Is Amazon Associates Program Worth it?

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Hi Warriors,
I think IM is a good idea of getting some form of income. Since having your product remains the best way to make money since you are in control. I was just thinking: what do amazon associates program has to offer as a learning platform as well as an income earning startegy. This is a new year I am thinking that with a little patience in 6 months from now I can get some income from Amazon. My questions are:
1) Can you earn a living from amazon? Anyone who have?
2) Amazon is better than CPA networks am I right?
Your answers either way will be appreciated
Thank you
#main internet marketing discussion forum #amazon #associates #program #worth
  • 1) Yes

    2) Yes

    But it's the same as anything... it's not easy, you have to work it right. Find specific products that cater for the needs and requirement of your niche.
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  • See my response in red. Hope it helps
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    • I make a full time income on auto pilot from Amazon.com

      It took me about 2 to 3 months of work before I started seeing some consistent results. It's been 8 months about now since I started and I now have a full time income on auto pilot, I am also outsourcing everything 100% so my business is growing without me which leaves me time to go travel and pursue other business opportunities such as product creation to diversify.

      So yeah, to answer your question. To me Amazon associates is totally worth it.

      Cheers
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    • thank you for your advice
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  • 1) Yes
    2) Amazon is a affiliate network, not a CPA network, therefore cannot be compared with each other.
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    • thank you what i meant is not to compare the two in the way they work but the easiness of earning
  • If you're a newbie, then making a good income from Amazon affiliate program in a short amount of time will be quite difficult. You only make a small % per sale.

    But the reason many people like the Amazon program is because they are reliable, trusted and is a well known brand.

    I personally like affiliate programs that pay at least 50% or more per sale.
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  • Yes, it is worth it as long as you have good search rankings.
  • Me and my business partner make a full time living from Amazon. We currently average close to $15k a month and in December made just over $32,000. It is definitely doable and we know of people making more than us.

    Prior to this we used to use merchants from Commission Junction and Linkshare and other similar networks. They resulted in some sales but not much. Amazon really made the difference in our business.
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    • Once again, impressive. Nice work.
    • Paula, how are you paid by Amazon? In Australia they only pay you in Amazon Gift cards - is there a simple way around this?
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    • Wow! Do you have a lot of sites? I guess i am trying to see how with such a low commission on physical products people can make so much money.
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  • PaulaC Do you target Google US or Google AU?

    I've read alot of your posts & I bought your Amazon profit plan ebook (which is amazing ) a while back. I also heard your pod cast interview which had some great info too.

    It was your success & information that first drove me to make money with Amazon. I have started to see some success & 2011 is looking very good for me.

    One thing that really got me was how much the UK Amazon affiliate structure differs from the US.

    Amazon UK cap all commissions at £7 per sale which is really bad. I only found this out after selling a £300 item & got £7 commission.

    Also with Amazon US to get the top commission of 8.50% you need to sell 3,000+ items but with Amazon UK you need to sell 30,000+ item to get the top commission. This makes it hard to get the top commission % in the UK.

    I have no idea why the Amazon UK make it so much harder for their affilaites to make money but I'm still going to push ahead & see if I can make a good income from the program.
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    • We only promote to the US - so we try to rank in Google.com and we use Amazon.com only.

      We don't promote to Australia because Amazon won't send most of it's products here.

      We've never tried to promote to the UK. I guess you would have to look at the benefits of doing that. It may be easier to rank in Google.co.uk - if that's the case then it might be worth promoting to the UK. You would really need to do your home work on it.
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    • Thanks for all this information about Amazon UK.
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  • You can make a full time living with Amazon many have and I'm one of them, but just because a lot of us made it work this doesn't mean it will work for everyone, it's a lot of work just like it any business, you have to advertise your blog, split test, test and do more testing. But if you stay in this game and don't give up then yeah .... you will make a full time living from Amazon.
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  • Tried it for a year...low returns and very demanding
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  • thank you all for your answers but I still need more answers to the later questions
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    • Your asking the wrong people. DO what I did

      Pick up the Phone and speak to amazon directly. Many of the high claims on this forum are bogus. I don't say that just because i am mean. It's because I had a very long in depth talk with an amazon associate manager and they made it clear that " They have not heard of people making above 10K in amazon, if they had they would talk about " they said " The majority of the high earners have sites which have extreme traffic " No 8 page wonders even if they are 1000 words a page.

      Now having said that. You could earn $1000 maybe $2000 if you had a lot of sites and really put in a lot of effort but dont expect to buy a $97 ebook go out and be making $10k by the end of the year.. That is total toss talk geared only to get people to keep buying an ebook.

      Amazon has conversion power but that in itself doesn't equate to easy money.

      Making good money in affiliate requires a lot of consistent work
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  • I have been trying to make money with Amazon for the past 8 months after following a course on the subject that I bought from Sara Young. Like all internet marketing it is very competative. I have so far found it difficult to find a product within any niche that is not already saturate with other affiliates.

    The other problem is getting good listing on Google for my web pages which are usually wordpress or blogger blogs.

    In order to get listed I am using article marketing and after several months am having some success with some keywords. However to date sales have been somewhat limited. I am still optimistic and feel that more success will come as I add more articles for different keyword.

    I have and am still promoting a few CPA offers in the health and Fitness sector. Once again I am using article marketing to drive traffic to the web pages for these products.

    Hope this is useful.
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    • It is fairly easy really.
      Just this last week I started promoting a book from Amazon that is in the top 10 list.

