You’ve heard it before and you’re bound to hear it again. The best kind of income is passive income, because it means that you can have more money in your pocket with no more effort required on your part. The trouble, of course, is figuring out how to acquire this elusive “passive income.”
You could go ahead and write a book but that can take a lot of time and effort. Instead, you might want to consider a “set it and forget it” website that generates consistent revenue. For that, you might want to consider Site Depot and the services it provides.
As we make our way through today’s review, we’ll learn about exactly what Site Depot does, how much it costs, and whether it is worth your investments of time and money.
What Is SiteDepot.com
In a nutshell, SiteDepot will do all the grunt work on your behalf to set up an Amazon-based e-commerce store. You don’t have to deal with any physical inventory on your own, because your online storefront is really just an affiliate site that works off of the Amazon Associates program.
Pick whatever niche you want, snatch up the domain of your choosing, and leave the people at Site Depot to do the rest. They will set up your affiliate e-commerce site, including its custom design and layout. They’ll also populate your “catalog” with the appropriate products from the Amazon marketplace.
The default configuration will draw products from the US-based Amazon.com, but you can tell the designers and SiteDepot.com that you want your affiliate site to tie into Amazon Canada or Amazon UK. Other locales are not supported at this time.
What Kinds of Sites Can I Have?
The core functionality behind any e-commerce store that you set up with Site Depot will be identical. You get the facade of being a real store, but you’re really only selling things as an Amazon affiliate. It will be Amazon that deals with the real order and shipping process.
In this way, your revenue is dependent on how many of these commissions you can get. At the lowest end, I believe the commission rate is 4.00% of the sale. At the top end, you can earn as much as 15.00% for each sale. The kind of “e-store” you choose to open is up to you.
Shown here is the “shopping cart” for CheapMotorcycleParts.com. Amazon sells that kind of stuff. Above that, you can also see a screenshot of FlashPen.com, a SiteDepot-created site for selling USB flash drives.
Just as you can choose to blog about any niche under the sun, you can almost do the same with your SiteDepot e-commerce site. If there are products in the Amazon marketplace that are related to that niche, you can open a site to sell said products. Other examples featured in their portfolio include laser levels, leg warmers, Italian shoes, video games, preschool books, and emerald jewelry.
How Much Does It Cost and What’s Included?
You’ll notice right up front that SiteDepot.com charges $150 per domain. This is not a monthly or an annual cost; as far as I can tell, this is a one-time fee and you’ll never have to pay another penny to Site Depot for its services. You’ll have to get your own domain, however.
Included in this price are the custom design, layout, and population of your Amazon affiliate e-store. Interestingly, this price also includes lifetime web hosting, backups and updates. The assumption is that SiteDepot has purchased a larger hosting account and is dividing the storage and bandwidth among all its customers.
Other highlights to SiteDepot-developed affiliate sites include a turnaround time of between one and three business days, US-based web development, SEO-friendly URLs, real-time product information and pricing, real customer product reviews, RSS feeds, integrated shopping cart, and unlimited customer support.
If you choose the right niche, the right domain, and go through the right marketing strategies, you should be able to earn back that $150 investment without too much trouble. Consider that the SiteDepot-developed site is largely on auto-pilot and it includes lifetime hosting to boot. That doesn’t sound too shabby.
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{ 52 comments }
Great write up Michael. And $150 for the e-commerce site isn’t a bad deal at all. Basically if you have a domain just sitting on the shelf, they will create you a website with the potential of it making $…sounds like a no brainer actually…
I’ll def take a closer look…
This is an example of dropshipping correct? $150 is a good deal but it might take awhile to earn that back is the comission percentage is 4%
4% is for electronics items only. most other things are 6%, going up to 7% if you sell 100+ items that month, 8% if you sell 600+ (roughly). 8.5% is the top rate and you need like 3000+ sales in a month, or something ridiculous that i’ve never come close to. 10% is for mp3 downloads and 8.5% for the kindle (used to be 10% too when it was priced higher a few months back). 15% is for their new shoestore only. computers are capped at $25. gift cards are eligible.
you’ll need to sell around $2000 worth of stuff to make $150.
not encouraging…
I’d love to echo everything that Exposed SEO said, but also note that it isn’t drop shipping. It’s still strictly affiliate. Drop shipping is if you’re doing the customer service and ordering the product from a vendor and having it sent directly to your customer.
The sales go straight through Amazon and are not dropshipped.
I agree that passive income is by far the most powerful type of income, because of the fact you can set it and forget it and continue enjoying the earnings.
I have numerous articles I have written they earn money for me daily and I haven’t even done anything to them in quite some time.
I always enjoy getting an alert from paypal that I have a deposit. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.
wow seems prettty awesome to me.
I think this is a really great idea to be able to choose a niche of without having to worry about overhead expenses, or any expenses for that matter.
I like the service, but do they offer a self-hosted version? If they are hosting it, they have complete control!
I’m with Jeremy… If they offer a self hosted version, I would definitely run a test or two. I have a ton of product domains just waiting to be developed!
Looks like they are using Associate-O-Matic software which you can self-host on unlimited domains for unlimited niche sites for $99 up-front and $20 per year. They also have a free version
Classifieds For Free Blog,
Thanks for sharing. This is very helpful information.
All the best,
Ian
That’s absolutely awesome John!
I might have to give site depot a try sometime, still a little skeptical though, haha. It’s kind of pricey
CJ
i think the price is decent since it includes free web hosting, but this isnt going to be passive income unless you promote the hell out of the site.
Hey this looks like a really neat idea.
I wonder if someone can share their experience if they have tried this?
So basically after you get your site up through sitedepot, all you do is drive traffic?
