Hello and welcome, my name is Charles Joyner and I have been an Amazon Affiliate Publisher for about two years. However, I have been in software for over 25 years.
Yes I had a 56 baud modem and thought “You got mail!” was the future.
Please take a read, I wanted to show why I created Linkmoney with some hard facts and numbers. This is a kind of a before and after story, with a winter tale in the middle.
I began with an Amazon Affiliate site that was struggling to get 1,000 pageviews a week and within a year took the site to over 65,000 page views per month.
How I created traffic growth- the short version
I got a break, The Texas Freeze
That big jump in February 2021 (seen above) was when Texas froze and I happened to have an article about if toilets will freeze. That week my affiliate site jumped to 14,245 pageviews.
As a Texan, I can tell you- toilets do freeze when the ice age shows up suddenly, and then the electricity goes out for over a week.
I was lucky to have that article, but it let me know the revenue I could look forward to when I hit my goal of over 50,000 page views per month.
That goal was broken in August 2021 at 50,248 pageviews.
Hard work, good content, and SEO increased traffic substantially
To get this increase in traffic, I studied SEO, read everything I could read, and experimented with existing content. I also bought Semrush and took a deep dive into that system.
I created a team of writers and what I call “editors” and trained them in what I call my “mojo”. This is basically the formula I came up with for great SEO and Google Rankings.
I used Airtable to manage the team and tasks. I say “used”, I use Airtable for everything.
It always starts out with good content. Good ingredients make good things.
As my revenue went up, I created more and more content.
I created two teams for content growth
Writers create content and my editors post the content (including other things like internal and external links, formatting, getting Smiley faces for Yoast, and several other things I do for each article). At one time my writer team consisted of 9 writers.
I also purchased great SEO content from Human Proof Designs and Niche Website Builders for a content boost.
I categorized content into two main groups
Between the two teams, a lot of content was going up on the site. I split my content 50/50 between “Informational and “Buyer’s Guides”.
Informational articles are usually things like “How To” and “Questions Answered” types of content.
Buyers Guides are like “The Best” and “Our Picks” types of content.
My Buyers Guide articles link to Amazon and many times even the Informational articles can have Amazon links too- if it fits.
It is not uncommon for a Buyers Guide article to have over 10 Amazon Affiliate links on it, sometimes way more.
I split the content 50/50 so I could get both good Ad Revenue and Amazon commissions.
We increased the site content- a lot
By about July 2021, my article count had gone from about 180 articles (or posts) to over 500. Our goal was 1,000 articles on the site.
I noticed a problem in Amazon revenue growth
When my traffic started to increase, I began to dive into the numbers and analytics. It was fun to go on to Google Analytics every day and look at the traffic. For the first time, I could actually see “Active Users”.
What I noticed was my ad revenue was increasing steadily with the traffic increase, while my Amazon revenue was not.
A little bit later I set up an event on Google Analytics to check my Amazon conversions, and I could now see that people were going to Amazon from the website.
So traffic from my website was converting to Amazon.
But the increased Amazon revenue was not going up as steadily as my Ad revenue. By the way, at the time I was using Ezoic for ads. Now I use Mediavine.
I started to look deeper into Amazon conversions
I began to look around and dove into my Amazon Affiliate links. What I found blew me away.
I could see from my Amazon Associates dashboard “Order Report” that I was getting:
Product Link Clicks– the number of clicks to Amazon that takes a visitor from your Web site to the Amazon.com detail page of a product you’ve specifically chosen.
Ordered Through Product Links- Number of items matching the title in the left-hand column that were targeted in a direct link and ordered by a customer.
Shipped Items– Items that had been shipped to the consumer.
Product Link Conversion– This is the percentage of product link clicks that resulted in an order for the item targeted in the direct link. If the item has “N/A” next to it, it means that the order was not made on the product link and the customer either came in on an indirect link or a direct link for a different product.