      After 36 hours I was #1 in Goggle for variations of:

      "Author name Book Name"

      Crappy .info domain with PR0

      Pick a product that gets over 4 stars in reviews with over 30 reviews
      Write 700-1000 quality words about it with associated words sprinkled through it.
      Get backlinks to that page.
      Write 5 shorter articles relating to this.
      Link from all 5 back to main page.
      Back link smaller pages.
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    • You should also try to bookmark your articles, ping them and try to generate backlinks to your articles using livejournal etc...

      Ping everything and bookmark it. If you can get hold of RSS feeds (but only for your account) then you should also ping them submit them into feedburner and ping it again.

      I know this kind of method seems to be time consuming and labour intensive but what it will do to your traffic generating power is something amazing.

      I hope this helps.
    • I've done pretty much the same with Sara Young and article marketing. The only time I've made money is in article writing and it was quick. I should keep trying because I have to admit, I did enjoy the course.
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  • I think the whole "pay by cheque" issue is the biggest gripe I have with Amazon - otherwise I think that it is a great way to make money online. I wish they would follow Clickbank's lead and start allowing direct deposit for international affiliates.
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    • I think with amazon you only need to be patient
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  • As you probably know by now there are lots of people out there making a living promoting Amazon products. I recently changed my online strategy and decided to start doing some Amazon stuff as well and have already made a few sales after just a few weeks in without too much effort.
  • encouraging thank you
  • I'm new to IM and I'm personally starting as an Amazon Affiliate. I bought Dan Brock's course and it was great. I think the only thing I really need to get down is backlinking.

    I just finished my first niche site... I have all my articles set to drip feed and I'll start back linking them as they come out. I just need to create a schedule and keep track.

    On to my next niche site... and then I'll make another... and then I'll make another. I'm hoping to have atleast 10 sites within the next 3 months. Hell, I made my first complete one in under 5 days... I can only imagine how quick I'll be when I get good at it! I'm sort of a computer nerd though.

    I'm really going to try not and pay attention to my stats because I know/believe If I do the right thing... conversions will start to occur maybe a few months down the line.
  • Regarding the comment from Brandstrom - post #19 "This seems like a major traffic leak since Amazon said affiliates don't get a commission if the customer clicks those links and buys from the other stores."

    Perhaps these are the third party items which we do get commission from. (Check the Amazon Affiliate Earnings Report - At the bottom of the report there is a break down of Total Amazon.com items Shipped and Total Third party Items Shipped. I believe this may be referring to those items.
  • people just buy stuff but a few implement what they learn here
  • My biggest gripe with Amazon and the only reason I don't focus on them 100% is the fact that they don't pay lifetime commission if they did I would jump in with both feet
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    • Oh maaaaaaan! Lifetime commissions with Amazon would be awesome.

      What affiliate programs pay lifetime commissions though?
    • what do you mean by lifetime commission? you dont mean like a neverending cookie do you?!?!
    • all the same it is a good way to make money
  • If you really want to know the nuts and bolts of earning a lot with Amazon, study PaulaC's blog (in her sig). I've been following her model and seeing great results.

    I wrote reviews of products that cost $250 or so, and am averaging 10% of my amazon clicks turning into purchases for those products!

    Although commissions are much lower than clickbank, conversion is way higher!

    Here are a few tips (most of which I learned from Paula!)

    1. Choose products that cost at least $xxx, so your commissions will be more significant than the .35 cents commissions I'd earn on the sale of a book.

    2. Write helpful reviews of the product. The key being "helpful". Don't just rehash the description, spend a day researching everything you can find out about the product, and present it in an easy-to-read and friendly format.

    3. Get SEO traffic by getting backlinks with your anchor text to your review pages until you are ranking well for your keywords. Target keywords like "product xyz review" so that you'll get traffic from people who have their hands on their wallet and want to buy this type of product.

    4. Get the Preview Tool working on your site: so that when people simply hover over your amazon text or image link, they get cookied into your affiliate link. (Test this out, it may be more or less effective in different niches.)
    5. Don't worry about competition. Most people are lazy and will abandon their sites within a few weeks or months, meaning that it will be easy for you to outrank them if you keep at working on the same site, their sites' rankings will fall.

    6. You don't need to get ALL the traffic in the world for that keyword to make a good living. If you can rank in the top 3 spots in Google for a couple of different long-tail variations of your keyword, all that traffic can bring you a nice amount of money. So what if some traffic goes to other sites? Does Walmart lose sleep because some people shop at Target?

    7. Work on ONE SITE at a time! Many people want a cluster of 10 or 50 sites that each earn a couple of bucks a day. While that can work, you'll be spending an enormous amount of energy just checking your stats and logging into each site to do tweaking! Additionally, the amount of backlinks pointing to a domain is a big factor in google. So, if you are working on backlinks for your page example.com/blue-widgets, you are also indirectly boosting the rankings of your other pages like example.com/red-widgets, because you are bringing more backlinks to the domain as a whole - which is impossible when you're spread across a bunch of sites.

    8. Don't stop doing these steps until you have at least 100 visitors daily from the search engines for your target keywords. Once you have that much traffic, you can do split testing and tweak. But, most people will give up way before they have 100 visitors from their keywords daily.

    9. Keep imagining a point in time - maybe 10 or 18 months from now - when you are selling 25 $250 products through your site daily. At 7.5% commission, that is $18.75 x $468.75 every day. Yes, you'll have some expenses, you might be outsourcing some backlink building and article writing, but $468 daily can support most families in style. And you won't have to deal with customer service, returns, emails for support, and can take a couple of weeks off at at time without harming your stream of income!
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    • Great, GREAT point!

      I hammer this point to my students and yet many of them are just not patient enough to take it one site at a time and then when they tell me how scattered they feel when they tried doing 5 or 10 at once, I tell them "Told you so!"

