Are there any successful Amazon Associates present? Advice welcomed

they kicked me out for incentivizing their amazon bounty offer. its my fault, i should have read their terms of conditions.

i was making good money with them too.

Paid Traffic could be one option. Best options would be for Bing or Facebook Ads, I wouldn't go crazy but you could test some low amounts and see if it brings in sales, one or two and it would have the job done. The other option is ranking YouTube videos, they will rank a lot quicker than any sites and could drive targeted traffic to your sites.

Firstly, as far as I am aware you don't have to be an Amazon affiliate to use their images.

To make sales you need traffic. So take a look at your on page SEO making sure you have good quality relevant content. You may need to look at how you are targeting keywords.

Try blog commenting and using forums with a link in your signature.

Also, look at where you place your affiliate links. Banners are generally pretty ineffective, but placing a link within a product review for example can be more successful.

Good luck!

I remember a couple of years ago I places some ads on craigslist during the Christmas season. In three days I produced over $1200 in sales and got my first payout. It was just for a little over 50 bucks I think but hey, its better than nothing.

Anyways I see craigslist has a new platform you might want to check out for the "for sale" items. Also try listing products on ebay.

It's kinda hard to answer this since you really didn't give much information. Are you getting traffic to your website, but not sales? Or are you not getting much traffic either? And what kind of website is it anyway? Because the thing is, that while your site is relatively young and while it absolutely does take time to grow and build your business to a point of sustainability and profitability, if you're having a hard time getting any sales at all in 90 days, then you've got a problem. Our first month we earned a little over $300 from Amazon -- nothing to write home about, but at least we knew then that our business model had some legs to it. If your site is over three months old and you're not getting any sales, I'd really rethink your business model.

As I said, it's hard to give pointers without knowing what you're actually doing, but from what I've gathered from my brief time on the WF, the dominant model for Amazon affiliates seems to be creating a "review site". This site is generally made by browsing Amazon's categories for different types of products and choosing the ones with the highest ratings. For instance they might go to Health & Personal Care : Men's Grooming : Shave : Electric Shavers. Maybe they do some keyword research (looking for I don't know what) and then they build a site around that. They're also very careful that the products cost over a certain amount because they are under the misguided impression that just because you make more per sale, you're going to make more money overall. And of course they make sure that they have good reviews.

They pick about 10 products to review, get a cheap hosting plan, a cheap (and usually very generic-looking) theme and slap up a few pages. Obviously each product gets a page of its own. On the product page is a review and a few pictures that they copied from Amazon's site. And that page has probably been meticulously worded and coded for SEO. And of course there are affiliate links embedded in the page. But of course the real meat of the site (though I think it's more like cheap ground beef than top-grade, grass-fed sirloin) is the comarison matrix. This is where they put their top (or all) products side by side and give them arbitrary ranks on any number of arbitrary factors. In my razor example you might get something like "Razor 1: Loud", "Razor 2: Quiet". Usually, though not always, these reviews feel very stilted towards trying to get the user to buy the most expensive product of the bunch so that the site owner can get the biggest payout.

Hopefully you see the manifold problems in this model as I'm describing it, but I'll spell some of the bigger ones out anyway:

They're offering little to no value to their customers.

1. Their customers can easily replicate their search to find the products they're looking for. If it only took the site owners 5 minutes to find those products on Amazon, why would it take their customers any longer? Anybody can choose a category and sort by rating, which is all most of these "review sites" do.
2. Their reviews are no better (and let's be honest, they're probably much worse!) than what their customers can already get on Amazon.
3. Their comparison matrices feel forced, arbitrary and are almost always geared toward the "best" razor (or whatever) instead of trying to match the right razor to the right person. Sometimes this is alleviated somewhat by segmenting the products into subcategories such foil shavers or rotary shavers -- but the problem is still that they're still assuming that what's best for one person is best for everyone. And the truth is that while product matrices might work for some types of products, they really aren't the best comparison tool for everything under the sun.

They offer no authority, no track record and no reason to trust their recommendations.
This starts with the cheap look of the site, the poorly written reviews and the pictures that anybody could just download from Amazon. But it also has to do with the fact that most of these sites are relying very heavily on search engines or ads for traffic which means that almost all their visitors are first-time visitors. Trust and authority are things you build up over time. But since you're not offering any real value to your customers anyway, why should they come back? And moreover, why should anybody link to you (which is what's going to give you the biggest boost for SEO)? You also earn trust and authority by doing an amazing job. Not just a good job -- anybody can do a good job, and on the internet you're literally competing with everybody -- but an amazing job. And that's a lot harder to do.

Building your site around one very limited set of products doesn't encourage people to return to you
Let's say despite the above, one of these sites actually succeeded for once. I bought an electric razor from them. Now what? I get my razor; maybe I even love my razor. And so the next time I need a razor I... Oh, wait. I'll probably never need another razor again! So that 8.5% you made off of my initial $100 purchase is all they'll ever get from me. And now they gotta find someone new to sell and market to. Tough way to run a business! Which is why instead of building your site around a set of products, I think it's much, much better to build it around a set of customers. Because doing it that way you can cultivate long-term relationships with your customers through list-building, social media, blogging or just by having a good experience over and over again whenever they visit your site or buy from you. You just can't do that with a site that's basically a list of the top 10 electric razors, A/C units or whatever else you might be selling.

So again, I'm not sure what kind of site you're running, but if you're like so many Amazon affiliates on the WF, I think your problem might be a fundamental issue with your business model -- and that's something a changing/adding product links or doing a giveaway aren't going to solve.

Good luck!

Review some hot selling products in your nicbe and run some ppc traffic to them via Bing and adwords. Track which keywords are making sales and scale from there.

You should be able to make some sales within a day or two.

Cheers

To jan roos and Kilgore: The first site is about pet ownership and so the products I show are mainly pet products. That seems like a pretty wide range, I suppose, especially since I talk about aquariums and fish in a few articles, and that can be a broad niche too because there are a lot of consumer products related to aquariums.
The second one is about crafting so I am showing craft supplies, including books, different kinds of craft paper, glue and adhesive, etc. Since I use half of these kinds of products I figure my opinions on them are credible. Same as the pet niche. I do try to walk my talk, always.
I have written quite a few reviews on Amazon....I am wondering if I could include screenshots of some of them? The ones related to pets and crafts?

A proper review of any product will not try to make out it is the best product for everyone because such a product probably doesn't exist. kilgore is right - much depends on the person interested in buying the product, as well as the product itself.

A good review of any product will contain something that can't be found in any other review of it and that is of value to potential buyers. If your review is just a rehash of what is on the Amazon product page then you're probably not going to get many sales.

It comes back to the basic rule of marketing, and of life, that you have to provide value in order to receive it.