Why informational type of articles are important for your new Amazon niche site (especially if you are a beginner), where to get ideas for them, how to do proper research and finally, how to write them as quick as possible.
I’ve noticed that many of you have trouble writing your own articles, at least the part of you who are not paying someone to do it for you (outsourcing).
I can tell you upfront – writing is hard, it takes time and it takes good English writing skills.
One thing I personally do when I don’t like the topic I’m writing about is concentrating on my goal – making money with Amazon as an affiliate.
Just think about it when you are in that ‘I hate writing’ mood. The articles you write and the way you write them will have a huge impact on your SEO rankings and on your conversions and sales.
Think of your readers and customers. They are one step from buying from Amazon, and you can help them reach that next step and convince them to buy now – today.
There are two kinds of articles you’re going to have on your Azon niche site, those are informational and commercial (sales) articles.
Today we’re going to talk about informational articles and teach you how to write them like a professional and amaze your readers in the same time.
Why write informational articles in the first place?
Informational articles most likely won’t bring you many direct sales, if any. So why write them in the first place?
There are few reasons and benefits, and here’s the most important one – Amazon.
If you just started your Amazon affiliate journey and you are just building your first niche site you can’t have just review (sales) articles on it, Amazon doesn’t like that.
Amazon likes value. They want your readers to learn something and get value from your website, not just to make sales. So ask yourself, if you removed all your sales/review articles from your niche site, what’s left? If the answer is nothing you may be in trouble.
After your first sale, someone from Amazon will manually check your niche site and probably close your affiliate account with them because all you have on your websites are reviews.
Now some of you may disagree with this, or maybe you got away with just review articles, but I know from my own experience that a lot of you won’t be that lucky.
When I start my niche sites I make sure that I have at least 3-5 informational articles in there before I even start publishing reviews. Later on that ratio will change and you will have more sales articles (of course), but you must have some informational articles as well.
If you are not sure about this, after you create your niche site with some content, feel free to contact Amazon Associates support and ask them directly to check your website. You’ll get the same answer like I gave you if you don’t have informational articles on it.
Other benefits include extra rankings on Google and helping your readers to make their buying decision faster and more accurate. Yes, your readers will want to know which product is the best, but some of them will like to learn even more before they decide to buy.
Making Amazon happy quickly – HACK
Honestly I’ve never tried this, but, in theory, it should work without negative SEO consequences.
Here’s the thing, Amazon will check if you have informational articles on your website but they won’t check if that content is original or not, they just don’t care about that stuff.
As we all know having copied (unoriginal) content on your website will be recognized by Google as duplicated content and your page just won’t rank high (or at all) for any term. It may even have a negative effect on your whole website.
Image source: Moz
But! There’s a solution for that.
There’s an SEO term (which some of you will know) called a canonical URL. With a canonical URL, you are basically saying Google that some other page is the original page and not yours, even if it’s not on the same domain.
With that in mind, you can just copy content (literally) and publish it on your website, while letting Google know that the original content is on another page.
To let Google know which page is original you can just copy the original page’s URL and paste it under canonical URL field (in Advanced settings in your post/page editor) if you use WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin (which many of you do). I’m sure other SEO plugins have the same feature.
In any case, not sure if this is the smartest thing to do, but you are free to try it out. Original content is always better, SEO wise at least. Your users won’t care if it’s copied from other websites if it helps them.
Use this hack with caution and only if you have to. Or, if you want to experiment. In that case, let us all know the results.
Ideas for informational articles
The best way to get ideas for your informational articles is digging deep into your topic/niche. Use Google, type in your main keyword and start reading articles, blogs, forum comments, check YouTube videos as well.
There’s a ton of ideas just laying around for you to grab them.
Another thing you could (and should do) is going through your keywords list. Use tools like KWFinder, Ahrefs or SEMrush and start checking them out.
I bet you’ll even find some nice topics with good search volume too.
Finally, you can always check your competitors, they have done all the hard work already anyway. Spy on their websites and see what are they writing about.
Just remember, you want to be better than your competition. They might also not include some important things so don’t follow (or copy) them blindly. Use them for inspiration and that’s it.
Informational article ideas cheat sheet
Again, for the lazy ones (aren’t we all?) I wanted to help and provide you with some ideas for your informational articles that can work in any niche, for some better, for others maybe not so much.
- FAQ page – You can really use this page for any niche, just add 5-10 frequently asked questions and answers related to your niche and you are good to go. You can always expand it later and add more questions. Easily 500+ words page.
- Video page – Depending on your niche (but almost always) there will be some kind of videos related to the product(s) you are promoting. Share a few most interesting (or most useful) videos and add a few comments for each video. Again, easy 500+ words article.
- History page – Hello Wikipedia 🙂 History can sometimes be boring, but it can be fun too. Add some interesting history facts about the product, how it all started, who created it, when, where and stuff like that. I suppose Wikipedia will be your best friend for this article, but look for other sources as well.
- A difference between products page – In every niche there are similar products that do the same thing but with a few differences. Maybe those differences aren’t that obvious to your readers or they don’t know what those differences stand for and how do they work. You can use this page to explain which unique difference is for whom, the purpose of it and why are they good or bad. Feel free to add few Amazon links to show examples of good products as a good representation of each unique thing.
- Types of products page – This is easy. Like I mentioned in the previous point, there are usually different types of products in each niche and on this page you can write them all down and describe each type in a few sentences.
