Last Updated on February 24, 2021 by Content Team
If you are thinking of starting an Amazon affiliate site (Amazon Associate), here are some examples of sites in different niches with high traffic and affiliate earnings. Some of the examples are huge, corporate owned websites, while others are small niche sites doing a nice monthly revenue from their traffic.
[Update January 2021 – Lots of affiliate websites got hit during the December core update, many of the sites below will have been hit hard. Before starting a new site, look at all the site that got a boost in December 2020 and figure out why.]
This is a growing list. I’ll keep adding sites as I come across them as I research different niches to enter myself. If you have some good examples, drop them into the comments and let others know why you like them or anything they are doing differently from competitors.
*I started writing this post ages ago so some stats/traffic may be different now, especially after recent Google algo changes
Contents
General Huge Multi-Category Sites
Website: consumersearch.com
Niche: General
Site has been bought twice, initially by About.com for $33 million. Site has a very basic look and feel but lots of quality content, but unfortunately has never fully recovered from it’s peak. It must have been doing 5M+ uniques back in 2011 with multi-million affiliate commissions.
View this page to see how they build out categories – http://www.consumersearch.com/treadmills
Website: Bestproducts.com
Niche: General
Owned by Hearst Media, who also own magazines/websites such as Cosmopolitan and Esquire. This site has already been under the scrutiny of SEOs who have outed for using footer links from their other sites.
Here is a sampling of their SEO wizardry in action:
Esquire.com – “Product Reviews” links to the homepage
PopularMechanics.com – “Products Reviews” links to their Tech category
Elle.com – “Beauty Reviews” links to their Beauty category
ElleDecor.com – “Decor Reviews” links to Home category
Cosmopolitan.com – “Beauty Reviews” to Beauty category
CountryLiving.com – “Decor Reviews” to Home category
RedBookMag.com – “Reviews” to homepage
MarieClaire.com – “Reviews” to Hair category
RoadandTrack.com – “Reviews” to Car category
Seventeen.com – “Product Reviews” to homepage
TownandCountryMag.com – “Reviews” to homepage
WomansDay.com – “Product Reviews” to Parenting category
This was also a dropped domain!!
You can see Viperchill’s rant about this site here.
Website: http://gearpatrol.com/
Niche: General
Nice looking site with more of a magazine feel than outright product reviews.
Awesome looking growth chart in SEMrush.
Website: http://www.outdoorgearlab.com/
Niche: Outdoor
This site has grown so big, they have done deals with suppliers direct, most of the affiliate links are direct with the manufactures…a much better way to go. 6000 linking root domains according to Moz and most look editorially given. They have also seen massive link growth this year.
We really love their comparison tables, see this one below for tents.
Website: http://thewirecutter.com/
Niche: Tech
Part of the New York Times group, this site has huge traffic.
Website: http://www.toptenreviews.com/
Niche: General
Owned by Purch Media, this is just one monster site within their portfolio. According to their main website, the above site gets 12 millions visitors per month…but they have bigger sites!
Tom’s Guide – 17.5 Million per month
Mobile Nation – 60 Million per month
Tom’s Hardware – 22 Million per month
Live Science – 11 million
Andriod Central – 20.8 million
Business.com (no stats given)
How to Geek – 20 million
and they still have some smaller sites.
Not all their review pages have affiliate links on, which I think is a good strategy. Google has been known to penalize affiliate sites with too many affiliate links in the past.
The more you dive into this site the bigger it gets. It’s huge, with insane amounts of content. Look at the category for headphones http://www.toptenreviews.com/electronics/headphones/ – seems like endless pages of reviews and articles. When you land on one of their amazon money pages like this http://www.toptenreviews.com/electronics/headphones/best-wireless-earbuds/, you see they have really gone to town with the table reviews. Even the tables lead onto individual reviews in sub-folders of the main article.
Website: http://www.bestcovery.com/
Niche: General
Another general review website covering multiple niches. Traffic has significantly declined from its 2012 heyday. Looking at the SEMrush’s algo history, it seems they were consistently hit with every Panda update. The site is still doing very well though.
Highest traffic appears to come from Synthetic oils reviews page here: http://www.bestcovery.com/best-synthetic-oil, which only ranks around #5. Sure this page could be greatly improved. I’d add the individual product reviews into a sub folder of the main page with breadcrumbs. I would also add information on what makes a good oil etc, page is pretty thin on content in my opinion.
