Several years ago, when I started dabbling in my own websites I found Amazon and Google to be the easiest place to start.
The idea was simple, open up an Amazon store with a whole bunch of items and then put Google Adsense ( ) on it!
I first looked at site scrapers, something that I would use to scrape the site and put the information into my database. I would then use that database to display one item per page. I would then have to build a way to search and a way to link all of the products so that Google could index them.
That was pretty complex and prone to A LOT of errors.
That is right about the time Amazon came out with something called AWS. AWS stood for Amazon Web Services. You could do was pull in Amazon data feeds directly instead of having to scrape their site. Even better, if you sent the visitor to Amazon to purchase the item, you’d make a commission. (4-5% usually).
Nice I thought! I built all the routines in PHP. They probably don’t work any more, but they are still out there for download.
So, between Amazon and Google, I was making a few hundred dollars a month. Hosting was less than $10 so it was almost all profit.
I later sold the site for about $5,000 on eBay.
Nowadays, you need to have some niches (like Pet Clothes or Big and Tall Pants) but the money is just as easy.
Even more so, you can now buy software for just a few bucks and use it to make your own store with very little programming. If you’re looking to get into the market, you should try the following.
What you need to do this
1. Pick a Niche
2. Get the Amazon WebStore Software
3.
4. Build your Store
The only other thing that you need to do is be patient and get people to link to your store. Some of those ways are comment in your niche’s forums, ask for links directly and Google for “<NICHE> Submit a Link” to see similar sites that ask for links.