I wonder what the conversion rate would be?
Nabeel
What about duplicate content. Do they allow you to plug in additional functionality to their site package, like forums, blog, etc? Because just the item descriptions is not going to be getting a lot of traffic.
And such details also come under duplicate content.
I saw one video about this from Matt Cutts.
Interesting your name is also Matt.
Good reviews & nice services to offers.. $150 for lifetime and additional service include is pretty interesting..
Thanks for sharing. I will definitely check on this one.
Does it include unique conetnt written for your site? If not, it is money thrown out the window as you will receive the Google slap for duplicate content before you can say ooops! Also the price is rather steep, I have used http://www.associate-o-matic.com/ in the past and they are not only cheaper, but also allow you to build your store on as many domains as you want, SY
The only content is products. It’s basically a shop site. Those are pretty hard to duplicate, unless you do it deliberately.
yeah exactly
SY,
While I don’t think sites built with this app will get the Google slap, I do agree with you that they probably won’t rank in Google. Google requires so much: great content, inbound links, great domain name, age, etc. However, if you have some really great domain names, I’ve seen sites rank organically on Yahoo based on URL alone. In short, something like this can make a lot of money on Yahoo if you have a great domain name. That said, the Yahoo-Microsoft Search Alliance will change everything and Yahoo organic results will be powered by Microsoft. I do see these types of sites easier to rank in Bing as well (as compared to Google) but not as easy as Yahoo…
Best,
Ian
Yes, an EMD (Exact Match Domain) can be powerful, not only in Yahoo but also in Google, but still, and I speak out of experience, as site that simple posts products (and reviews) from the Amazon website will not be successful in the search engines long term. You need good, unique content for this, SY
That’s right good unique content. Many marketers avoid doing the hard word creating content.
I must disagree (but also agree). In my personal portfolio, I always focus on unique, original content. It’s the only want to go in my opinion because it’s the right thing to do – especially if you have a long term outlook. That said, type in “discontinued cosmetics” into Yahoo and you can see that the #1 result is DiscontinuedCosmetics.us, a simple Shopping.com-powered site (very similar to the sites generated by the tool featured in this article). Why is this site ranking? Definitely not because of the content. After all, it’s dupe content and already available on Shopping.com. It’s ranking because DiscontinuedCosmetics.us is an exact match domain and moreover Yahoo likes dot us domains. I think this is a good example because it’s a competitive vertical where legit content-heavy sites exist, but the exact match domain with a thin dupe site can still do well. There are many cases where you can still rank on domain alone. Now, I’m not saying that’s the right thing to do, but it is possible (and a viable short term solution). Now, combine a great domain with the right content and your golden (that’s my approach).
Best,
Ian
I agree with SY. It sounds good on the surface but without unique content these sitest will be nowhere to be found in search engines in the long run.
If it really was a good ROI they’d be building the sites for themselves. As it is they make more money by charging $150 per site.
Vance
There is no duplicate penalties if you build up some links to the sites. That more than takes care of that.
Also the other two search engines love these sites. Take for example http://www.Guitars.net which we launched less than 2 weeks ago.
The site is now ranking on the first page of Bing.com and Yahoo.com as well generating 100+ visitors daily and on the rise day-after-day-after-day.
If anybody else have any questions or needs anything else, contact us directly via our website http://www.SiteDepot.com
All the best,
Mike
Mike @ SiteDepot.com did an awesome job for me on Mens-Razors.com. Thanks Mike, i love it.
Mike,
I like the logo on your site.
Best,
Ian
Haha! Just responded to SY’s comment above before reading this. Mike, well said.
All the best,
Ian
yeah
$150 is not on the high side. But the problem is the effort put in to attract visitors to your site. One has to be good in traffic generation to make good living out of it
That’s what I was thinking too. They help you set up the site but it’s up to you to generate income from it.
I’ve also been wondering if they final checkout is on amazon or at the affiliate site.
Yes definitely that is my point as well.
not bad, thanks for sharing
They pick the right keyword “Passive Income” that is the weakness of every internet business person.
yeah right
It would be an advantage if you can add other web pages to include different affiliate networks and add your own content (i.e. product reviews, company updates, etc). Eventually you’d like to website to grow too.
I would consider it if I could pick my niche. Also you should be able to add content, articles, reviews etc otherwise google will not rank you at all.
Cool idea. Bit pricey, though.
Do you need to get your own Amazon associate ID? Are you paid directly from Amazon or sitedepot?
Looks like a promising product for the price of $150.
Has anybody tried one of these yet? Any success?
looks pretty interesting……
I will check out the whole features….
Thanks
Thats looks like a good deal,
does anyone know someone who is making money from this?
Hi,
Mike @ SiteDepot.com, is there any offer like this for clickbank product ?
i am so interested because clickbank product pay commission up to 75%
reagard’s
Does anyone know how the SiteDepot sites compare with the free SmartName.com shop sites? They seem to do the same thing. Not sure how one ranks better than the other and I’m trying to decide if it’s worth dropping $150 on a SiteDepot site when I’m paying nothing at SmartName. I did however just start using SmartName so I can’t really judge how my sites are going to perform yet…
Thanks-
Well this one is sounding great.
Get the proper niche idea, start link building with less competition keywords and here you go.
SY,
In short, I think we are on the same page. It all comes down to short term vs. long term. I think tools like this can be great for short term because it’s impossible to develop all your domains if you have hundreds (or even thousands) and at least you can start generating some revenue. Long term, however, this is not the right strategy in my opinion – unique content and domain development is key. All the best,
Ian
Yes if you want to be stable than you will have to give your best time to one or two projects at a time.