      If you really want to do well with Amazon, build your empire one site at a time. Once your site has solidifed on Google's first page, then work on the next!

      Ellen, this is one of the best posts that I've read on Amazon Associates in a long time! Excellent contribution!
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    • I will incorporate this soon, but I would assume that you can assign a tracking ID to it, but my thinking is, it doesn't matter if they get the cookie if they actually never click on a link. Yes, there is the small chance they may visit amazon by typing it in, so that is a definite benefit. I'm just thinking out loud on how I can track the effectiveness of this.

      Thanks for sharing, by the way.
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  • Hi Julie, you are missing the big point, even if a digital product pay much % of commission, they usually sell on $7 or $97.

    On the flip side, one physical product can cost $5,000 which will pay you $200 @ only 4% rate.

    It is easier to market a real product than a digital one, because you have a large number of consumers who are willing to buy that product.

    Just see: On the Christmas, people buy real gifts as presents, but not ebooks/softwars. They spend lots of money on this season; just as the guru amazon affiliates have mentioned on this thread, they got some huge commission on this Christmas season. Makes sense?
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    • In my opinion physical product are better
  • This is a really valuable discussion.

    Think about this: Ask your real-life friends and relatives this question:

    "Have you ever bought an ebook?"

    I did an informal survey of my friends, and they all said, "no."

    Then I asked the same group of people, "What's the most recent 3 purchases you've made online?"

    And the answer always included amazon within the past few weeks or months!

    Most everyone orders from amazon. More and more people order things online every day that they would not have thought to order online a year or three ago (when they were more used to driving to brick and mortor stores.)

    Even I, who have been in IM for 5 years, find myself ordering categories of products for my house that I used to drive to Walmart or Target for to save time.

    And Amazon does an INCREDIBLE job of converting visitors into customers and upselling and cross-selling. Our job as affiliates is to get "product-hungry" regular folks over to amazon, then let amazon work their magic.

    Ok, back to work to tweak some of my review pages.

    One more tip:
    Use a plugin like "all in one seo" on your WP site and pay attention to what the "snippet" of text that is displayed on your SE result says - that will dramatically affect how many people click through to your listing, even if you're not in the top spot or two, you can get much more traffic by putting in 160 characters of highly targeted information, rather than just letting Google pick up the first 160 characters in your post, which may just be introductory words.
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    • I don't recall if this has been brought up here yet, but with the upsurge in popularity of the Kindle and similar e-readers, ebooks look to be a growth opportunity.

      Besides, sell enough of those $0.99 ebooks, and you can give yourself a nice raise on those higher priced items...
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    • I found that useful Thank you
  • I use a combination of Hub Pages, Squidoo, and my own Amazon store fronts, using an awesome Amazon store script. It is a nice, steady income indeed.

    Basically, it's just research a niche, buy a good url (or use existing domain), create Amazon store, repeat
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  • The fact is there is more traffic out there than you can shake a stick at and people are buying stuff online like mad, heck, "I'm" buying stuff online like mad. There is so much money to be made selling physical products it's insane. Amazon is massive, and people just love to buy stuff there. Having said that, they are far from the only source for physical products...Buy.com,linkshare,Commission Junction etc etc. If your willing to do the work it's hard "NOT" to make money. The fact is you can "& DO" make money in your sleep.
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  • I dont know anyone who is making a ton of money of amazon or any other program would bother spending so much energy to sell things on how to make money doing so. I use amazon and make a living off it and in no way have time to write or help people make money doing it themselves lol . Seems like a lot of bs . For the amount of time I would spend doing that I could double or triple my amazon income and that is much better for the long term.
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    • SO I'll share my 7 - 8 week amazon experience based on actual results.

      Around Thanksgiving I think, I took an old adsense site that was making a few bucks and threw some Amazon products on it (it's in a niche that is hot during the holiday season). I made some nice sales thru Amazon over the Holiday period. Nothing that I'm going to retire on but for a few minutes work very nice.

      I also registered a new domain on 4th Dec. It was for a household appliance! Lets call it light bulbs (I'm keeping the real one confidential!!!). The site I registered was lightbulbreviews.info (yes a .info).

      I've done some backlinking and stuff using Fiverr and currently I am at position #25 for my main keyword and climbing but I am also getting good traffic through long-tail keywords that contain the brand and model name. Made my second sale yesterday. Not bad given I am barely spending any time on this.

      I can see a LOT of opportunity here.

      Anyway just my personal experience, take it for what it's worth!

      Simon
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  • Hi, Smartdoctor:
    From what I know about Amazon Associates, it's well worth the time and effort. I'm just now in the process of creating some "sites" that will connect with Amazon, but it's been highly recommended to me, and I know others who are making lots of $$ every month through their associate accounts.
    Good Luck!!!
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    • I am new in it too and I have to put more effort on traffic building for my websites Thank you
  • I know that you can make a really good living from being an Amazonassociate..I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of people that made serious money on Amazon
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    • I have also done my research well and I can say this is the truth
    • Like I've mentioned before, take advantage of Squidoo and, in particular, Hub Pages to test the niche. Once you've found a good niche, then you can use those pages to point to your Amazon affiliate store.


      ***Important***

      Always, always make sure your affiliate store site is more than just a bunch of products. It must provide value to the visitors, as you don't want to have it labeled as a "thin affiliate", which Google hates.

      Add other scripts and features to the site and add original content/value.

      The very best is to build a store into a directory on an existing, well-established domain. The nicely organized, professional looking store can actually be considered a "service" to the folks that have long hung out there. A friend of mine has a shark site that has been around for years. He added an Amazon store to it and is now making a nice, steady income. It's win-win for everyone.
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  • Yes you can make great money with Amazon!
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  • Ellen C. Braun touched on this above, but for those of you who are making this work, do you find there's a good price range of products to stay between?

