I am a co-founder of TopTalkedBooks.com. When looking for dev books to buy, we often struggle finding good dev books. What if there is a site which can aggregate all the good book reviews together and present to the users? It will be beneficial to the dev community. That is how we found TopTalkedBooks.com
Our mission is to help people finding the best books from the community including Hacker News, Stack overflow and Reddit.
Today, I will share my experience of how our site got rejected by Amazon Affiliate Program.
Site Development
We started this project on August 1st, 2017. We spent less than two weeks creating this website. As this is our side project, we finished it by working at nights and weekends. Everything went so smoothly, and we were happy with our progress. We got our google analytics, MailChimp, Facebook and Twitter setup; we hosted our site on google cloud platform; everything was ready for business, and we just needed visitors.
Site Launch
We did a soft launch(the site was up, but was yet to be known by anyone) on August 10th, 2017. We sent our website to friends and coworkers to gather their feedbacks. We had a lot of experience in development process, but we were new to affiliate marketing. Amazon accepted our application very quickly and we believe everything was good to go. August 14 was a special day for us, as we got a total of 16 orders from our visitors. We were super excited that we got our FIRST income ($4.93) from Amazon!
We couldn’t believe that we received our first income so soon. As a disclaimer: we have asked all the friends who knew about this site, and found that the orders were not purchased by this group of friends. They were orders truly from our visitors. This proves that we are on the right path. When we provide great content, people will like it, and they will support it.
We were planning on doing more promotions to let more people to know about us. Hacker News was our first target for promotion. On August 15th, we officially launch our website and did a hacker news post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15018161, and our visitors were immediately boosted.
As the traffic increases, our Amazon referrals had also gone up. We noticed at least 20 more orders are generated on that day. We were thrilled that our two-weeks hard work are finally paid off. We have got enough money to pay for the server cost.
Sad Day — All of our income are gone!
On August 16th, a day after we officially launch our site, we received the following email from Amazon.
Hello,
Thank you for applying for the Associate program. Upon review, we are unable to accept your application. A part of our criteria is that your site has to be established with enough unique content. We rejected your application due to one or more of the following reasons.
- Lack of content which is original to your site and beneficial to your visitors
- Pages that are mainly empty when advertisement content is removed
Unfortunately, we aren’t able to review an application once its been rejected. If your website has been further developed and now contains appropriate content, you’re welcome to submit another application by using the following URL:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join
Thank you for your interest in Amazon Associates.
This had huge impact on us. The worst thing was that Amazon won’t review the application once it has been rejected, that mean we can’t appeal it, the decision was final. We have to start over! we were so puzzled, our site has no difference than our competitors’. How did theirs get approved and ours get rejected?
Lesson Learned
- Don’t put full gear on marketing until approval from Amazon Affiliate Program is obtained. Otherwise, all your traffic will be wasted. Big lesson learned!
- Being accepted by Amazon doesn’t mean your site is good to go. Amazon won’t start reviewing your site until you have at least 3 sales within 180 days. Your site will be reviewed after your third sale. Therefore, submit your application when your site is really ready. (now you know how to get your application reviewed sooner, if you know what I mean.)
- Content, good content, original content! Amazon wants website to have at least 50% of original content.
- You can re-apply for a new application, but all your previous hard earned money are gone.
- Think positively, don’t give up! On the bright side, I am glad that Amazon rejected us now than later. We are just in the beginning, and we don’t have much to lose. In addition, it helped us to come up with a better idea for the site.
Conclusion
Although this is a big strike for us, we were so disappointed and discouraged, we did not give up. After some research and discussion, we came up with a new solution. Currently We are busy with writing version 2 of the site to be compliance of Amazon Affiliate Policy. V2 will be much better in terms of content, and we have a much clearer vision of how this website will be. We will be submitting a new application and hopefully it will be approved. I will keep everyone posted if we hear back from Amazon.
Thanks for reading, if you have a similar experience, please leave a comment and share the pain and joy of learning.
Edit: V2 works! Our application was approved before I publish this article! We were super excited!
Edit: After my application was approved, I started another amazon affiliate site: https://thingsreview.com