20/20 last night......

So Easy,

Your problem is your strategy. Amazon only pays 4% commissions! You need hundreds of websites or sell products $1000 or more to make any kind of real money using Amazon. Last month I sold over $5000 worth of merchandise from ONE website and made very little money.

I would recommend you find products you can sell that make at least $35 or more per sale. Even better if you can find a product that pays you every month.

I like to find products in the following areas:

Health
Beauty
Dating
Make money

Find a product that already sells and build a review site around this product. This is a better method in my opinion.

Hope this helps, Bill Parlaman

There are A LOT of great options besides Amazon. Don't limit yourself to the heavy competition and small commissions of Amazon, and look at some of the other great options available to affiliates and webmasters.

What's the average Amazon commission rate?

The starting rate is 4% and it scales up, depending upon
the number of items sold through your referral links, to
a maximum of 8.5%

See http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/...pensation.html

So it would be safe to assume an average rate would be
around 6.5%


What's a full time income?

Clearly that will vary from person to person. But we could use
an annual income target of $50,000 as an example.


So, to make an income of $50k you will need to generate a
total of over $750,000 sales revenue through Amazon.

That's going to need a shed full of targeted traffic!

John

Thanks to those who responded. ALL of you have the same theme....you can't do it by Amazon commissions alone! Their commission rate is extremely low, in my opinion. However, they do sell a boat load of products each year.

My goal by the first of the year will be to find alternative Amazon competitors who pay a better commission rate.

Thanks guys for the input!

Yes, you can make a full-time income. That's what I had until the recent Google change, and now I'm starting to get out of it.

Don't be too afraid of small commissions. 5% of $1M is $50K, which isn't too bad. And doable.

nadavs

I agree with the above, full time affiliates don't do it with Amazon (usually). The best (in terms of income) in the affiliate marketing is CPA. But if you are into physical products try Share a sale, as seen on PC, and if you can get into commission junction of course do it.

Just for the record, I know someone who is making really good money only with Amazon, but of course I can't share his strategy here without his permission, especially that he doesn't know that I reverse engineered him :-).

As others have said if you are going to spend time creating and ranking all these sites, you may as well do it for products that are going to earn you a lot more than 4% commissions. Yes, 5% of 1 million is $50,000 but 50% of 1 million is $500,000. Most digital products are going to pay you at least 50% commissions. I've never understood the fascination with Amazon. Seems like a lot of work for little return.

There is quite a bit of money to be made with Amazon. My advice is to not worry about how much you make, but work your plan until you have completed it. Amazon sites can take months before they really see a large amount of traffic and if you concentrate too much on what you make, at first, you may become discouraged.

Benjamin Ehinger

Amazon pays a piddling 4% to newbies. If you sell a great number of Amazon products you can boost that commission all the way up to a munificent 8.5%. Whoopdedoo.

If you are going to go the Amazon route the thing to do is sell lots and lots of low priced items. After you sell lots of low priced items Amazon raises your percentage from 4 to 8.5. THEN start selling high priced items from Amazon. You will be paid pennies for the low priced items, but higher dollars for the high priced items. If you go this route you can smile at Jeff Bezos when he drives by your house in his limo.

I read on another thread that folks cross promote click bank products that enhance their physical products from Amazon. Neat idea and I just purchased some LTK domains that I plan to develop using this strategy.

I'm making about $6k/month. $2-3k from amazon, $2,000 from Adsense, $500+ offline and $1,000 + from cj.com. No wso or other Im stuff.

When trying to make money with affiliate marketing, finding the passive, reoccurring is Very Good as well. Ie, membership AKA Continuity sites.

You can build a niche site that promotes:

Standard affiliate products (physical/ebooks/1 shot deals)

AND

Continuity programs (monthly commissions for as long as a member has signed up).

Tackle both! They both have their places in your affiliate marketing strategy.

Hope that helps!