    In other words, if you're selling only $5 products, you won't make much commission, so it makes sense to market higher-priced products.

    But can you go too high? I wonder if there's a point where a lot of people won't spend that much for a product online, because they want to see it in a store or try it out. So is there like an upper limit where it's not worth marketing things that sell for more than $1,000? $2,000?
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  • I think including Amazon is worth it.

    On my Adsense websites, I will usually reference a book or product as a recommended example item to help the reader solve a problem. I could care less whether or not they buy that particular product. I don't have to spend time writing copy on a product I've never used by looking at other reviews. All I want is the click to get that cookie in a user's browser for 24 hours, and hope that the user buys something else later on. With a conversion rate of 5-10%, I'm pretty happy with just getting that cookie in there. I would rather have the user exit via an Adsense click. But if they don't click on it, I'll settle for the Amazon cookie.
  • Lots of great info in this post and I wanted to chime in and provide some info on my results.

    Unlike some IM'ers, I have a full-time job and sell my own Clickbank products and other products on Clickbank in both the IM space and other niches. I've passively been involved in selling on Amazon for while and when I began to see so much junk being sold on Clickbank I turned my direction back to Amazon.

    I started revamping a few of my sites in June of 2010 and made less than $200. I began mixing my sites (2-3 of them) with reviews, articles and video reviews. I created traffic using core SEO methods, video posting and backlinking.

    In the span of a month I was able to increase my traffic and my amazon commissions from less than $200 to over $800. The next month was even better.

    While I love the initial setup and getting everything going, I hate the maintenance because I'm lazy. Typically after a month or so I'll use some auto posting plugins that keep the site looking good. I've managed to keep most of my top rankings for my sites and most are within the first page of Google.

    A few tips I've learned that I can pass on. I have a site that promotes smaller dollar value, popular products...think impulse buys. These alone push my volume and commission percentages up very quickly each month. I actually dont care how much I make from this site, the entire purpose is to get my order quantities up for commissions on bigger orders.

    My bigger dollar order sites are detailed, better reviews, less "noise". I always add in accessories for those big dollar products if available. My big dollar product sites almost always have video reviews. Just simple powerpoint presentations that I've designed to be product-review stylized. A little goes a long way.

    I never sell on my sites. Every is based on reviews and social proof. If people are on my sites it's because they are already in buying mode. My job is to push them off the fence on the right side while delivering helpful information.

    SO for those asking, YES, the Associates program is worth it. In fact, I actually recommend Amazon over Clickbank and eBay Partner programs for anyone that actually wants to make their first money (or any money) online.

    You won't make $45,137 in 30 days from the start like some of those push button Clickbank products, but if you want to start seeing results, give it a try.

    Jeff
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    • I thought may be clink bank was better but you seem to have had a real life experience with both
  • She means pages. But, what does it matter? Pages. Posts. Don't over think it
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    • Because if she meant pages I wonder what she is going to do with it.

      If you got a review site you post reviews as posts...
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  • Most of my reviews are on pages and my posts are posts. Works wonderfully for me
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    • I guess it can be done both ways. I would assume that one isn't necessarily better than the other. Just a matter of choice......

      I like them as posts so my home page is filled with for example 5 reviews.

      Pages will be used for about, contact etc.
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  • You can make a living off of both of them...don't let anyone tell you one only one thing works....develop a clear exact plan and stick with it..you can get either of them to work....master the area you are in....thats what those who are top do...
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  • Correct me if I am wrong here, but doesn't Amazon set a session cookie only? Meaning you'll only get paid if your referral buys on the initial visit and if they leave and come back later no $??? It sounds like they don't really stack the deck to favor anyone but themselves. I know there are strategies and tactics that can make amazon viable and even lucrative for affiliates, but it just isn't for me.
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    • But you can also use wordpress as a general CMS, not just a blogging platform.

      its a 24 hour cookie
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  • Do you think Amazon will become saturated? I know there's many niches but there is only so many of them and it seems that more and more people are becoming Amazon affiliates all the time and are competing to get on the 1st page of Google for the highly searched keywords in their niche.
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    • If your sole strategy for generating referrals is competing on Google for a handful of obvious keywords, then I'd say that there is a real possibility of saturating the obvious niches. Especially if that competition is among superficial 'review sites' scraped from Amazon itself.

      Beyond that, Amazon has millions of items that fit almost as many niches. Once you get past butting heads over laptop computers, cameras and big-screen TVs, there's a lifetime worth of products and matches there to exploit. And I use the word 'exploit' in the best possible "everybody wins" way...
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  • Yesterday someone bought a product to keep cats out of their garden on my site. Of all random things! (That's not something I promote, but with Amazon you get credit when people buy anything at all through your affiliate link!)

    Like Paula advises, I've found that really high-quality reviews work best. I read up on all the technical details, and explain the features and benefits in every day language, which people really appreciate. It takes me 6+ hours to write one review - and that is because I spend hours gathering the relevant information, breaking it down into bite-sized pieces, and presenting it pleasantly.
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    • do you put some links in your review or you put them after the content? :confused:
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  • I don't write long reviews and I do well. I do a brief overview of the product, list features, then pros and cons, social proof, and then summarize. I also might link to a youtube video. As long as I'm getting traffic to my page (which I think is what making money on amazon is all about), I'm getting sales.
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    • Good post....2 things:

      1) Short reviews can do just as well as the long reviews. Most visitors scan posts and want to get to the meat of the information.

