Sorry, no. Good luck and work hard.

Hi there, what you describe above certainly does work. You’ll see on my site that if I have a post on any given topic I may have snuck in a few Amazon links to related products, that works great. It’s totally random that’s pretty useless. I think what would work better though was if you created a best kitesurfing bag post, and did it all right, with a comparison table etc. Presuming of course that this is a keyword that will work for you. You need to be careful with affiliate links though, Google doesn’t like sites that are just chock-a-block with affiliate links, it’s one of many ranking factors. Also look at your site speed, speed is a ranking factor and also it seems that the faster my site gets the more affiliate revenue is generated. Yes things will get to the top faster if it’s a clearer playing field. ie. not much quality competition, lower competitiveness score, but I’d still figure on 6 months to a year. It would be better if you could conjure up some quality backlinks, which I’m guilty of never doing. Some of my posts getting to the top now are 5 years old, I did once have one that got to number 1 within 24 hours. It depends on search volume a lot, Google needs a big enough test volume of readers liking your content. Also get as many social shares on your post as you can, also a ranking factor. Adsense doesn’t pay brilliantly but some money is always better than no money. Certainly give this other agency a go if you can, I don’t know anything about them, I went straight to Mediavine. I have the ad volume turned right down on my affiliate sales pages, that seems to work too. And try sticking a few Amazon links on Facebook, that can also work. Best of luck!

Just been reading a lot of your blogging articles in the past few days, and I really like your writing style. It’s straight to the point, not pushy and very experience based, very refreshing these days!

I started a blog (extreme sports & travel) with my partner just over a year ago, and are now seeing about 12k PV a month. We’ve been trying quite a few monetization styles, mostly travel oriented affiliate marketing (hotelscombined, 12go.asia etc…), but the only thing really working for us right now is a product review on a very technical product within our sports niche. (not from amazon, straight with the brand)

So we’ve decided to try to replicate that by focusing all our efforts on product reviews within our niche, signed up on amazon associates and already written a few reviews, but we’ve noticed that product reviews usually take an awful time to get up the rankings.

(Do smaller keyword volume/competition means less time needed to reach ranking?)

So, I’ve decided to try to add some of these super relevant amazon products as simple ads through related content, thinking that if it works for display ads, why not affiliate products, but is that really a good idea?

Because since reading about your experience with adsense and especially advanced ads, I’m wondering whether to just scrap the manually placed amazon ads for Adsense instead, or possibly Ezoic, a smaller entry Mediavine. I just can’t seem to grasp which direction would be the smartest right now.

You say that placing amazon ads randomly in content doesn’t work right? What if they’re extremely well targeted? a kitesurfing travel bag in a kitesurfing destinations post for example?

It’s all about how to maximize our revenue with the traffic we currently have right now. I kept hearing so far that Adsense was just not worth it for small sites, but I’m starting to question things again.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Whoa, this is helpful. Thank you, Alyson. I think maybe I was in the text editor field.

Liz