Anyone that says you can't do it with amazon doesn't know what they are talking about.
The commission is low compared to digital product services, sure, the cookies only last 24 hrs, ok. But everybody and their mothers already has an Amazon account and don't even need to fill out any information to place an order.
Conversion rate is much higher and refund rate much lower than with a digital product.
Read this thread: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ing-money.html

There are several other options are available too dude, dont just limitize yourself with one or 2

Sky is the limit with affiliate marketing. I've gone from a few hundred per month at the beg. of this year to low 5 figures in October. However, I spent quite a bit of time learning/doing before that (started in 2009) ... it's been this year that things took off. 99% of my income is from affiliate marketing.

I promote a variety of products, including Amazon. Almost any site can include both digital and physical product promotions. You control the site and can write any post or page you wish. For example, if you have a website about furniture, it's not a stretch to sell some digital DIY home reno product. Even if your site is a narrow niche, there's no reason you can't expand your promotions.

Consider diversifying beyond affiliate offers with Adsense and CPA. I added Adsense about 5 weeks ago to a couple of sites (and they weren't in the optimal places for various reasons), yet averaged an additional $5 per day without lowering affiliate sales. That's a nice bonus.

I've had much less success with CPA, but many people do well with CPA.

Once you find a product or a few products that you successfully sell, promote it to death. Write 50 to 100 articles that link to a pillar page. Do your keyword research for EVERY article to increase traffic. It helps if the product earns a decent commission. So, if it's Amazon, it should cost more than $500.

Don't ignore recurring commission opportunities such as subscription software and membership sites. In time, with successful promotions, you can built up a great passive income with recurring commissions.

Building up a decent affiliate income is a big job. It requires daily effort, tons of content, and consistent promotion. However, once you earn consistent commissions, you keep adding to it. It really is frustrating in the beginning, but it can be done and is being done every day.

As an aside, approx. 40% of my income is now from local business lead gen and referrals which is fundamentally affiliate commissions, but it's quite a bit different than promoting Amazon. I work with local businesses and earn referral fees for sending them new customers. It's something you have to set up individually, much like getting a client. The legwork is more than applying for an affiliate network, but can be lucrative if you work out a deal. My point is affiliate marketing is referral marketing and it can be done in many creative ways beyond Amazon. Amazon is great, but there are many ways to earn from targeted traffic.

Learn the basics such as building sites that attract traffic and convert ... from there you'll have a skillset that is incredibly valuable for pretty much any business.

Remember? Amazon didn't even make a profit the first 6 years in business...

Yes, you can. I suck at affiliate marketing, myself, so I prefer to create my own products simply because I'm better at it. But I can still pay my bills, buy my groceries, and have a little left over using nothing but affiliate marketing.

Granted, it took me two years full time to get there and I've had some seriously rough times. But yes, you can get there. I can certainly make more money affiliate marketing than I can make at a minimum wage job. When I'm behind schedule on a product (which is most of the time), or I don't have one in the works at all, affiliate marketing can usually shore up the gaps and keep things running. And that's just using it as a last-ditch, desperate, "the hosting bill is due" measure.

If I actually wanted to make my living as an affiliate marketer, I'd probably spend a lot more time studying it and testing things and trying to get better performance. But I kind of don't, so I concentrate on building my own stuff and just pull this out of my back pocket when I really need to.

Could you make a full-time living working part-time at your "real" job?

Let's not put too fine a point on it, you're working part-time and waiting for a full-time living. This can be done, if you concentrate on passive income sources, and affiliate marketing can be a passive income source if you do it properly. But you have to think very seriously about what it is you're trying to do here, and make sure your plan can get you to it.

It's not difficult to learn affiliate marketing, really; there's a three-step process.

1. Get into the loop on big affiliate marketing contests.
2. Look at the leaderboards to see what names pop up over and over.
3. Go get on those people's lists and look at what they're doing.

Todd Gross has probably been my biggest unwitting mentor in affiliate marketing. Never hired him and only bought a few products through him, but I've been on his list for over a year and learned a whole hell of a lot. Another big one was John Alanis, although he's pretty specific to the dating and relationship niche.

CDarklock, could you give me a link/point me in the direction of John Alanis? I'm in the same niche as him, and given your recommendation, it sounds like I can learn even more!

You can definitely make full time income with Amazon. You need a ton of traffic or a bunch of Amazon websites. I would personally recommend diversifying your income streams though because let's say your Amazon sites take a hit then what?