Website: https://www.bestreviews.guide/
Niche: General
This site came to my attention when someone posted a ‘How the fuck is this ranking’ type post in an FB group. And yes, it is totally bizarre! The posts have hardly any content, yet the site is getting a huge amount of traffic. There was talk of some big players behind the site, but I still need to have a real deep dive and try and work out what they are doing.
Website: https://improb.com/
Niche: General
From zero to nearly 2M visitors per month in 2018, very impressive traffic boner indeed. Would love to know who is behind this site 🙂
Who said repurposed domains stopped working in 2018?! This site is built on an expired domain which goes back to 2013. Waybackmachine is currently not working, but the first links make reference to a list of nobel prizes winners.
From the footer links, it looks like they are trying to tell G they also physical magazine with a link to the ‘magazine subscription’, page is blank though.
Website: https://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/
Niche: General
Another affiliate website that goes against the ‘content is king’ norm. This site has even less content that the site above and have opted for a Pinterest type site. The site does not even have product pages, every ‘check it out’ button is just an affiliate link to another store – or some kind of offer/deal.
This site has huge amounts of traffic, with 100K+ of brand searches each month.
The site still manages to rank well for a lot of terms. #7 for ‘gifts for men’ (135K MS), their 2nd most visited page. The page has infinite scroll but web crawlers like Googlebot will only see 279 words, yet the pages ranks for 4840 keywords!
I also believe the site has strong user metrics. Although visitors will quickly click the affiliate links, they are taken to external sites in another tab. Users are highly likely to close the new tab after and continue browsing Thisiswhyimbroke’s products page again. Similarweb estimates the average time on site is 1.43 sec.
Site: www.dudeiwantthat.com
Niche: General
Unassuming website, not even on https (at the time of writing), but doing 150K+ uniques per month, according to the sites advertising page they get 1 million visits per month.
I found this site from researching content in ahrefs content explorer. This site popped up numerous times for posts going viral and attracting links.
The site mixes long form product reviews with short, trending products. The site also diversifies away from pure affiliate, with what looks like a dropshipping section on the sub domain http://exclusives.dudeiwantthat.com/
The site is owned by Awsomer Media, who own a few other sites linked to in the footer.
Niche Site Examples in Home Category
Website: Winecoolers.reviews
Niche: Wine Coolers
Interesting that its ranking with a .reviews domain, not a choice I would have made.
Great use to employing tables for a featured snippet for ‘best wine coolers’ – also got an image in there at date of search.
Website: http://coffeemakerpicks.com/
Niche: Coffee makers
I stumbled across this site and just had a sneak peak at the visibility, who would a think a niche website for coffee machines would get so much traffic?! SEMRush always report lower figures, so this site easily gets 100K visitors per month.
The site’s traffic comes from lots of #1 rankings:
Site: Myslumberyard.com
Niche: Home
I found this site after listing to the Humanproof design podcast. One of the founders, Matt Ross, came on to discuss their business model.
I like strategy Matt talks about as they focus primarily on Youtube content, though they still put out a lot of content on their website.
These guy reviews every mattress personally, so the reviews are ‘real’, unlike many of their competitors who just make the reviews based on internet research or depending on the special relationships they have with the mattress suppliers.
Organic traffic is pretty good for a relatively new site, but it sounds like they have a large team behind them.
Their Youtube channel has had over 4 million views since January 2018 and they have 27K subscribers – which is good for a mattress related channel. They grow this channel by giving away a mattress every month, below are the hoops visitors have to jump through.
Website: http://10beasts.com/
Niche: Limited general
This site is famous in the niche website world for generating 6 figures with only an 8-page website. The guy started the site in April 2016 and in December he did $88K profit in that month alone. You can read more about this site in Glenn’s article here.
Website: http://thebestelectricsmoker.com/
Niche: BBQ smokers
Great example of a really niche website, but its not looking good from the traffic/revenue point of views. Probably hit by penguin and never really got doing. Could be a good purchase for someone who is good at penalty recoveries. At the moment the site has no real value so you could buy it on the cheap.
Niche Site Examples in Health/Fitness
Website: http://www.livelongerrunning.com/
Niche: Running gear
This site focuses on the the treadmill niche only. Comparison tables based, but very simple.
Site is a few years old and you can see they have been hit by Google updates constantly. Main drop coincides with Panda 4.0.
