Earning Money As An Amazon Affiliate - At Last!!

Today I checked my Amazon account and found that I had made 13 sales from one blog alone yesterday. One of the sales was an item costing £90 and 11 of the sales were accessories for that larger item and all costing between £10 and £15. I was pretty pleased with that even though those sales from that blog wouldn't have netted me much more than £13 commission altogether.

Why was I pleased?

This time last year I would have been lucky to make one sale a month with Amazon never mind 13 from one blog, now it's a bad day if I don't make any sales.

Why the difference?

I stopped just adding banners and links to my sites willy nilly and built blogs or converted blogs especially for Amazon products. Adding banners and links to thousands of pages of my websites just didn't work, they didn't get clicked on so obviously there were no sales. I began to think that it was virtually impossible to make money as an Amazon affiliate but then I read posts on the Warrier forum from those who are making large amounts and decided that either they were lying or I was doing something wrong.

Last November I bought an Amazon training course and following the advice built two keyword researched blogs. Basically I found out what people were searching for and buying and bought domains that included those keywords and built the 2 blogs.

They both started to get traffic almost straight away from the search engines and that was because of the keywords and search engine optimisation. This was good targeted traffic of people interested in buying the products displayed on my blogs. I also submitted articles to directories and added the feeds to RSS directories.

I didn't just have products on them. I added relevant articles of my own and from article directories making sure that I included the author details of course. I used a free wordpress plug in called Amazon Autoposter and my content rich niche blogs started to make commission from Amazon. I used some of that that commission to upgrade to WP Robot, the paid version of Amazon autoposter with more features which includes customer reviews.

December was pretty spectacular from those two blogs, both niches were great for the Christmas market but are also pretty steady all year round. I'm just wondering now how well those 2 original niche blogs will do in the run up to next Christmas when they will be more established and have more traffic.

Since then I have built some more blogs in different niches using the same methods and converted some of my other blogs. My earnings are steadily growing and a lot of that is passive income because I don't spend much time on those blogs now.

Why am I writing this?

Every day I see posts on forums from people wanting to know how to make money fast and often without spending anything. Most replies come from people with common sense who tell them it takes time to build up an online business and that many do not succeeed. You always get the odd one out who tells them that they can make money online fast.... but there is usually some money making scheme to click on in their signature.

Some people do make money online fast but they are rare and an exception to the rule. Less rare are those who have worked hard to build up their online businesses and their lists and because of that hard work in time they can make money online fast from product launches etc.

That's the way it is. Personally I don't want to go into list marketing so my way is to build content rich niche sites and watch my business and earnings steadily grow. I know that I could do things quicker but I want a solid online business that I enjoy and I don't want to sell overpriced overhyped internet marketing products. That is unless I use them and can recommend them.

Why choose Amazon?

Because they are real world products with a much bigger market than internet marketing products. There are thousands of different products to choose from in many different niches. Amazon have grown to be the most trusted retailer on the Internet which helps if you can get people to click on your links.

There is also the upsell factor of Amazon including links to other products on their product pages saying 'Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought' and another list saying 'What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?' and yet another list saying 'Frequently Bought Together' with an add to basket button. All of these features help to procure more sales and it's all done for you.

Downside of Amazon

Nothing in life is all good unless you are a chocolate addict. Cookies expire after 24 hours so if somebody who has originally clicked on your link goes back more than 24 hours later and buys you don't get credited with the sales. Commission is also low, starting at a mere 4% and rising to a maximum of 8.5% depending upon how many sales that you make.

Also there is the different area thing. I live in the UK and my traffic is UK targeted so I am a amazon.co.uk affiliate. However, a large amount of my traffic is from the US and other countries so I lose sales if they click on my links because they get automatically redirected to an Amazon site appropriate to where they are located and where I am not an affiliate. I have seen a way where I can affiliate to the UK and US sites on Squidoo and will be checking this out soon. I am also trying out a blog plug in called Apture that may help make more sales ... we'll see.