Monetizing with Amazon

May 25, 2007

One of the other monetizing options besides Adsense is the Amazon affiliate program.

People still love to read books. That’s what keeps Amazon in business. What’s so great about that, is that they pay you up to 10% of the price of an item that was sold though your affiliate account.

Building links

There are several ways to display Amazon’s products. But it is made very easy to display the links to those products, with your affiliate code embedded.

Product links

These are links to specific products. There is a choice of Text only links, Image only links and Text and Image links. Examples:
Text only link (basic):
Affiliate Millions: Make a Fortune using Search Marketing on Google and Beyond

Image only link (basic):

Text and Image link (enhanced):

Context links

Just like most other context links by other networks, these links automatically identify and link relevant phrases within your page content to Amazon products. Just tweak the settings, copy the code to your theme, after your content, before the closing </body> tag, and Amazon does the rest.

Omakase links

As explained by Amazon: “Omakase links will show an Associate’s visitors what they’re most likely to buy based on Amazon’s unique understanding of the site, the user, and the page itself. To create Omakase links, simply modify the template and appearance elements below and copy the resulting code on to your page. Then leave the rest to Omakase!”. Here’s an example:

Recommended Product Links

To create this type of link, first you need to pick a product line (Books, Electronics, Baby, Automotive, etc), then you can either enter keywords, or select a subcategory. Next you can select the size of your block of links. On the final page you get the chance to customize link appearance and change the content of the links before you copy the HTML code to paste it in your template. Exapmle:

Banner Links

These are graphical banner ads. You can select them by Promotion or by category. You get to see a preview and the code to add to your site. Example:

Text Links

You can create your own text links, using product line ad keyword combination, product line and subcategory combination, or just create a link to an Amazon.com page, with your own achor text. Examples:
Subcategory: Computer and Internet Books
Keywords: Books on Blogging
Link to Amazon page: Amazon’s Significant Seven, May 2007

Search boxes

You can let your visitors perform searches for products on Amazon by adding search boxes to your site. There are 2 types:
The Standard Search Box:

The Seach box with Dropdown:

aStore

As an associate you can create up to 100 aStores. An aStore is your own personalized storefront. You can hand pick products on each page of your store, or you can display products from Amazon’s Listmania lists or from selected product lines and subcategories. The latter can be narrowed down with keywords. I create an aStore with all kinds of books in the top category, and a sub category of web design related books. Another top category in my aStore is Electronics. Take a look at what a simple aStore looks like.

How you make money

Whenever someone clicks on one of your product links, either on your site or in your aStore, there is a cookie placed on that person’s computer with your affiliate information. This cookie has a 24 hour lifespan. This means that the person has 24 hours to place an order, in order for you to get your referral fee. This is CPA, you get paid for an action, in this case, someone ordering products at Amazon.com.

When it comes to referral fees, you can choose the Classic payment plan, where you get 4% on any item shipped, or the Performance payment plan, where you get between 4% and 8.5% of items shipped, depending on the total number of items that were shipped.

Final thoughts

The Amazon associate program is especially advisable for niche blog. When done right, this can be a very lucrative source of income. But, this program is not a “fire and forget” program. The more money you want to make, the more energy you will have to put into it.

If this sounds like something you want to try, join Amazon Associate and let me know your experience with this program.

Posted in Monetizing