Once you get more profits from Amazon start learning about Adsense, Private Ads etc.

You should be "busting your rump" promoting other products through merchants on popular networks like CJ and SAS.

I promote high heels to a list and on various other websites. Some of the merchants I am associated with pay 15% for purchases through them. The shoes that I promote range from $20 all the way to $190.

For one merchant that I promote the "average sales order" reported by SaS is $47. 15% of that is $7 and change.

Amazon is very attractive, but the commissions just aren't there in my opinion. Sure there are some who earn the higher commission by moving more product for them, but I would still rather have 15% of $3000 a month than 8.4%.

You have made $8 and some change as an amazon affiliate. This means that you are doing something right. Therefore, you can decide to wash, rinse and repeat what you are already doing to increase your earnings, or get distracted and try 20 different things that will have the same odds of success.

Affiliate marketing takes work, persistence and dedication regardless of the program or what you are promoting. Clickbank affiliate marketing isn't a cakewalk either, but you can make money with them as well. Same for CJ, Share a Sale and others.

What you need is a good "strategy" to follow in picking niches and building websites that convert into sales. Regardless of what you are promoting, you've got to find stuff that people actually are eager to buy.

I would suggest you used sniper sites. Pick a product, find a domain name that matches the product(hopefully the product is worth over $1000), write some articles and reviews, SEO optimize it, see how it goes, rinse and repeat.

It can take several months of hard dedicated work to start making an income from amazon affiliate sites but I can tell you that it can be very profitable.

I sold off twenty two of of my amazon affiliate websites last year for a decent profit even though each site was only generating around $50 per month.

Stay focused and motivated and you will get there.

The thing is that you might find that other affiliate programs or even other IM approaches are more profitable for you. So instead of putting all your eggs in one basket with just Amazon, try some of the other affiliate programs.

I started out focusing on various affiliate programs and found Amazon to work best for my methods but you might find it to be different. So there's no shame in testing. So your focus should not be on the merits of Amazon's affiliate program but rather does it works better for you than other programs....And the only way you'll know is by testing!

If you are simply trying to be an affiliate, you have to realize that all we are is online sales people for Amazon. Back in the day, I was the number sales rep for Time Life Libraries. I made about 44k. The average sales rep made 20k selling $24 CDs.

In order to make 44k, I worked 53 hours a week for one whole year and sold over 5000 orders of CDs.

A friend of mine that used to work with me went to another company that sold merchant accounts. He worked 40 hours a week and made 80k his first year! The next year I believe he made close to 100k!

So he doubled what I was making in one year while working less!

If your goal is to make 50k, go find out what the average affiliate is doing to make 50k. When I say average, I mean one man/woman shops.

I'm willing to bet that the average affiliate that makes 50k isn't setting up TLDs for Amazon products.

Your motivation for this thread was based on the fact that a relatively young guy took Zappos.com from nothing to a billion dollar company.

But that's not the whole story.....

He first sold a backlinks site for 250 MILLION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!

But here we are talking about making 6% commission on a $100 product, which would be $6.

If you become an affiliate for ROLEX and sold one 7k rolex a month at 11% commission, which is what this site says they'll pay: https://timeandgems.postaffiliatepro.com/affiliates/

Then you'd make over $800 from one sale.

You'd have to sell over 100 , $100 products to make the same amount. Which one do you think is easier?

Lastly, like I said, being an affiliate should only be a small portion of your income because you don't have full control, and you just can't make as much money.

If you looked at the top 1000 internet entrepreneurs, if there is such a list, I would bet that a majority of them own their own company, product and services.

Zappos.com sells other company's shoes but they do it at an extremely high level with a website that get millions of visitors.

Targeted traffic * conversion % * commission per sale = money.

The easiest thing to control in the above formula is the commission or earnings per sale. You either sell a product as an affiliate that costs more, or get your own product or service that costs more.

Think outside the box too. I made 40k from one sale last year of one website and there are many people that make much more per sale in hundreds of different markets.

I stopped using amazon after I got 5,000 visits to the site from twitter and made $1.50. since I live in illinois made a decision even that much easier to leave them.