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LivingOffCloud SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundup📰: April 2020 Edition

April has been such a tough tough month! 😣😰

I am sure you have already heard the latest news: Amazon US cut the fee rates!💥☠ Apart from the “regular” business activity decline, we niche webmasters got an extra hit below the belt by our (formerly) beloved affiliate program 😭😭😭

So, in this news issue, we will talk about:

  • New Amazon fee rates and what we can do about this change (spoiler: diversify!)
  • What one of Amazon’s competitors has done in responding to the growing popularity of Amazon
  • The latest state of the overall economic situation that affects your earnings
  • How to grow your Pinterest traffic with a strategy tailored to the spring days of COVID-19
  • Free SEO tools
  • And finally, Authority Hacker Pro is open for sale! 🎉

Let’s dive in 🐋

Associates Program standard fees schedule

👉👉👉 affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/GRXPHT8U84RAYDXZ

Starting from April 21, 2020, Amazon US reduced its fee rates by 2-2.5 times for many categories that used to have a 6-8% commission 😢

If you do Amazon Affiliate, you couldn’t help but notice how much the Amazon traffic has grown in the last weeks. 

Amazon is on fire due to the coronavirus lockdown happening in many US states. It is clearly the go-to destination for self-quarantined online shoppers.

Despite the growth, the fee cut may make you earn pretty much the same as before the lockdown online shopping craziness started. Or maybe just slightly more.

And once the lockdown is lifted… well the earnings might drop significantly 😭

How much do you make from Amazon now and how to mitigate the change? This is what the next link is about.

Amazon Affiliate earnings (April 2020 change) – how much will you make

👉👉👉 authoritywebsiteincome.com/amazon-affiliate-earnings

In this post, Jon from AuthorityWebsiteIncome talks about how much the Amazon US fees got slashed and how to calculate the financial impact you will get (with a free spreadsheet!). He also dwells into the possible reasons why it happened as well as the opportunities the change presents.

I also wrote a similar post about what we can do about the change; read it here.

It’s now free to sell on Google

👉👉👉 blog.google/products/shopping/its-now-free-to-sell-on-google

Meanwhile, The Amazon growth did not go unnoticed by Google 😮

Google decided to respond by making it free to sell on Google Shopping platform 🤯

Will it become a viable competitor to Amazon? Or will these efforts go in vain? Only time will tell!

In any case, you may want to join its affiliate program on CJ.com if you are thinking of diversifying away from Amazon. The affiliate program offers quite yummy commissions with specific bonus categories above 10% 😮

Google Shopping Affiliate Program

Amid the economic gloom, some hopeful indicators emerge for marketers

👉👉👉 searchengineland.com/amid-the-economic-gloom-some-hopeful-indicators-emerge-for-marketers-333216

But it’s not all gloom and doom out there. If you are doing a display advertisement (and you should in order to diversify your revenue!), here’s good news for you:

Consumer confidence and spending have ticked up as people receive stimulus money and anticipate the lockdowns ending.

The post above talks about a spending burst that apparently got triggered by the first wave of government stimulus checks. For example, on Shopify, it caused  “Black Friday level traffic every day” according to the CTO Jean-Michel Lemieux.

The burst produced an increase in marketing and ad spending. Indeed, I’ve noticed my ePMV on Ezoic is going up 👍

(if you do not know what Ezoic is, check my review post 😉)

Ezoic EPMV Chart

Pinterest Search trends – Spring 2020

👉👉👉 blog.tailwindapp.com/pinterest-search-trends-spring-2020

If you are doing Pinterest, here’s a great post from Tailwind about how to change your Pinterest strategy for this highly irregular spring.

It talks about current hot search trends as well as anti-trends or what you should not pin right now.

And of course, during these uncertain times, it never hurts to know what free tools are available over there 😉

44 best free SEO tools (tried & tested)

👉👉👉 ahrefs.com/blog/free-seo-tools

Check out this massive list of free SEO tools that Ahrefs has collected and tested! The list contains:

  • Keyword research tools
  • On-page SEO tools
  • Link building tools
  • Technical SEO tools
  • Rank tracking tools
  • Analytics tools
  • Local SEO tools
  • And more

Do you use any of these tools? 

Me, I use quite a lot of them… I started listing what I use but quickly realized the list would be too big! And still, I found more tools that I did not know about🤗

And finally, we got more good news!

Authority Hacker Pro is now open for sale!

👉👉👉 authorityhacker.com/pro/

This is the very first website building course I bought that laid out the foundation for my increasing income. And it is finally open for sale!

It will be open only till April 27 so if you have been waiting for it, this is your chance.

The content gets updated regularly. 

For example, a few days ago (on the sad day of April 21st 😢), they added two new blueprints: Site Speed Blueprint and Selling Your Site Blueprint

You can sign up using my affiliate link above ☝

If you are not sure what it is all about, read my review!

How you liked my LivingOffCloud SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundup📰 for April. Let me know what you think in the comments! 🤗


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Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. I will receive a small fee if you choose to buy after clicking on any of these links. Thank you if you do! 🤗

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