      2) Google still shows a lot of love to blogs with youtube videos within the posts. They're very easy to incorporate! It's a great way to accelerate your rankings on google if you're site is stuck.
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  • Yeah I think it's worth it. The commissions are low, but the products tend to convert a lot better than clickbank. Promote amazon products in addition to CPA and other affiliate programs. It's best not to have all your eggs in one basket anyways.
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    • Yeah you have to spread the risk by incoporating other plans on your site
      I think Adsense or CPA can be a perfect fallback plan
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  • It's sort of like everything else, stay with it until you become an expert, most lose focus and move on for some reason.

    It's like shopping in a store, something catches there eye and they move on.
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  • I feel its worth it if you know what you are doing and understand the terms of service, payout system etc. There are literally thousands of products (probably more) to promote in different niches and its a trusted company, but the thing is to make sure you do not get discouraged. In the beginning, you may start out selling hundreds of dollars worth of products and ending up with 10-20 dollars worth of commissions and feel you are being cheated, which is why it’s important to read the fine print and make sure you understand it.
  • It depends what you get good at. The top people in CPA would never mess around with amazon's 4% commissions. But the people making gonzo with amazon probably don't do any CPA. I personally think you have to be smarter to make your money doing straight CPA than stuff like amazon sites. I fall into the amazon category... I could never get CPA to consistently be profitable, but I can make one hell of an information site. Go figure.
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    • If you're good with traffic generation and getting the top spots on search engines, you'll make money no matter what the monetization method is.
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    • Thanks for this Nate. Very helpful
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  • hi there. is it better to have your product descriptions as pages or as blog posts on your site?
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  • Kea55,

    I think it comes down to the number of product descriptions you will have. If it is only going to be a few, then pages would be okay, but if you are going to have hundreds, then use posts.
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    • so if you have multiple reviews on one page, how do you backlink that? like I mean seems like you would have a lot of keywords to backlink for and readers would have to keep scrolling when they reached your page right?
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  • I'm making a full time income building Amazon sites for others. The Amazon thing is so popular right now and there are some people who don't know how to do it the right way. I've learned from Jan Roos (who posted in this thread), PaulaC (who posted in this thread), Dan Brock and the Niche Affiliate Program by Chris Guthrie.

    So it's not just a matter of writing a review site and slapping it up there, there is a lot more involved than that. Jan's WSO is good to learn how. I think it's the best out of all that I mentioned.
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    • Well I bought Paula's "Amazonian" product, can you tell me if Jan's methods are much different or do you recommend I buy his too before starting off buidling a site?
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  • I never used amazon as a affiliate but going off what i read from other marketers.
    I would prefer CPA Networks: Why (higher pay,more freedom,have your own affiliate manager to talk too, can get paid weekly if you choose etc)
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    • I only make a small amount through amazon, roughly £250 a month, but I am not too bothered about whether or not I get paid in a week. Amazon pay you 60 days after the month end and I like that because I know in 2 months that I will be getting paid and acts like a little savings account.
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  • I think yes. I use it and I make 20$ per week with it.
  • Very encouraging and inspiring thread..
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  • I have learnt a lot from this thread. Thanks everyone
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    • I have to get my first niche websites GOING before any of this is even relevant to me. But--having said that---I have been hearing here on WF and in other places as well that there is a lot more potential income in physical products than digital. So my first take on the subject as a newbie is--why not be an Amazon Associate ? At some level it's just another affiliate program. As someone who has made most of their money so far through only ONE program on Clickbank, diversity sounds good.

      Thanks to the contributors to this thread----my takeaway is that getting into Amazon is a good idea. And your detailed suggestions go way beyond that.

      polrbearz

      P.S. FreshDomains--I am seeing you all over the place today. You joined a month after me but have quickly become a every involved posterer. Best of Luc.
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  • Its very worth it. I like it because there are endless products that you can choose to promote for every niche imaginable, as well as all price ranges.
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  • I would say yes you could earn a full time income with Amazon. They don't pay a ton of money per product but the products are everyday products people buy anyway. So it's not hard to sell at all. People are looking for them anyway. You just have to create the sites and get it in front of the buyers. Easy money!
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    • Hi Everyone,
      When I wrote this thread I was not even sure of where to start but I have started And I appreciate the progress so far. My only worry is the ' amazon astore feature' seems not to give me enough catch as I had anticipated. Can anyone tell us if they are using this feature and possibly share the dos & donts... oR am I rather impatient? :confused:
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  • I am quite new to internet marketing and wanted to market Amazon products by using sites such as Snipsly and Xomba. I intended to write good, informative articles and try to get traffic in this way.

    But I have read that to get an Amazon Associates account you need to have a website with several pages.

    Does anyone know what the situation is with regard to getting an Amazon Associates account?
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    • I think it is best to get your own site just so you are in full controll and will not get taken down. Also your not wasting time backlinking an article which is not on your site.
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  • Well I just started with Amazon about a month ago and so far I have not made a sale yet,but I am positive that things will be OK very soon when I start getting that very much valued traffic. As for whether you can make a living from Amazon, I would say possible but difficult.
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  • My resounding answer to your questions is a big YES. But you have to be effective in selecting your affiliate product...
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  • I originally put this on as a separate thread, but thought later that as this thread is about Amazon, it may be answered here.

    I have been looking at ways of selling products online. Amazon in particular.

    I was given a system using Snipsly, Xomba and some other article sites to promote products.

    The advice to get onto page one of Google was to use the full description of the product as the title of the article and also for header 1.

    I see a big problem here.

    This was one example given.



    Well, the article was published some months ago, and is still on page one of Google today.

