Promoting Lower Cost Amazon Products

This exactly. The first consideration always has to be the visitor. Nobody buys something because it will make a good commission for the seller, they buy something because they need or want it.

For kicks I did a quick query of my Amazon sales data and here's what I found:

This past December we sold over 25,000 items costing $15 or under. For products costing over $250 we sold less than 50.

I purposely chose December for two reasons. Admittedly the first reason was that it's Christmastime, so all the numbers are skewed high making the figures here a little more dramatic. But it's also the season where we tend to have the majority of our larger purchases. While, I'm not into sharing my income figures, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that selling lower-priced products is far more lucrative -- for us -- than selling more expensive ones, even in a high spending month like December.

The problem with your thinking is you're assuming that you'll get the same amount of traffic for a site selling $100 products as you will for products costing $10. But generally this is not the case at all.

Moët & Chandon, makers of Dom Perignon, sell more champagne than anyone else in the world. But their revenue at $1.1 billion is nowhere near the Coca-Cola company's $44 billion. And you can say the same in just about any industry: would you rather own Toyota or Ferarri? Would you rather own McDonalds or Masa (the most expensive restaurant in New York)?

The point is, people buy a lot more coke than Champagne. And a lot more people can afford Toyotas than they can Ferraris. And most people will never in their lives spend $600 per person on dinner, but they might get fast food weekly or even daily.

The same holds true with online business. Most people will never buy a $1,000 digital product. Most people only buy one toaster oven or one shopvac or one dehumidifier -- at least for a long period of time. But there are some things they'll buy over and over again, especially at a lower price point. Thus with these sorts of products, you're more likely to get return visitors, which means more -- and much better quality -- traffic.

This last point is something I really want to highlight. For the lower-priced model to work, you have to give people a reason to come back to you again and again. Part of that is choosing the types of products that people repeatedly buy (because not all cheaper products fall into this category). But it also largely comes down to actually running a great site -- and giving people a reason to come to you rather than just going to Amazon (or somewhere else) directly. This is why Al's point about giving your visitors what they're looking for is so important.

One last comment: As mentioned above, "1000 visitors a day is a totally different thing" than 100 visitors a day. But even 1000 visitors a day is nothing. Keep in mind that on the internet the entire world is your potential customer.

So if you can't give 1,000 people a day out of the 7 billion people in the world a reason to come to your site, just go home now. Get a job. You obviously don't think you have the talent or confidence to create something that is actually useful to people.

You don't make money in online business hoping that there's a small place for half-assed work. Because just as on the internet everyone is your potential customer, everyone is also your potential competition. And if they find someone who does a better job delivering what they need, they'll go there instead. It's why 20% of businesses make 80% of the profit and the remaining 80% are fighting for 20% of the profit. You don't have to be an Apple or a Google or an Amazon. But you do have to do what you do better than your competition. And if you don't think you can get a measly 1,000 visitors a day, you obviously don't think you're up to the challenge.