One way to work smarter is to set up review blogs that make money for you even while you sleep. One of my 2011 goals is to significantly increase my monthly Amazon earnings so that I can earn money even when I am not actively working on it. This will require a lot of up front work. But once it’s going strong then I can ease up a bit and still collect a NICE monthly income.

2010 was the first year that I’ve been an Associate for Amazon. I dismissed the idea for years hearing about how low their commissions were.

But in early 2010 when I was setting up my Adsense sites I put some links to Amazon on my pages and to my surprise I  immediately got several sales.

I was pretty much hooked after that! It just seems too easy. People love to buy from Amazon and they usually buy more than the products you are promoting.

Unfortunately, my earnings have been all over the place and this is because I have been spreading myself thin working on too many projects at once. December earnings were a sad $87! But what can I really expect if I’m not being consistent in my efforts??

But NO more! I will put in the work so I can earn the dough! Especially, when I know there are people making a full time living on Amazon sales alone (see Chris Guthrie and the ladies over at Affiliate Blog Online).

The first step in this challenge (of course, join me if you like) is to assess what I have going on.

Over the past year, I’ve built well over 30 blogs in many different niches and not-so-quickly realized that this is not the path I wanted to take. Once I decided this was not the path I wanted to take, I sold over half of them and a couple I just let go. Now with roughly 8-10 (8 for sure, 2 are up in the air) I feel I can take each one step by step to earning much more.

First, I’m going to follow the advice at Affiliate Online Blog that says to assess your pages not blogs. They also say you only need a handful of pages to make a full time living with Amazon.

In fact they say that you only need ONE good review to make great money!  That makes me feel much better since I am so scatterbrained sometimes! 🙂 Update: I won a copy of the Amazonian Profit Plan! So I’ll be using this strategy for the challenge.

So the overall plan will be to:

1. Assess what I have going on right now. Don’t build any more blogs or product reviews until I get what I already have working for me.

I’m going to pick 5 product reviews that I have already created (as long as they meet the criteria in the APP) to focus on and that’s it!!! I will sooo try anyway…

2. Tweak and rework pages.

3. Backlink like crazy until I reach #1 spot for my main keyword (then move on to the next page and do the same thing). Ideally it would be great to have each product review ranking for several keywords.

So, right now I’m in assessment mode. One thing I’m finding as I’m going through everything is that I created most of my Amazon blogs prior to the change Google made that updated the keyword tool. Sooo the keywords I am ranking for or targeting are not good keywords any more. They have really low volumes! 🙁 Now I have to go back and rework my pages with better keywords.

Okay, so what’s the Amazon Challenge?

To create $5K/mo by June 2011.

Typing that felt scary! But I did it anyway!