Website: https://runnerclick.com/
Niche: Running gear
Another running site focusing on all things running. I’ve been having a good forensic dive into how this site has grown so big…it’s beautiful. The origins seem to be a basic genesis site back on 2015…
To the real beast it is today.
The site must have been heading towards the million visitors per month mark before it was hit with the August 1st, 2018 core Google update. Looking at the stats that’s 28% loss in traffic and probably 28%+ loss in revenue.
Looking at Majestic they have had a huge increase in linking domains this year, probably naturally as they are ranking for so many terms.
These guys also own the following sites: gearweare.com, nicershoes.com, thegearhunt.com according to their footer links 🙂
If you fancy going into the health vertical, check out some of our top rated health affiliate programs.
Website: https://garagegympower.com/
Niche: Health – Gym Gear
Solid gym related website which managed to survive any hits from the medic update last August.
Check out the home page for this site. They currently have a great quizz users and quickly take which leads them to amazon product links they may be interested in. This is a great way to get visitors to ‘interact’ with your website, something Google loves.
Niche Site Examples for Weed
Website: https://www.420beginner.com/
Niche: Weed Growing
In August 2017 this site was sold for $165K with the buy now button on Flippa. The site also only had a root TF of 7, so never pay too much attention to metrics!
This is a great example of making big money by going really niche, especially in a growing market.
The site had excellent organic traffic and dominated all the top keywords in the niche.
Niche Site Examples in Outdoors
Website: https://www.theadventurejunkies.com/
Niche: Outdoors
I’ve just been looking at this site as it competes with one of my niche sites. Since January 2016 they have done incredibly well, building 100K monthly visits (rough estimate, always add more to semrush data). They have also acquired over 880 referring domains.
Website: http://survival-mastery.com
Niche: Survival
Solid website in the survival niche. They have also dodged all the algo changes since July 2018. I looked at this niche as it’s really interesting, but now pretty saturated so decided against it.
The site has a lot of well written ‘how to’ guides, like their top traffic page ‘how to build a bomb shelter’. These pages are not heavily monetized and must be the driving force behind solid user metrics.
Site: https://www.bikeperfect.com/
Niche: Outdoor
I’m in this niche, so have been watching this site very closely. It’s only a few months old by check out the traffic growth.
First I thought this site must have some really good content and top onpage seo, combined with mass publishing. NO, it’s just good old fashioned links…and sitewide links at that. The site is owned by Future PLC, who have a huge portfolio of sites: Techradar, Windows Central, Cycling News, T3,Tom’s Guide, Gizmodo…the list is endless. They only need to send a few sitewide links from these authority site and they can smash into the SERPs.
Here’s the shot from Ahrefs – 50K backlinks in 2-3 months from 60 domains.
Niche Site Examples in Technology
Website: Versus.com
Niche: Tech
I landed on this site whilst comparing 2 Samsung phones and was blown away by the data. The pages look amazing.
Not only do they give you lots of data in easy-to-read tables, but give you the option to compare products of your choice – great for engagement metrics like time on site etc.
There’s a big discrepancies with Ahrefs data on this site, who show nearly a 1 million users per month:
Whilst the site was focused on phones initially, looks like they started expanding out into other categories whilst keeping phones as their primary authority.
Versus has done well with internationl SEO. Whilst SEMrush is showing 200K visitors per month in the USA, they are also getting 100K in Germany, 100K in Spain and 60K from France, plus lots of other countries.
Versus is a great example of using apis to just pull in loads of data and auto generate pages. Even the videos on the product pages are 3rd party and pulled in from Youtube.
They also don’t rely completely on Amazon and are promoting Ebay.
Niche Site Examples in Automotive
Website: Carbibles.com
Niche: Auto
Landed on this site when doing some research for a potential niche. It was ranking #1 for a term I was looking at, but looked pretty unassuming. Throwing the site into SEMrush reveals a different picture, over 1.5 Million visits per month at the time of writing. With SEMrush generally under reporting, the site could have 3 million visitors and 7M+ pageviews.
I don’t like to expose a site’s link building tactics if owned by a individual as I probably know them, but this site has over 7K linking root domains.
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This post will be continually updated with new sites and niches so keep it bookmarked and keep popping back. If you stumble across the an interesting site with huge traffic, drop it into the comments or do a quick write up on the site and I will give some link attribution.
You might also want to read how to make affiliate commissions without a website.
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