If you once had a booming Amazon niche site that doesn’t seem to be doing so well anymore, you might have passed it off as low traffic or seasonality. But there could be a really easy fix that can instantly boost your amazon affiliate income. Keep reading to see how I increased earnings overnight.
Why are my Amazon sales down?
Recently, I had noticed my Amazon earnings weren’t doing so well compared to last year, despite traffic being even higher. I accepted due to “seasonality”, but something didn’t quite seem right especially since traffic was up.
I took a further peek at my links and noticed some of them were going to outdated products! Yes, I had broken Amazon links on my affiliate site. I had simply neglected my site for too long and was most likely losing revenue from it.
I quickly went to work, going through each page one by one. It was a little time consuming, but thankfully I had just heard about a cool tool called AMZ Watcher to do most of the heavy work for me.
Introducing AMZ Watcher
AMZ Watcher is an online tool that finds broken Amazon links on your site that point to unavailable product pages (check out the AMZ Watcher site). It even finds 404s and Amazon links that don’t have any IDs. Quite handy!
Setting up AMZ Watcher was really easy. You can use a free trial right away and don’t need to enter any credit card information. So if you just want to check your links without paying, you can. Go ahead and set up a free trial here.
Once you start running AMZ Watcher, it can take a little bit to generate the report. I have less than 100 pages on my site and it took over 14 minutes to run. If you are running a report on your own site, just be patient and trust that it’s working.
Here’s the final report. Turns out, I had 35 Amazon links pointing to unavailable pages! And that was after I had already fixed about a dozen of them.
The on-page report is only so helpful because it doesn’t tell you what pages the broken links are on, but you can export all the data to excel and find out there. And if you wanted, you could send it your VA to fix.
What’s really cool is you can set AMZ Watcher to run automatically on a schedule and email you with the results, so you don’t have to remember to run reports.
After I had fixed my broken links, I started seeing a LOT more sales from the products I was promoting. As you can see, even though the clicks remained steady, the number of orders and earning increased!
The importance of maintaining your site
The biggest lessons here? Don’t be lazy!
If you have a site that needs minimal maintenance, don’t let it go too long without making sure everything is updated, including Amazon links. Not fixing my Amazon links has cost me thousands of dollars.
What should you be doing specifically?
- Always link to the latest products models as older models will no longer be sold
- Periodically check your Amazon links to make sure they are correct
Sometimes a particular product would be discontinued all together. In this case, it’s you can find a close replacement, either by simply swapping out links or referring to the newer product on your page.
Using a tool like AMZ Watcher can help a lot. Give it a try!
Interested in trying out AMZ Watcher? Try a free trial at AMZ Watcher
Hey Ben, that’s a really cool idea, thanks for letting us know about it. I’m going to check my sites now and see what’s broken!
Thanks Mike! Yeah, it will be even more useful on larger sites for sure. Hope it helps!