Amazon affiliate sites: do they work?

Sure, if you put some time and effort in them and do them well.
Start by searching YouTube and see if that's what you want to do.

Joe

Hello,
Well yes, but you need to set them up a certain way, if you use a store builder and just hope for the store builder to work, well it wont, but if you do use a store builder like we do, you need to add content pages for what site is about and on home page, so this will add up to 5 pages to be added for starters.

It is very difficult, I currently have about 20 Amazon stores with number of products in each store ranging from 4,000-8,000 products. Just as of last week, Google has begun de-indexing all of the links from my most profitable sites, par for the course, nothing ever seems to last with Google as your "boss".

The internet has gotten to the point that unless you can afford a team of content writers 24-7, you're going to have a very difficult time in the long run. Sure, you can see some limited success, although probably fleeting at that. It almost seems that whoever has the most money ends of first in the Google rankings. Capitalism at it's finest I suppose (sarcasm).

Now to your questions if you choose to continue down this road.

1: With Amazon, due to the commission structure, you're going to want to stick to the highest commission payouts, stay away from electronics, kindle stuff, computer and etc... 4% commissions and less... Go for the less glamorous products, think "Industrial" niche on Amazon, high priced products (higher commissions - 8%) and "unglamarous"...LOL

2: I use this plugin exclusively - Woocommerce Amazon Associates. Once you get used to it, very quick, effective and easy... Though, without unique content on every product page, you may rank in Google for a while (up to a year), but they will eventually get you....never fails. Forgot to mention, I have 2 VPS's running this software, so just my hosting alone costs me $140 per month for these 20 sites...

3: I drive traffic purely through organic search (Google). Everybody knows if you can't get Google to like you, you'll never get any substantial traffic. Difficult to do any kind of paid ads with Amazon's low commission payouts...

Well, that's my abbreviated story and I'm sticking to it...LOL

Good Luck

A significant number of people now choose to do shopping online for a most of reasons. Many people sells inventory on Amazon.com which has a huge amount of buyer traffic.

1. You have to pick one niche of product and specialize in it and start promoting.
2. I suggest to go with Wordpress + Woocommerce + TemplateToaster to build a profitable site.
3. You can increase traffic on your site from social media to create a Facebook Fan page, Twitter, Linked In and Google Plus as well as article writing, blog postings, posting videos on YouTube, SEO and website linking. You can also post your ads on movie review sites, news review sites, funny videos, Classifieds and Forum Commenting etc.

I hope this helps. Good luck with your venture.