate programs is to identify opportunities to replace Amazon affiliate links with higher earning affiliate programs.
AMZWatcher provides alternative affiliate programs recommendations for every Amazon product link in their report (when the “Find Amazon Alternatives” option is selected). It also displays the difference in commissions percentage for every product based on the affiliate program. I recommend replacing Amazon whenever you can and you can hire a VA to help you if you don’t have time. Amazon Associates accounts for just 20% of my revenue across my portfolio of websites because I seek out alternative affiliate programs to maximize commission rates.
Scan Competitors to See What Products They are Promoting
Successful niche site builders are always learning from what is working on other sites. One great source of competitor data is using Ahrefs to find the top traffic pages of other sites in your niche. Since you already know these pages earn good traffic, publishing better content on the same topic gives you a great chance of increasing traffic.
Similarly, you can check which Amazon products are being promoted by a successful site as these could be good candidates of products that you could promote as well by adding them to existing pages or even publishing new product review pages around those products.
A useful feature of AMZWatcher is that it provides the number of pages on the site that are linking to a specific product. If you see that a competitor is promoting a specific product on several of their pages, this might be a profitable product that you can consider adding to your site.
Bonus: Quickly Calculate the Profitability of a Niche You are Considering
One of the most important decisions when starting a niche site from scratch is determining which niche or topic to focus on.
The Amazon Affiliate Earning Calculator is a free tool provided by AMZWatcher that estimates how much you could earn based on the niche you select.
For example, if you choose the niche of video game consoles with a 1% Amazon commission rate, you would need approximately 248,000 site visitors per month just to make $1,000 per month. However, if you choose a niche like kitchen products with a 4.5% Amazon commission rate, you would only need about 55,000 site visitors per month to make $1,000 per month.
Advanced Website Flipping Strategy using AMZWatcher
As a website buyer, you are able to pay a higher multiple if you know that you can quickly increase earnings with quick wins like fixing hundreds of broken Amazon affiliate links.
I recommend running the AMZWatcher report on all potential sites to see if there is the opportunity to fix hundreds of Amazon affiliate links. This gives you the opportunity to pay a higher multiple on website auction sites like Flippa or to justify buying a site with a fixed price at a high multiple on a marketplace like Empire Flippers.
The data from the AMZWatcher report gives you an advantage over other site buyers who are basing their bidding strategy on the current price without considering the upside potential.
Wrap Up
Niche site builders can increase their revenue and profits with automated tools like AMZWatcher. Even a small increase can add thousands to the website valuation when multiplied by the average sales multiple of 30-40 times monthly earnings and justify buying a site because you know that you can increase the value quickly.
After over a decade in the website flipping space and over $440,000 in transactions on Flippa, I have observed that fixing broken or out of stock Amazon affiliate links is one of the top missed opportunities where buyers can immediately add thousands of dollars of value to an asset with just a few hours of work. This is why I think AMZWatcher is an essential tool in the toolbelt of the effective website flipper or niche site builder.
