Interview with Imdadul Haque Jewel, a young digital and affiliate marketer from Bangladesh
Meet Imdadul Haque Jewel, a young digital and affiliate marketer from Bangladesh. The 28-year-old works specifically with Amazon Affiliates. He builds a website around a specific niche, publishes content around it and then builds links to rank pages.
He recently sold an Amazon niche site for a whopping five figures, which we guess is above 10,000 USD. But his journey was not a smooth one. Before he got here, Jewel’s life had its ups and downs. He opens up to us about his road so far and his future goals.
NM: A little about yourself?
I’m Engr. Imdadul Haque Jewel. An entrepreneur and digital marketer, I’m the Managing Director & Founder of Hexagon ICT. I graduated from Stamford University, Bangladesh in 2014 and achieved a 4-year Bachelor’s Degree (Bsc) in Civil Engineering.
As an engineering student, I always think out of the box and differently from students in other disciplines. As a result, I chose a different platform to work too. In a way, I am too business-minded a professional!
I can’t think of anything without giving it a business context. In today’s world, it’s not necessary to explain the opportunity to do business online. And I love working online. So I chose the virtual world as my workplace. I have been running online businesses from 2012.
NM:Recently you sold an Amazon affiliate site for five figures. Can you please share this story with us?
Yes of course. I started developing niche sites in April 2015. However, my first site failed. But I didn’t let this pull me down. I found out why it failed, and realized that some things were not working the way I wanted them to. So I changed my strategy and started developing niche sites again. This time, I started getting sales.
Then in August this year, my family required a good amount of money to buy a property, but I didn’t have such a huge bank balance. So I decided to sell my first successful site and make instant cash to buy the property.
There are a few broker websites available in the market to sell niche sites, but their process is very time consuming – for instance, they take two months for the whole process to go through, from approving the site listing to putting in money in the bank account. They also take a 10-15% commission on the sale price – which I feel is not a small amount.
I was then pondering over what to do, and an idea struck me – why not search directly for a niche site buyer online?
I started emailing them and asking if they were interested in buying a niche site that was minting dollars as an Amazon affiliate. A few people showed interest, including big market names like Jon Haver, Tung Tran, Lion Zeal etc., but after a week of talks, I felt that they just wanted to pay lesser than the market value, their justification being that they were paying instantly.
In the meantime, I got an email from a buyer expressing his interest in buying the site. I then started negotiating with him and finalised the price within three days. I got several times my monthly earning. Normally, affiliate sites get 20-22 times their average monthly earning, but luckily I got 29 times the amount thanks to my site’s future potential. The selling price was in five-figures.
Sorry. I can’t give out more details here due to my client’s NDA agreement. Then, my client initiated a transaction profile on escrow.com on the condition of a five-calendar-day inspection period.
I agreed and transferred all the site-related entities to him on completing the inspection period and confirming the conversion rate of my website. He then released the funds, and a week later, I received the cash in my bank account.
NM: Where did you sell the site?
I sold my site directly to a UK buyer. And he completed the transaction via Escrow.com
NM: How did you start your Amazon affiliate site journey?
In December 2012, Abul Kashem, the founder of nichemasterly.com introduced me to Amazon Affiliate. He organized a 2-day workshop at Mirpur, Dhaka. I attended with my friend Shohidul Islam. But after completing the workshop, I was very upset because I did not really understand more than 20% of the technical terms. Amazon, affiliate and many other terms were Greek and Latin to me.
But on completion of the workshop, I read every single post the workshop attendees posted on the Facebook group and also started studying about this online. After a year, I returned to the same workshop at Dhanmondi. Now many things were clearer for me. After this I started studying more and more about Amazon Affiliate, but could not make a decision about starting a site.
Then in the beginning of 2015, I received a 2-month training at an institute. There, the course coordinator was Alamin Kabir , who is a successful Amazon Affiliate marketer. As a trainer, he set a task for us to — start a site in two weeks of passing out from training. And that’s how my first site was born. I built the site, published content and worked for a ranking upon completion of training. But my first project failed due to high competition among keywords.
Then I heard from Abul Kashem that he was starting an Amazon Affiliate site-building bootcamp program with a 30-day live webinar followed by a 2-day hands-on workshop. I enrolled in this programme. It was very informative and I learned a lot of new strategies in terms of choosing the right keyword and taking the right steps to move up the ranking quickly. This was the life-changing program for me.
After working on many strategies that I learned from different course coordinators in the Bootcamp program, I got a good amount of sales on Amazon. But I was not pleased with the results, because in the meantime I was paying a few people who were working on my projects. I usually run three projects at a time.
But on day 1, I became so upset, because my Amazon Affiliate account got banned for a very few small mistakes. I then took steps to solve all these issues. I applied again and started getting sales like before.
I always took suggestions from Abdullah Al Mamun, a team member of NicheMasterly.com, whenever I had any confusion in making any decision. He is a very good human being. He helped me a lot by spending his valuable time in giving me advice.
A few days later, I heard from Abul Kashem that he is taking an effective link-building session in his Chittagong office. I then decided to go from Dhaka to Chittagong to attend his training. I learned a few decent tricks from him in that one-day session about link-building, especially for Amazon Affiliate sites. Then after I came back to Dhaka, I started applying those tricks and I am now getting good results.
NM: What are the challenges you have faced and how do you deal with them?
I first faced a huge challenge in getting a winning keyword that has enough search volume but has low competition. It actually takes time, even months, to get a winning keyword. Second, getting a rank for my main keyword was tough because no one wants to give a backlink to an affiliate site.
I created shareable content without a single affiliate link and then reached out to them to get the links and pass link juice to the main page by interlinking.
What’s your top tip for getting ranked well in search engines?
- Create as much as shareable content like infographics, which people want to link and share, and then pass link juice to the main pages through interlinking.
- Try guest posting as much as possible, even if they want some money from you. If the site is relevant, then you can spend.
What Are Your Career Goals?
I want to be the Number 1 Digital Marketer in the world. My company Hexagon ICT should be a million dollar digital marketing agency.
What is the target of earning from your affiliate business?
I want to be a net 7-figure USD earner per month from my affiliate business.
Thank you much for answering the questions. We wish you all the best and success for all of your future endeavors.
