How is the new Amazon Update Affecting Your Business?

[runner21]

I'm curious to hear if how the change in Amazon's affiliate percentages are affecting or not affecting your business.

For me, It has made me up 1 of my projects on the back burner and worry more about sites that are not focused on Amazon monetization.

 

[CCarter]

If you are not the owner of the product/service then the internet will squeeze you dry sooner or later. When the middlemen are no longer necessary they'll get crushed.

An example is what the internet did to malls and retail. All of a sudden Brands could sell their products directly to consumers, cutting out the middleman and therefore increasing profits. Malls, places like Circuit City, Targets, Sears, and tons of places that were the go-to slowly became irrelevant. You could now shop online, and we see the results in the empty malls and storefronts.

The middlemen needed to reinvent themselves.

Amazon did it's part to clobber the little guys, but affiliates helped them do it along the way. And now that Amazon has consolidated power they no longer need the middlemen - affiliates. Those affiliates have to admit they were a part of clobbering of the malls and storefronts.

Have you noticed that a ton of SEOs are selling "courses" lately? Whatever cannot be found in BuSo's Digital Strategy Crash Course is all that's left. Now everyone is guruing for the last table scraps.

The only way to survived is to own a Brand - aka your product/service, or a serious online contender with an audience you built up overtime by gathering emails, mobile numbers, and other direct communication challenges, cause if you only rely on Google - they can update their Algo.

So Brand SEO... LOL sorry was trolling.

But in all seriousness you need to be a product/service owner or a Brand that has an audience so you are never reliant on too many outside forces.

Think about an SEO affiliate - they are battling for Google position, which can change at anytime and wipe them out, and also the commissions from whoever is paying them. However if that SEO affiliate started creating a brand like "TheWireCutter" - the audience would recognize that brand and go there for whatever. Google updates wouldn't impact them if they were growing their audience by collecting ways to directly communication with them.

It's why every time at SW when we write a blog post we email our whole userbase. Direct communicate gets the job done. I'm not going to wait for Google to index the content and send traffic overtime. Fuck that.

By using marketing tactics that in the long-term increase our Brand's reach through direct methods like email, newsletter, mobile, Intercom, etc you are able to survive a Google update or a commission drop. In the SEO affiliate example if commissions dropped for an Amazon product, you could have updated the page with different product with another affiliate program then send a mass blast to your userbase and got some immediate sales.

If some random executive can have a bad day and impact your bottomline and whether you can feed your family than you were already on thin ice in the first place.

You can start off playing on thin ice but you can't stay there forever. The ice WILL crack.

There are so many ways to survive onslaughts that you should see coming if you plan for "What if scenarios". The only constant in this universe is change.

 

[secretagentdad]

I'm curious to hear if how the change in Amazon's affiliate percentages are affecting or not affecting your business.

For me, It has made me up 1 of my projects on the back burner and worry more about sites that are not focused on Amazon monetization.

Super affiliates used to call him Big Jeff.
Now he is known forever as Small Jeff.

If you are not the owner of the product/service then the internet will squeeze you dry sooner or later. When the middlemen are no longer necessary they'll get crushed.

An example is what the internet need to malls and retail. All of a sudden Brands could sell their products directly to consumers, cutting out the middleman and therefore increasing profits. Malls, places like Circuit City, Targets, Sears, and tons of places that were the go-to slowly became irrelevant. You could now shop online, and we see the results in the empty malls and storefronts.

The middlemen needed to reinvent themselves.

Amazon did it's part to clobber the little guys, but affiliates helped them do it along the way. And now that Amazon has consolidated power they no longer need the middlemen - affiliates. Those affiliates have to admit they were a part of clobbering of the malls and storefronts.

Have you noticed that a ton of SEOs are selling "courses" lately? Whatever cannot be found in BuSo's Digital Strategy Crash Course is all that's left. Now everyone is guruing for the last table scrapes.

The only way to survived is to own a Brand - aka your product/service, or a serious online contender with an audience you built up overtime by gathering emails, mobile numbers, and other direct communication challenges, cause if you only rely on Google - they can update their Algo.

So Brand SEO... LOL sorry was trolling.

But in all seriousness you need to be a product/service owner or a Brand that has an audience so you are never reliant on too many outside forces.

Think about an SEO affiliate - they are battling for Google position, which can change at anytime and wipe them out, and also the commissions from whoever is paying them. However if that SEO affiliate started creating a brand like "TheWireCutter" - the audience would recognize that brand and go there for whatever. Google updates wouldn't impact them if they were growing their audience by collecting ways to directly communication with them.

It's why every time at SW when we write a blog post we email our whole userbase. Direct communicate gets the job done. I'm not going to wait for Google to index the content and send traffic overtime. Fuck that.

By using marketing tactics that in the long-term increase our Brand's reach through direct methods like email, newsletter, mobile, Intercom, etc you are able to survive a Google update or a commission drop. In the SEO affiliate example if commissions dropped for an Amazon product, you could have updated the page with different product with another affiliate program then send a mass blast to your userbase and got some immediate sales.

If some random executive can have a bad day and impact your bottomline and whether you can feed your family than you were already on thin ice in the first place.

You can start off playing on thin ice but you can't stay there forever. The ice WILL crack.

There are so many ways to survive onslaughts that you should see coming if you plan for "What if scenarios". The only constant in this universe is change.

I've met multiple people who's money making game plan is to unironically repackage the Buso Digital Strategy Crash Course as their own gurutard funnel or ebook and sell it.
Its getting harder to commit information arbitrage for money.