    That sounds great, but if you put this title into Google Keyword Tool, you find that it gets absolutely no monthly Global searches at all.

    So, if no one is searching for that term, what is the point of getting on page one of Google if you are never ever going to make any sales.

    It would seem that if you use any less obscure phrases for your title, such as maybe 'Portable Air Conditioner' you will see that there are now thousands of monthly Global searches, but you will never have a hope of getting on to page one of Google as it is far too competitive.

    How do people promote Amazon products by writing articles, would it be better to use something else for the article title, other than the product description?

    I would welcome your views on this.
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    • Rob,

      All the guys on here that make what I call considerably high incomes from Amazon all say the same thing.
      Make your front page an authority page. 800-1,000 words. Put as many LSI keywords in it as possible, includung words like "best", "cheap", "buy", "purchase","website" and a word I use constantly, "amazon".

      You will start ranking for terms you never thought of.
      Link from every post or page on your site back to your index page twice. Once in text and the other in a pic.

      Backlink your index page like there is no tomorrow then grab those backlinks and backlink them. I kid you not, it works (the cheque I got in the mail last week says so)

      Cheers mate,

      Craig
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  • @robwill2. Id like to know the answer to that also. Im using the SEOPressor plugin. When i create a review page it asks you to enter the main keyword for the page.

    The product name keyword doesn't show any monthly searches on the Google Keyword tool yet other more generic keywords related to the niche are to competitive so what are you supposed to enter as the main keyword for the review page?
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  • Definately can make full time income from Amazon.

    The hard part is just sieving out all the "noise" from the WSO,s if you are just starting out.

    1) Buy 1 good Amazon guide is all thats needed.
    2) Learn which backling stategy works for the least amount of input/money.
    3) Work hard building a few sites till you start to earn money from them.
    4) Re-invest profits, outsource the work and scale up as quick as possible, snowball
    the income.
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  • Hello Cooler1.

    Yes, it is a puzzle to me, and one that I would be grateful for an answer to.

    I am sure that promoting the higher value Amazon products could be very profitable, so I would like to get into this.

    I do see occasionally that people are searching in reasonable numbers for the exact product description, but not that often.

    I am sure that someone will come on here soon and give us the correct way to do this.
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    • From my experience it is just as easy to sell a $200 than it is to sell a $50 product.

      Why?

      Because people looking for reviews for a specific product is already prepared to pay the price of the product they just don't know which one to get yet. This is where we come in.

      Review products that costs over $100 at least because we will make more per sale and our sales will be just as good as if we promoted a $50 product.

      Your home page will be optimized for "product x reviews" depending if there is search volume for the keyword. You will then rank your home page for that keyword and start getting sales.

      Every product that you review on your site will be on it's own page optimized for that product's keyword or keywords. If you have 7 products all on their own pages these pages will start to rank individually for the product name keywords and you get additional targeted traffic onto of the traffic you get from your home page keywords.

      Wash, rinse and repeat a few times and you have yourself a great income stream.

      Cheers
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  • I have no doubt that there are people making 10k/month with Amazon. If you're saying someone from Amazon told you that no one does that, then either he or you are aren't telling the truth. I have nothing no product or service to push here; I'm just going by my short experience with Amazon and what I see it can do. 10k/month? I'm an IM newbie, and I can see that in the realm of possibility for myself eventually, even. I'm talking years down the road, with a lot of daily work, but it is for sure possible. If a newbie would be wise to put that much effort into a single income stream is a different issue, though.

    However, I agree that it is in NO way as easy as some of the sellers of Amazon products/courses/coaching make it out to be. It's a ton of work if you want to make any significant amount of money, and it's definitely going to take a while before that starts coming in. Of course the people pushing products/services are going to artificially beef up their numbers. There's no way to prove that they're doing it, so why wouldn't they?

    Amazon definitely seems to be treated like some magical push-button system around here, and it's far from it. From the perspective of a newbie, you have to put in a ton of work/effort for very little (or no) immediate payoff- or even any payoff at all if you do it all wrong. I'm sure it's much easier for experienced marketers, though. I don't have experience with other affiliate networks, but I'm sure it's mostly the same. If you're a newbie, don't expect to buy a pre-made Amazon site or affiliate course for $100 and be making $5000/month from it. It's not gonna happen. The guy selling the course may actually be making that, but let's not forget that there's a difference between someone that's been doing IM for years and a newbie who found this forum yesterday.

    I can't speak for any of the coaching or courses offered here, and I'm sure some of them are actually great, but you need to put in a ton of work on top of it if you want to get anywhere.
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    • Yes there are People who are making 5k to 10k a month with amazon. But this people doing it already for quiet some time.You can not expect that people who finish one Amazon course will start making this kind of money. But if those people will contribute their time and work in to it. Than it is possible to make money with it!!

      I read an Article about Amazon, and how much money they have done in 2010. And it's a lot of Money!!!! And the good thing is 40% of Amazons revenue comes from Affiliate marketers!!!


      Thing about it!!!

      And yes I'm a newbie, but i got already my first sales with my first site!!!
  • I know you will find it difficult starting on your own. There is a learning curve and I would suggest that getting guidance and help from others (usually paid) will speed things up considerably for you. Best of Luck.
  • I know a lot of ppl that made a lot of money on Amazon. So yes, if you have dedication then you can make lots of money there
  • I've been a member of the Amazon network for many years and put links to some of their books on my websites. It generates some free income every year with no work on my part other than putting up the roiginal image and link which is just part of building the web page. Worth it, but, not going to make you rich.
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  • I picked up Sara Young's course and was pleasantly surprised with how well she explains the whole process of setting up Amazon product sites.

