Discouraged with Amazon...

It's because you are targeting Amazon the wrong way.

You can't just throw up a product image on your website and hope it converts with info-related traffic (which is what I assume your site is about).

You need to target specific product keywords with Amazon to make it work because by the time people search those keywords, they are within that 1 day buying period you speak of.

A lot of this depends on your niche. Impulse buys and folks that know exactly what they want typically do better with Amazon.

I've never found Amazon to be a profitable income source. I looked at the potential revenue and it doesn't add up to be worth the time
If you think about it you are only getting a % of the commission THEY earn whereas with CJ you are getting a percent of the actual sale of the item - Big difference.

Personally I would just use the sources that make you money like CJ

If you think about it, every person who clicks an Amazon ad on your site is NOT clicking a CJ ad or even an adsense ad - so you are really loosing out.

Dump Amazon and funnel that traffic through your other links.

You've tested and now you know!

We aren't in a position to rant about Amazon, they are at liberty to offer whatever deal, cookie duration they like, if we don't like their offer and/or cannot generate revenue that way we just have to go elsewhere. If the cookie length means many affiliates go Amazon might change, if they keep coming back Amazon will stay the same.

I am sure they will argue that because they ahve such a large brand, the traffic isn't nly driven by our own SEO etc. work but also benefits from their positioning and we can also have some confidence about their delivery.

So if you cannot make it work, learn from the test and move on

Yeah i think amazon affiliate program is not doing well these days. I think you can make much more with some cpa network.

Gearmonkey, you provided the solution to your own problem in your original post.

You say that Amazon.com isn't working on big ticket items because buyers like to research.

Why don't you become the resource they need to answer all of their questions?

Find your most popular products getting clicked on (to Amazon) and flesh out your content so it provides everything they need to know about the guitar, amp, or pedal.

Make them want to buy after they read and leave your page.

me 2, i made 2 sales with them and then nothing.

It is funny this should be brought up today. I have 34 squidoo lenses for Amazon and have been listing very specific product names. I checked today on Google search and a lot of them are #1 and a lot are on the first page. Still my sales are very minimal.

I've found Amazon's affiliate program to not be overly profitable. I rarely use amazon for anything other than product research.

Gear-monkey, it would be really hard to say why you do better with CJ and Shareasale than with Amazon without having some stats about your traffic and clickthroughs. $50-500/day with CJ is great but if you have 500 product links for CJ in your site and only 10 for Amazon, then of course CJ is going to do better.

I'm not saying that's the case, I'm saying that without this information it's hard for anyone to help diagnose the situation but it's obvious many experienced warriors would like to help you figure out how to use this information to improve performance.

Many warriors could show you stats that would prove Amazon can be a great source of income regardless of the 24 hour cookie and on high ticket items. I have one site alone that gets 500 visitors a day and will make $700 this month - most of that from Amazon.

It's not that Amazon doesn't work, it's that each person has to ask themselves: "How and where does Amazon fit in my toolbox as a way to further enhance income in my niche?" It's not the same for every person or for every niche.

What if you could tell which products or which keywords did better linked to Amazon and so linked to Amazon in those cases and linked to CJ and Shareasale when Amazon wasn't best? What if you knew where your visitor could get the best price and told them so in the review?

This may help because:

1. My guess is that at least some of the products you are trying to sell do really well on Amazon and may have a lower price there, as well. Maybe it's not every product but even if it is a percentage of your products, you'd be best serving your visitors by pointing them to where they could get the lowest price and serving your visitors well usually pays you back in the long run.
2. Some people are going to be more comfortable buying through Amazon than another site.
3. A lot of shopping takes place on Amazon around the holidays. You know...shop for a guitar and then buy 20 kids toys because it's that time of year. Just the icing on the cake.

I did a search in Google for guitar related products with more than 50 reviews on Amazon and a price higher than $100 and there were plenty of them.

Looking at a few pages of your site reveals some interesting information. In many cases, I compared the price on Amazon to the price on your CJ vendor and it was exactly the same. Your CJ vendor offered free shipping, too, and even waived tax in some instances.

This would be part of the explanation for why you do well on CJ over Amazon. There's not a great deal of room for price arbitrage to encourage visitors to buy in one location vs. another and you probably make a higher commission rate at CJ so it's worth pointing the visitor to them.

However, there are some things you could do that might improve your clickthrough rate regardless of which vendor links you use.