- Buying guide page – This can easily be both informational or sales article. Whatever you choose it should give good tips and pointers for your readers about things they should take special attention to, which products will suit them best, and some bad things they should be careful of.
- Interviews page – Again, depending on your niche, sometimes you can find people who are passionate about it and using it often. Contact them, ask them few questions and publish it as an interview. You can even do this on a monthly basis. Best thing is, it’s basically free content for your niche site written by someone else, and highly relevant.
- Statistics page – You may also call this fun facts page or just regular facts page. Something like ‘Did you know?’ article and write few interesting things about products you are promoting, with actual statistics and facts to back it up. Will it be fun or serious facts depends on you and your niche (products).
- Experts round up page – For those of you who are in marketing circles you are probably familiar with expert round up kind of articles. Basically, you find 5, 10 or more people who are (preferably) experts in your niche and ask them 1-3 questions (same question(s) is sent to everyone) and just share those answers in a form of an article. This may not work for some niches, but for many other it will definitely work. With this option you again have an article written for you for free, which is great.
- User’s manual page – I haven’t seen anyone using this on their niche sites but I think it may serve a great purpose. User manuals are different for many products but still, you can find a lot of info applicable to most of them (within the same niche, similar products). Find a user manual (online or offline), pull the most useful information out of it and write it in your own words. If you get your hands on an offline version check it out if there’s an online version of it somewhere, if not, you can basically copy the whole content and put in on your website, and it will be unique. Useful for your readers + great SEO value as well.
With this little cheat sheet you’ll never have problems finding ideas for your informational articles. A lot of them will have a good effect on your SEO as well and bring you some more extra traffic.
Doing research for information articles
Like with anything else, research is just that – research. There’s no special hack or tactic, you need to put time and effort and start browsing through websites.
Whatever the topic for your article is, type it in Google and see what results will you get.
I then open each page that seems relevant (based on their title and description) in a new tab.
Those pages can be blogs, forums, YouTube videos or even pages from brands who build that products.
Sometimes it’s 5-10 tabs opened in my Google Chrome browser, sometimes it’s 20 or more/less.
You will soon realize that a lot of websites write about same things. Your job is to gather all that info and make one good (the best) article than all other articles individually. This is also known as Skyscraper technique and is also great for getting backlinks.
Here’s what I do after I’ve opened all those pages in a new tab. I create a new document in Google Docs (Google Drive, if you are not using it you are crazy, MS Word is a thing of the past; I use Google Docs to write all my articles, even this one) and start reading each and every article.
Each piece of content you think is useful, good, worthy, highlight it and copy/paste it to your Google Doc you just created. So, whole sentences and even entire paragraphs, just copy and paste them in your doc. Do that for every article you find, no matter if some of the content is the same or talking about same things, often there are bits and pieces in paragraphs that are different and that can be used in your upcoming article.
After you do that, depending on how many sources (pages) you found while doing your research, you should have several pages of content in your Google Doc, sometimes even 5+ pages.
Now you have enough material to work with and can start with your writing process.
Writing informational articles
Here comes the fun stuff. Just kidding, this is the hardest part – the actual writing. Here’s how I do it…
By now you probably have a good idea on how your new article should be structured. You’ve seen over 10 pages from other websites and learned what are the most important things for that topic and from that you should be able to decide on your article chapters.
When you have chapter headlines ready it’s much easier to continue.
The first part of your article should be the intro. This is where you tell them what’s the article going to be about, what will they learn and few more details about the topic.
After that you start with your first chapter.
Btw you do all this at the top of the same document where you copy/pasted all those paragraphs of text while you were doing your research (that’s how I do it anyway).
The next step would be reading (or quickly scanning) and going through all that content you pasted on that page. If the content matches the topic of your chapter cut and paste it below your chapter headline.
Repeat that for every chapter.
After you’re done you should have all that copied content nicely put under their own chapters. Still, some of that copies content can overlap, or the same paragraphs can go in multiple chapters. Just keep that in mind, you’ll edit it later.
And now, start writing your article 🙂
Use the best parts from copied content and write your own content above it. As you cover one copied part of text delete it so it doesn’t confuse you. After you deleted all copied content and have written everything you could (based on the copied text) you are done with that chapter.
Repeat the process for each chapter until there is no more copied content, just your original text.
And there you go, your article is finished!
With this technique I can easily write 500+ words on any topic, often even over 1000 words.
But don’t get me wrong, if it sounds easy it’s really not and it takes time. But after you are done you will probably have the best article on that topic, even better than your competition.
To make it even better you can use lists in your article, comparison tables, pros and cons etc.
Also, if you find some good images in your competitor’s articles you can use them as well. Just don’t forget to mention the source, or don’t, that’s up to you.
Wrapping it up
This guide ended up being a lot bigger than I expected but I hope it was worth it. I know some of you guys will find it basic or maybe you already have your own writing process (please share it in comments below), but I also know a lot of you struggle with writing – this article was written with you in mind.
Writing is hard, especially when you are not familiar with the topic and you have to do all that research first, but when you write and publish your content you’ll feel some personal satisfaction knowing you did good and that you will help someone by sharing all that info.
That’s how I feel every time I write, especially for Azon Hacks.
One other benefit of writing for niche sites is, you’ll get to learn so much new stuff about things you never thought of learning before. Who knows, maybe it will develop into a passion eventually or you’ll want to try something new (this, of course, doesn’t apply to some boring stupid niches like kitchen faucets!). 🙂
Till next time, good luck with your writing!