That said, I think you're way over-complicating branding.
You can brand just as easily with simplicity and consistency as you can with mass communication.
Brand media familiarity breeds a weird kind of contempt over time, especially outbound.
Yeah it is sorta better to over do it for network effects but I'm not sure it sticks well anyway.
Lots of seo industry brands including a lot of face branded gurutards are starting to experience pretty nasty brand perception issues from over communication.

 

[runner21]

"The only way to survived is to own a Brand - aka your product/service, or a serious online contender with an audience you built up overtime by gathering emails, mobile numbers, and other direct communication challenges, cause if you only rely on Google - they can update their Algo."

***

I completely agree! I have always thought it was crazy for everyone who was promoting Amazon products like crazy. I caved last year to create an Amazon site to sale in a year (Most of my sites are with direct brands & 1 with my own product) and this happened. I just laughed but its so unfortunate for those who have been sold on making a living with Amazon. It sucks! I have been hearing alot of sad stories with people who just lost their entire income.

 

[CCarter]

I've met multiple people who's money making game plan is to unironically repackage the Buso Digital Strategy Crash Course as their own gurutard funnel or ebook and sell it.

Actually there is literally someone that went and copy and pasted word for word the DSCC, removed all our names, and now is selling it as a course for $997. And people are buying it. LOL WTF.

Brand media familiarity breeds a weird kind of contempt over time, especially outbound.

For SEOs yeah. SEO are fucked in terms of brands. The reason is they will always think in terms of Google and SEO first - in fact a ton of those gurus are former Google spammers, so in terms of marketing they don't have their shit together. That's why they are horrible at real branding. I'm not sure how many SEO courses can be repackaged to the point the same audience.

So XYZ, former agency owner turned SEO guru comes out with a Blue Print or whatever - I mean let's cut the shit: SEO is not difficult. It's people that make it over-complicated. So underneath all that the audience members know this. I mean who the fuck is reading fucking eBooks about SEO? And Why? Cause it's a in fancy packaging? Here is an example reply I sent in PM to someone:

It’s pretty easy creating link bait content you know. Just put up a fucking graph of ANYTHING!

Right now unemployment is a hot topic, if you had trending graphic of unemployment in California cities for the last 12-36 months, then traffic leak that all over the internet where people are talking about these newspapers historical unemployment numbers, you’ll get thousands of visitors and in turn tons of authors will create backlinks to your content for you, including regular consumers/visitors.

You are trying to waste your money on trying to hire some guru to tell you shit that is literally free and all over this forum, FREE!:

Creating Compelling Content

Instead of wasting money on expensive shitty guestposts, use Fiverr or pay literally anyone that knows JavaScript $25, $50, or $100 to use D3 (examples at bottom of thread) or other JavaScript libraries to create the graphics for you.

Create unique content and the links come naturally. It’s not rocket surgery. Ask your questions in that thread and I’ll answer them there.

Or I could charge you $10k a month then copy and paste content that is already written on how to dominate SEO and generate traffic tomorrow in PMs with you weekly. Choice is yours.​

The person wrote back the response was a $100K response. There are no fucking SEO secrets, everything is literally already written out for free. But for some reason if I copied and pasted those same responses into an eBook and charged $997 and put my name on it, all of a sudden it's got more value. LOL OKAY. That's why people that only focus on SEO fail so hard - they want to pay for shit that's free.

Fine buy the clowns' eBooks, I have a feeling next year there will be a 2.0 version, and then a 3.0 version of the same dribble.

 

[runner21]

You can brand just as easily with simplicity and consistency as you can with mass communication.
Brand media familiarity breeds a weird kind of contempt over time, especially outbound.
Yeah it is sorta better to over do it for network effects but I'm not sure it sticks well anyway.
Lots of seo industry brands including a lot of face branded gurutards are starting to experience pretty nasty brand perception issues from over communication.

I agree with both of you on this and through my experience, consistency is very important!

 

[secretagentdad]

You're going to love my next fonix trick.

Nice post.

 

[Potatoe]

The rates for one of my sites were not impacted, but I'm still taking this as an opportunity to go after some higher volume informational keywords with lower buyer intent and to steer away from the hyper focused long tails. Also, I plopped the site into Ezoic so it's no longer monetized strictly with Amazon. The new keywords are still targeting people interested in this hobby, so I'll work on getting them onto mailing lists, social, and over to the posts that are monetized with Amazon. I'm also reaching out to smaller online retailers that sell these products to test the waters in case this category does get slashed, or more realistically when it gets slashed. As long as people still like to have fun, it should be okay.

I fired up a site in one of the impacted Amazon niches about two months ago, still moving forward with that since it didn't get completely trashed, and I only expected Amazon to account for maybe a third of the site's earnings. As long as people require sustenance, it should be okay.

Beyond that, I've had one client cancel an upcoming project due to Smol Joffrey cutting off the Bezos Bucks. Bigger picture, even with the virus, a lot of domain sales are being reported to end-users in the 1000-2000 range which suggests that people are still starting up new online ventures in the "ma and pa" ballpark, and I'm seeing a lot of new projects still being put into development first-hand just anecdotally. Higher-end names are moving too, but it seems more like panic selling to other domainers rather than to end-users. As long as private businesses are still allowed to exist, it should be okay.

 

[Sutra]

@CCarter would mind linking those examples you mentioned? Would love to try this out.

 

[CCarter]

@CCarter would mind linking those examples you mentioned? Would love to try this out.

Examples of what?

 

[Sutra]

Examples of what?

Oops, my bad, hah. Nevermind. Didn't realize there was already a link to the article in your post.