    But like many others have pointed out already, I also discovered that getting the right keywords and doing some SEO was essential before I started making money. Plus, it takes some time to start getting traffic.

    With that said, I think that the Amazon Affiliate program is definitely worth it and has a lot of potential to make a significant income.
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  • Has anyone here put CPA offers on there Amazon sites. What were the results like? Did you see a decrease in Amazon conversions or was it worthwhile?
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  • Lots of posts and interesting information.

    The biggest draw I find for Amazon compared to other affiliate marketing is that it promotes physical products.

    I find it much easier to sell physical products than ebooks and such because they are more readily identified. By this, I mean that a Sony 32" flat screen is the same product no matter who you buy from. Not necessarily so with how-to informational products.

    You don't usually need to do as much selling for physical products. Yes, you need informational reviews and such to "push the customer over the edge" to buy from your link, but by the time they hit your site, it's likely they already know what they want, and often what brand, so what you are really doing is providing them emotional validation that they chose the right thing.

    This is a far cry from trying to establish your bona-fides and sell them an information product that needs to be proven to them to contain the value they are looking for, along with providing the actual solution to their problem.

    Look at your own buying habits. If you are anything like me (probably not, because we are all different individuals) by the time you are looking at reviews of a physical product, you've already decided to buy something, it's only a matter of which model or size, or price.

    On the other hand, if you are looking for information or an information product, you may spend weeks trolling through forums and searching Google or Bing before you actually do anything. Perhaps you've already tried to get something done in IM without purchasing a product. In this case, you may be ready to buy, but if not, it may be a longer sell than a physical product.

    Of course, the big draw in IM products for most folks is the high commission rates.
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  • Been making about $400 - $500 in passive income through Amazon for the last few months. What really stepped it up is figuring out your market.

    Before, I was offering a much higher end product related to a hobby niche that I also participate in. I found out that the majority of my readers certainly didn't have that kind of income so I switched up the promotions - I started receiving double the amount of clicks and since Amazon is so great at upselling and cross selling, I often get some great commissions when people buy multiple items.
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    • What I often get confused about is why don't people just go to amazon themselves instead of going to google then to our site which will then bring them to amazon?
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    • Purely Inspirational Thanks
  • I get a lot of traffic for pages I've built whose names are www.mydomain.com/product-xyz-vs-product-abc

    People are wondering whether they should buy Product XYZ or Product ABC, which are similar, but have differences.

    Create a page about that and throw backlinks at that page targeting that keyword phrase (product xyz vs product abc)

    Then list the similarities and differences between ABC and XYZ, linking all your images and a few text links to Amazon. There's much less competition than trying to rank for "product abc" and your page is seriously helpful to potential buyers of one of these products! Most niches have loads of similar products from different companies, or different models made by the same company!
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    • This is a helpful idea - thanks! I guess I had not thought of doing a comparison! Duh!!
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    • Thank you for that idea
  • The downside of Amazon is that the commission is relatively small. The upside is that they sell EVERYTHING!!! So there is bound to be something that you are interested in enough to write articles about etc.
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  • One Good thign about amazon is you can even use free blogging platforms like blogger, wordpress and send the visitors to amazon site. The conversion after after people sees amazon logo is very huge

    If not for your product they end up buying something in the 24hrs... it is quite possible to earn something from your visitor and do that for every visitor.

    Amazon takes care of everything you just need to redirect buyers to their site (any amazon.com page)


    Thanks
  • The problems with most people when join Amazon program and give up are:
    -Their landing pages did not get enough traffic
    -The traffic is not target, have many clicks but no sale.
    -The commission of sale is not enough with their wish.
    If you can solve this problem, you can have a cash machine .
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    • I agree with you that is why it is necesary at times you seek guidance from people who have made it in this field.Thanks
  • There are tons of opinions.

    1. It's worth it
    2. It's up to you

    There are people who are making more than 10K a Month. But they really work hard.

    For example, Paula and Wanda from affiliateblogonline.com make $14.000/Month.

    However it took several years for them to achieve these results.
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  • I think it works! Mind it, I have no experience working with them.
    But in near future, I'm planning to create niche sites with Amazon products!

    Hope that works!

    Karan
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    • Karan,

      I bought a product from one of the warriors here about article writing and she focuses on amazon. Private email me if you'd like more details.

      Brenda
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      • [2] replies
  • There is something that I wanted to add to this thread that I didn't see anyone mention before.

    People generally talk about choosing best seller amazon products or 4 stars + products that receive good reviews. I personally go after as many bad products as I can. This might sound strange but the reality is that many low rated products get searches and if you just ignore them you are leaving money on the table.

    I actually would include more low rated products than top selling products on my website. The reasons behind this are simple :

    1 - Bad products get traffic. Don't forget that Brands do all kinds of advertising even if their product gets bad reviews.

    2 - You can redirect that traffic to your better products. For instance if I review a 1 star rated product on amazon I mention the cons and the pros ( in this case the cons would be emphasized) and then suggest the visitor to forget about this product and buy another one instead. By following this you can turn a targeted visitor looking for a bad product that you would have missed out on, into a buying visitor of a good product.