Here's an example. You have a review on the Zoom Q3 and rank decently for a long-tail search word. But...

1. Your product image doesn't link to a vendor at all.
2. In the body of your post there are five outbound links (2 blocks of Adsense, 2 inner page links, and a banner ad) to things other than the product itself before your visitor ever gets to a link that takes them to where they can buy the product. You have given your visitors a lot of escape routes.
3. There are 2 small text links to the affiliate vendor and neither of those links takes the visitor to a product page about the Zoom Q3. It takes them to the vendor's home page so the visitor has to actually search for the product themselves. Makes your visitor work harder to get what they want.

Most of your reviews are formatted similarly although some do have a nice set of links to check prices on multiple sites but by the time the visitor gets there you've given them all those other outs.

Revising your review template to include more links direct to the product (where possible), more links of various types (images and text) and larger, more obvious calls to action and action buttons might increase clickthroughs in total.

Besides making changes to improve your clickthroughs, if you can get your visitor to click to both vendor options you should find some incremental improvement in your income just from having cookies in both places. Maybe the visitor buys the item at a CJ affiliate but goes back to Amazon to buy other accessories that they know are cheaper there than at the CJ affiliate. You then get commission from both.

Only you can say if any of these ideas are worth it for your site because maybe you do so well with the banner ads and Adsense that it's more valuable to you to keep them positioned where they are. I'm just taking a stab at how clickthroughs and sales might be improved without knowing all the other details about your site.

Edited to add:

What Fraggler suggested is very important for improving conversions. Some other threads mention writing lengthy, detailed reviews when you want to sell high ticket items to give the visitor everything they could possibly want to know before hitting the "buy" button so that you help them make their decision and encourage the sale.

I feel your frustration gearmonkey. In fact, most if not all affiliate will feel that way with the short 24hour tracking cookies.

Perhaps you wanna say...




But.. there are 2 things that you need to know...

1) there are widespread of info that teaches people to clear their cookies before buying from Amazon.. Amazon makes regular customers pay more ? The Register

2) if the prospect adds item to his/her cart within the first 24 hour period, and make the full purchase within the next 90 days and you will still receive commission for those items

Don't get discouraged. Just do what works for you.

Cheers..
Waken

Well Amazon isn't really for big ticket items. They convert well with low cost impulse buys.

The reason for your poor earning might be you are missing your amazon tracking ID of the products you are promoting.

Hmm... This isn't good news.

Haven't done amazon except in a very small way and didn't really expect to earn more than small change... and haven't earned anything yet. But your experience sounds really off-putting. THink I'll stay away.

Considering that the 24 hour cookie accounts for a huge chunk of my Amazon income, I will have to be the voice of the minority and say that....I'm not complaining! I'm focusing on the buying keywords and in those case, my site visitors are usually ready to purchase fairly soon.

True! Most of the items purchased I wouldn't consider them to be big ticket items ($500+) but the quantity of sales more than make up for it.

I'm just grateful that it's not a 1 hour cookie!

Well thought out post Sojourn, thanks! I'll re-read it and put some knowledge to use.

I made money on AMAZON.com today!!!!!!! I made a whopping $0.79 cents!!

However, I made over $190 on CJ.com so far today. I've decided to start removing Amazon.com links and start working harder on CJ.com. I hope to be at $1000 per day in the next 6 months.

I've had OK luck with the Amazon affiliate program, but am not holding my breath for better results by any means. I don't know, some people do very well, and some not so good.

Guess you have to get lucky and find that product that really pops. Somebody let me know when they do!

gearmonkey are you sure your links are formatted properly? With so many visitors, you should get a lot of unrelated sales, even if people don't buy your guitar stuff.

I am not sure which is your site (I looked in Google and the site at #2 doesn't have any links to amazon, and it's a black background and hard to read), but if I were you I'd check the link structure and make sure your Amazon ID was in there and properly formatted.

I agree that the Amazon cookie period is rediiulous, not to mention their commission percentage too. I have noticed through selling other products through CJ that most of the people I refer to a merchant end up buying a few days later. It is unfair that Amazon gets the sale and you get no credit for it if you refer someone who buys 2 or 3 days later. This is why I am constantly moving further away from Amazon associates.

