20.05.2022, Vladislava

Link building for Amazon affiliate site - 5 times more traffic in 4 months (updated)

The customer's site is an Amazon affiliate program, and the main product groups are specialized hunting and fishing equipment. The target audience is mostly hunters from the US, Canada, and Australia.

Task definition

The client approached Link-Stream in December 2017 for link building for their Amazon affiliate site. The main goal of the project was to get real conversions to the CA and improve the link profile. Link builders from another company had previously worked with the site, but the client was not satisfied with the quality of the donors/texts.

Features of the market

In terms of link building and crowdsourcing this niche is one of the most difficult. 70% of the thematic forums are closed from outside users or go there by invites. A separate feature of registration on sites for hunting and fishing - the moderator in 20% of cases personally calls and communicates with the potential member of the community. This restriction on communication is especially developed in the U.S., where hunting permits are not issued in all states - thus moderators of sites relieve themselves of the responsibility for encouraging illegal hunting residents from "banned" states. In addition, the slang of hunters and fishermen is often not available even to native speakers, which makes it difficult from the start.

Link building strategy

The site owner is an SEO specialist, so he addressed specific requirements for the quality of donors and texts. Among the basic requirements:

  • number of links per month - from 100 (natural growth of unique donors prior to link buildings did not occur)
  • the donor must have at least 100 referring domains on Ahrefs
  • type of links - any (dofollow - advantage) for the diversity of the link profile; in popular discussions you can leave text links (if active links can not be placed
  • the age of discussion on the sites should not exceed 6 months (for some of the topics of narrow-group sites, this is an adequate period)
  • type of site - forums, Q&A sites, blogs (it was allowed to post comments under topical articles)
  • geography - based on geography of CA

Difficulties encountered

  1. Selection of sites. The parameters of donors for link building - quite adequate, but the thematic sites are usually broken down by state or even city, which means that not all have 100 referring domains, but there is CA. Balanced with this rule in consultation with the client.

  1. Registration on the donor sites. In addition to the difficulties with the registration process itself, said in the block Features of the market, we were faced with the fact that the ban of accounts occurs instantly at the slightest "blunder" from the linkbuilder, even if the message is not left for advertising, but for "pumping" account. It is also useless to post links from accounts that were "pumped" 10 or more posts at once - usually accounts should be left for 7-10 days to put 1 link.

  2.  It is very critical to describe on 40% of the forums all the weapons the account owns and hunting regions - had to spend time researching the allowed hunting seasons in the US (and don't forget that hunting is done by season:)
  1. Writing. Agree, it is much easier to write comments on cat food or hotel vacations:) When writing the texts faced "undeserved" bans accounts for the very reason that we were not prepared for so many specific terms. For example, a deer is not a deer, but a dolar.

Relevant forum links
Relevant forum links
We place only links that help to qualitatively dilute the link profile. "Light" links are the best help for site's positions. Manual placement

Results

  1. As expected, there has been a steady growth of unique donors in the link profile,

    and donors - quite good (site analysis can be seen in Google sheet).
  1. Noticed a growth in position for the key queries that we used as anchors.

  1. We got real hits on the links, which was reflected in the traffic. 

Would you like to get the same results for your projects? Contact us :)