    3 - By following what I just wrote in 2, you gain in credibility and authority and your website looks more like a natural website instead of some cheap review website that only has good reviews to make some quick affiliate cash.
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    • Good tip! will definitely add this in my arsenal =)
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  • Yes, it is possible. I have just started and touching around $100 a month
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  • I would venture to say that Amazon is one of the easiest programs to get discouraged in as you could easily sell an item for around or over $200 and only receive a $10 commission on it and then never be paid as the commission fell below the threshold depending on your payment method. Its excellent if you can move alot of products on a regular basis and don’t get discouraged but many/most will end up quitting in disgust because of sales that are few and far between and not worth it in terms of compensation.
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    • As with anything if you work smart and focused you can make money with Amazon. I have not done much myself but I do know someone personally that makes a nice living from her commissions coming from Amazon.
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  • Yes. I am personally doing well with Amazon so it's definitely worth going into.
  • just to keep this topic alive and not open another thread, does anybody know if there is a LIMIT as to how many sites and tracking ID's you can have listed in your associates centre? thanks.
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  • [DELETED]
  • From the Amazon Associate website.
    There is a limit of 100 Tracking IDs per associate account. If you have further requirements, please contact Associates Customer Service>
  • Glad I found this thread as I have picked up some very useful info, even though I may not know how to do some of them yet. I have a niche website I've been really struggling to get traffic to. I have an Amazon store on it, yep, no sales yet. I just started to write a review of one of the products and will put a link to my store.

    I always put the new blog/article on my site first. Then I make a blogger blog and also submit to article directories and social bookmarks. Don't know why I'm not seeing any sales yet. I do, however get lots of comments to my blogs, mostly junk though which I delete.

    This thread has given me much needed inspiration after reading the Amazon success stories. I'm glad people are willing to freely share their strategy. It's very helpful, thanks.
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    • Hey there, I'm a fellow internet marketer who is just starting to come good on generating an income.
      I have a downside with amazon and thought I might share it.
      I'm very familiar with affiliate marketing and have learnt a lot over the last couple of years and know it takes time and commitment.
      I was recently in touch via phone (live in Aus) with amazon and they offered me 3 packages to start up my own amazon affiliate site. Didn't get too far in discussing the 3 options as he told me I would need to pay a monthly hosting fee. Ummm, 24.95 per month for hosting, don't think so. I asked why I couldn't use my own hosting and he turned very nasty on the phone and basically told me that I know nothing about affiliate marketing. With that in mind, I don't think I will go down the amazon path.

      Has anyone else heard of amazon advertising jobs like this? and has anyone spoke to amazon recently in regards to signing up as an affiliate?

      Just curious
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  • I like AAL, for my first venture I've made money with less then seven days of my site being built, and less then 20 clicks through to Amazon.
    • [1] reply
    • That sounds great! If you don't mind me asking, how much have you earned from this?
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  • unless you actually good amount of sales and have chosen the righ comission structure other than that i personally havent been in the favor of Amazon also because of their pay period .
  • I use Amazon as part of my overall online business plan as I believe it is important to have a variety of income sources just in case something happens beyond your control to one of them!

    You do need to be patient with Amazon payments if you live outside of US and don't have a US bank account (or international one). $100 minumum payment threshold by cheque and you get paid roughly 2 months after you hit the threshold due to refund time etc.

    For UK its £30 and straight into yout bank account.

    However I like Amazon as once people get to amazon they might buy a lot of other items that have nothing to do with what you sent them there for! Christmas is a great time!

    You need to have the amazon disclaimer on your site or they wont pay
    You need to make it obvious that you are sending people to amazon (no hiding links) or they might not pay
    You need to 'own' the website that you send traffic to amazon from

    You can promote any number of products.

    I tried CPA with no success! I definitely recommend amazon though!

    Good luck!
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    • This! I haven't sold one thing yet that I sent a visitor there for. They decide they need an ridiculously expensive pair of boots while there instead, great. The boots cost 20 times the item I had in mind.
  • I agree unless you are making a lot of money the program just isn’t really worth it. You are basically working in the present for money you’ll receive months from now. This money may also be chunk change resulting from a lot of work and expense. I believe it takes 60-90 days something to that effect in order to get paid.
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    • This sounds like a scammer trying to sell hosting to the naive by invoking Amazon's name. The giveaway is the fact that the person turned nasty over a simple question and made a clumsy attempt at intimidation.

      If you still have any details (caller ID, etc.), Amazon (and their lawyers) might be interested in someone using their name.
  • My resounding answer to your questions is a big YES. But you have to be effective in selecting your affiliate product...
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  • It's nice to know you are referring your customers to a major established quality site. Amazon has excellent customer service and works hard to maintain its reputation. When you send someone to purchase on Amazon through your link, they may feel more comfortable purchasing with the Amazon brand name behind the product. I really like the program.
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    • Holy **** this thread is amazing, cant even begin to count how many gold nuggets i picked up from this.

      I sincerely hope that this thread will stay alive for a long time to come.

      I do have one question though. And that has to do with Keywords.
      This question was asked earlier in the thread, bot nobody seemed to provide an answer, so here we go again.

      Ive allready picked a niche of products im going to promote.
      Most of the products have montly searches based on the product names themselves. - But, i do have 2-3 products that do Not have any monthly searches according to keyword planner.

      So targeting this as a "main keyword" in the SEO tool plugins seems very counterproductive.

      How do you work around this issue?
      Naturally the "main keyword" in the review article has to be something else than the product name...i just dont know what keyword to chose/use.

      Hope someone can provide some insight here

      --Ben
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  • diffcult...i feel even now I forcus just only one site which i owned didn't get any sales..

    my niches is all rounder from electronics to health even...

    I heard those successful ones..own many website..especially cater for one niche...
    that means you have to pay a lot on hosting too...etc..
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    Hi Warriors, I think IM is a good idea of getting some form of income. Since having your product remains the best way to make money since you are in control. I was just thinking: what do amazon associates program has to offer as a learning platform as well as an income earning startegy. This is a new year I am thinking that with a little patience in 6 months from now I can get some income from Amazon. My questions are: 1) Can you earn a living from amazon? Anyone who have?