This is interesting timing because I am running a survey right now
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...-one-says.html

One of the questions of the survey was naming the income method that works least and right now Amazon is topping the list

Its an anonymous survey
I'm just reporting what I see

Yeah, it seems that every $3,000 dollars I make through CJ.com, I make $0.28 cents through Amazon affiliates.

I think Amazon is set up like a game at the county fair, they make you think you can win, but strategically set it up to where it's nearly impossible to profit from. 4% commission and 24hr tracking cookies is pretty greedy by Amazon. Especially since they are probably getting hundreds of thousands of sales they don't pay commission on, because tracking cookies run out by the time the buyer pulls the trigger.

Statistics have proven that the consumers don't pull the trigger for 48 to 120 hrs after researching the big ticket product they are shopping for. Amazon cleverly thought of this and changed their TOS to 24hr tracking cookies. Brilliant on Amazon's part, not so brilliant if you are working hard to make Amazon sales.

If you are making decent money through amazon, imagine how much more money you could make if you were working with an affiliate that pays 2% more and allow a full 2-weeks of tracking cookies.

Not sure exactly what you are selling, but I play guitar and quite honestly, would not buy anything more than a cd or music book from Amazon. A serious musician is not buying an instrument from Amazon, each one plays and feels differently and needs to be tested so mail order is not the way to go. Best of luck.

I think you'll find that Amazon and CJ both work well....I've never been a fan of combining different affiliate links on one site. So I would just focus on one or the other

Go with what your stats and intuition tell you....Some people have found their stats to be a direct opposite and so they focus just on Amazon. In any event, if you got a good thing going then....Keep it going!

From my experience people have no problems buying big ticket musical equipment online. I sold a $1,700 item already today. The buyer gets free shipping, (likely) pays no sales tax and can try it out for 30-days to decide if they want to return it (which is also free shipping back if they call the store).

I'm not sure if Amazon has the same standards for buyers. I'm thinking about trying email marketing, that's something I never attempted. I have 3000 emails right now and can get more if I giveaway a guitar or something. I'm thinking about hiring someone to help me with this goal.

Looks like it's getting saturated.

Hi everyone
I'm new here and was just surfing the site when I saw this thread. One of my bigger sites is in the camping niche and I'm selling exclusively through Amazon, without much luck. My main page gets plenty of hits and provides about 100 hits to Amazon per month. Not earth shattering I know, but the thing is this... The webpage seems to be liked and the Amazon graphic clearly shows the current price of the product on the day. People click through to Amazon, but hardly anyone buys. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance, Stu

Just guessing here... but people might be merely shopping, then head to the local store to buy.

If you concentrate your efforts on products that simply aren't available locally, or products that most people end up purchasing via mail-order/online... you may improve your prospects.

I must admit I don't know much about your niche, but that would be my take on it.

Take it for what it's worth...

Harrison I agree,

guitar center, musicians friend, zzounds to name a few, all have affiliate programs. Music specific stores catering to musicians with social proof similar to Amazon with user reviews. I would try using any of the programs listed above if you are going into musical gear niche.

Steve

Call me old fashioned, well, cause I am.

I don't like any business model where I'm standing on someone else's rug.

I've had my share of having the rug pulled out from under me and ended up on my arse.

TODAY, right NOW. There are many, MANY warriors who are, IN MY OPINION basing their futures on the actions of other people.

Be these people Google, FaceBook, YouTube, ClickBank, Commission Junction, etc. etc.

POINT is: at any given time in the future, you're humming along, making BOO KOO (for Halloween folks) buckeroos and then WHAM, SLAM and on your butt Mam goes you.

Cause Google changed the math. Cause the founder sold the company. Cause you or an affiliate violated some arcane TOS, or simply because they wanted to change directions...

And there have been Warriors in the past who have hit it out of the park...and then, we heard the horror stories.

HEY, I'm NOT saying to ignore these money streams, some can be fantastically profitable. SOME people ARE making a fortune from Amazon. Others don't make squat.

What I am saying is; PUT yourself in a position where NO one, NO ONE, ever, never-never can pull the rug out from you.

You do this by CONTROLLING your own products (even if you acquire them) and by putting yourself in a TOLL BOOTH POSITION where the supply meets the demand and you stand in between.

FEAST while you can if you are depending on others, just be aware, you may be standing on a carpet which may seem like a fleeting second as if it were a "flying carpet", them's the seconds right before you fall on your butt and go OUCH.

USE Amazon. Don't let them USE you.

gjabiz