by Have you ever landed on an Amazon page with an out of stock or unavailable product? I’m sure that the answer is YES, it happens to us all the time.
In this article i’ll give you the reason why broken Amazon listings are a problem for Amazon Affiliates and how you can turn this into an advantage to outrank your competition and increase your earnings overnight.
This is going to be extra useful for those with established sites. The larger the site, the bigger the impact from this trick is going to be. Let’s roll.
Contents
Your Average Content Site’s Story ?
So you’ve made it. You’ve picked your niche, worked hard to create content, built backlinks.
Looks like you have a pretty tight passive Amazon Affiliate site, which is supposed to start bringing you income right after it goes out of the sandbox. Or even earlier.
What’s next?
You set the website into a half-passive mode, while producing some content once in a while and building a couple links here and there.
All nice and shiny.
Fast forward 9-12 months. Your site is out of the sandbox, it ranked and you are approaching the juicy top 3 spots.
You might still be (kind of) actively working on the site. Or most likely you’ve switched your focus to running another project.
Tell me right now if there is anyone who works on a single content site exclusively for more than a year. Hats off to you mate, I wish I had the perseverance to pull it off.
Time passed and you have reached a stable plateau.
The real money starts coming in.
Until one morning you wake up to an Amazon Associates dashboard where you see a decrease in your conversions.
You notice a downwards trajectory in the conversion rate, all the while clicks are pretty much at the same level.
You start wondering why is my site not performing as well as it used to…
The Problem ?
After spending some time on the website you notice that (among other things) a couple of the products you are linking out to have become unavailable, are out of stock or the pages have turned 404.
On top of that, you notice that your VA did not insert your affiliate tag correctly on one of the pages.
While the inattentive VA problem is manageable, you start to think about the broken links issue.
It’s not a problem, right? The readers are still going to Amazon.
If the product i’m linking out to is not there anymore, they’ll just buy something else.
I’m still getting paid…Well, are you?
Let’s think for a moment and try to understand your visitor a bit better.
What happens in your reader’s head when he/she lands on a product that is out of stock or unavailable? (let alone a 404 page)
He thinks “Well it looks like this item is not on Amazon”.
And his options are limited now: either to bounce off to another product on your list or bounce off to another review site.
Can you guess why? That’s because he has 2 other tabs with similar review sites open.
You are left to suffer dire consequences for this: The big G is gonna see users bouncing and will take action to lower you in the SERP’s.
What I’m trying to say here is that the average Joe does not see Amazon as a marketplace of thousands vendors fighting for the spotlight.
On the contrary, he sees Amazon as another supermarket.
And what do you do if you don’t find something at your local Trader Joe’s?
You just go to a Whole Foods across the street.
In your visitor’s head Amazon is just another supermarket, which does not have the product he needs. And your competitor is sitting there in another tab just 1 click away.
Hope that you are still with me, because this could be exactly the reason why your affiliate commissions is dropping. Or at least one if them.
An Amazon Mess You Are Left To Suffer For
This brings us to the following:
On one side of the equation we have users that see broken products and blame you for sending you there.
On the other side of the equation we have Amazon and its vendor platform. From what we see, it is a big messy mess up there.
Listings get renamed, moved and discontinued.
They vanish into the unknown leaving visitors wondering where they can find the products they are looking for.
Amazon should do something about it, right?
Well, forgive me for being blunt, but they seem to have gotten way too busy growing the most valued company in the world. All the while not giving a flying sh*t about minor details like these.
Please help me find an answer to this question:
Why should the affiliates of the largest affiliate program in the world suffer for Amazon not having its vendors in check?
Given our data, an average site has up to 10% of its links broken.
That’s 10% of your income flying out of the window every month just because Amazon is being Amazon all over again. (we all know how they treat affiliates)
So what can you do about it?
How Do I Recover Lost Amazon Commissions?
Option 1
You could leave everything as is and keep building more content or sites. Just like with anything, there are a lot of benefits and drawbacks to it.
Pros:
– More revenue streams
– Don’t spend time on details
Cons:
– Existing projects die out without attention
– Less revenue per project
– Starting a new site is so much harder than maintaining an existing one
What inevitably happen here is over time your bounce rate increases and Google moves you down the SERPs.
Your perfectly passive site starts losing money without regular care. Can you build sites faster than Google punishes you?
Option 2
You could do this yourself or hire a VA. Keep in mind that this is a soul-crushing manual work which you have to do every week or every month. This is the type of stuff I personally would go crazy from doing.
Pros:
– Not Losing Revenue
Cons:
– Soul-crushing manual work, which takes a lot of time
– Have to manage the process
– Have to create and maintain another Standard Operating Procedure
The main question you have to give an answer to here is:
How much effort is it going to cost you to be confident in every link every week? Let alone every day?
Not to mention diverting focus from creating amazing content (which is hard) and building great links (which is even harder).
So long as I’ve been offered this choice, I have always picked Option 2. Until I decided to do something about it.
A Better Way Of Doing Things
This is exactly why we have built this simple, yet powerful tool to keep track of your sites’ affiliate links and notify you when something goes wrong.
Just think about how much money you’ve wasted over the lifetime of your affiliate career.
Think about how much further you could have been if you knew about it and simply flipped the links when they went 404/unavailable.
Nowadays it looks like minor and major Google updates are rolling out every month.
The ever-changing landscape of content sites is becoming more competitive and the battle for number 1 is becoming more fierce than ever.
Utilize all the competitive advantage you can get your hands on to (get to and) stay number 1 in the SERPs.