Here is a graph of my Amazon Associates account showing my clicks, ordered items, shipped items, and conversions prior to Linkmoney:
But this did not match up to my events on Google Analytics.
There was a problem with my Amazon Affiliate links
I started to dig in and take a look at my Amazon Affiliate links on my site. Obviously, people were clicking to Amazon from my site, but I was not getting the credit.
After some time, I discovered several issues with my affiliate links on just a few articles- maybe 20 or so:
Links that went to places other than Amazon.
Incorrect or missing Amazon store codes.
Store codes that were not mine.
Completely broken Amazon links.
And many others.
This mess was going to take a team to fix
How did all these issues get on my site? I know this, there were people in and out of my WordPress site and at the time I chalked it off as human errors. I had no idea how bad it really was though.
At this point, it was a mess and I had literally thousands of links on my site.
I set up a team to go through every single page and check every single link. It was a huge undertaking, cost a lot, took a lot of time, and I realized that it would be almost impossible to do.
It is hard for a human to do this kind of work. Staring at text and links, just makes your brain melt.
Take a look at this article “What is Linkmoney” which talks about the manual costs, time, and effort to fix my affiliate links.
Why I made Linkmoney and its Smart A.I.
This mess is why I made Linkmoney. I knew that what I really needed was a smart A.I. that could find all the issues.
Smart A.I. never gets tired and doesn’t make mistakes. Plus it works about 10,000 times faster than humans.
The Linkmoney pre-Alpha phase
Since about 1996, I have been working with Stephen Wilkinson, a friend, and partner. Since 2008, we have been working together as company owners. He is an incredibly awesome partner.
I talk to him frequently and would let him know the issues I was having.
Soon after discovering all the issues, we built a Linkmoney prototype. That is actually a super kind description to call it that. However, it worked.
The Linkmoney pre-alpha was set up to find all my Amazon Affiliate links on my site and look to see that my Amazon store code was in every link.
Soon after we added several other known issues to look for.
Linkmoney got smarter
The next step, now that we knew we could find all the issues on my site that were holding back my Amazon revenue, was to write A.I. that understood what to fix and what to report.
Some things we knew that we wanted the A.I. to fix. Others, I would want to know about and be able to fix myself.
After lots of coding and testing on a staging site we had set up, we finally got Linkmoney to find, fix and report all the issues on my affiliate site.
I finally ran Linkmoney on my production site. Afterward, I noticed there were thousands of issues, some minor, some major on my site.
It was hard to believe.
Here is what my Google Analytics event looked like after Linkmoney. The event below tracks clicks to Amazon:
That is an actual screenshot. See that mountain on the right? My site had tons of bad affiliate links all over the place that were now fixed.
The next step was to check Amazon Central and take a look at my “clicks to Amazon”. Again, I saw a huge uptick in clicks.
Here is my Amazon Affiliate revenue. Again, the same increase was seen.
My Amazon Ordered items also increased.
The Linkmoney prototype worked. Everything, all stats, went up.
Why can you make money instantly with Linkmoney?
This is actually quite simple to understand, I already had traffic coming to my site. I was just not getting credit for my Amazon traffic.
So now that I was getting credit for the traffic to Amazon, and my links were fixed, my Amazon revenue increase was immediate.
When we say Linkmoney will make you money the next day, this is what we mean.
If you do it the hard way, with people, it definitely will not be instant. Linkmoney only takes a few minutes, compared to a team that could take weeks.
We want to share Linkmoney with you
Linkmoney worked so well, we knew we needed to share it with you. We spent the next several months turning Linkmoney into a great tool for your Amazon Affiliate website.
It does, even more today because as we began to build it, we started to find other issues that cause revenue loss to Amazon Affiliate Marketers.
Linkmoney comes in 4 plans. From “do it yourself”, to full A.I. up to ten sites.
It is our hope you give Linkmoney a try. After all, you work hard and put in your money and time to be an Amazon Affiliate Publisher. You might as well get every penny of Amazon commission.
