My First Amazon Sale!

Background

I have been a member of Wealthy Affiliate for about 2 months now and my main niche website is devoted to child safety issues. I have been frantically adding content and tinkering with the look of my site, but thus far I have not managed to attract much organic traffic or make any sales.

A Change of Theme

My progress wasn't helped by the fact that I decided to change my theme and dramatically re-organise my site about 3-4 weeks ago - my wife thought that my previous techie-looking review site would be more appropriate for selling computer graphics cards than child safety products. So, for the first time ever I listened to my wife's good advice and changed it.

Google Timeout Punishment

With the birth of my new softer daddy-blog style site came a new sitemap and lots of deleted pages ... the Google spiders were not happy! They put me in timeout and have only recently started to let me edge back towards the internet playroom.

My content is slowly getting indexed and I now have a few page 2/3 rankings for such exciting things as "retractable baby gates" and "baby gate with pet door".

Success at Last ... well ... sort of!?

No matter how many times I explain to my wife that this is a marathon and not a sprint, she insists on asking me the same question every day: "have you sold anything yet?"

My answers have become more and more irritated and have fluctuated between "no darling, not yet" and "I haven't checked today" (a blatant lie obviously!)

But, today was different.

Before she could ask me the dreaded question again, I sent her a text message that read:

"I have quit my day job. Just sold a $38 pair of Chinese brass earrings on Amazon. Yeehah!"

Now, when I first observed this sale on my Amazon Affiliate account I thought that it must be a mistake since there are no earrings on my site - earnings have no proven safety benefits. But, then I remembered the good old 24 hour Amazon cookie that entitles you to commission on any purchases that your referrals make during that period (however bizarre and ugly they might be - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C8F5O5G)

So, I might not have sold any car seats or baby monitors yet but I am genuinely encouraged by this slightly bizarre development - it shows that my links work in the USA and, if i can make random sales like this with very little traffic, I ought to be able to make considerably more when my site limps fully out of the Google timeout corner.

A Final Observation

When I had initially thought about the likely profitability of my site, I had only factored in sales of child safety products. This first sale shows that if you can get people to click on your affiliate links, you can make money even if they don't actually go on to buy anything related to your niche.

I remain optimistic despite my rather modest $1.52 commission and I hope to be able to share some more lucrative successes in the future.