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My previous experience with amazon affiliate program for one of my sites almost 2 and a half years back generated no revenue.
However, i am considering to spend more time and have the affiliate links for my sites from amazon. will be spending a lot of time getting this done for all my sites and i plan to use the XML feeds which they have.
I would be interested to know, if any of you webmasters are generating any kind of good revenue? Is it worth the time at the end of the month? Some actual numbers as to how much amazon affiliation generates for you would also be very helpful.
If it is working for you, could you please share some strategies as to whats works and what doesn't?
Thank you for your time.
Cheers
I don't think that anyone is making big money with Amazon. Everyone already knows about Amazon. If they are going to buy a book, they'll just type "www.amazon.com" into their brower address bar. You'll only capture a few dollars of impulse buys.
One of my travel guide sites earns ~$500 per month in "impulse buys" from Amazon - not enough to justify the creation of a stand alone site - but considering how easy it was to implement the "suggested reading" code and propagate it site wide less than 4 hours time total - it justified the time expenditure in the first month.
"Suggestive selling" and contextual recomendations go a long way to making the sale.
Sure people know about amazon - that is why my little 3 inches column space that is labelled "suggested reading from Amazon.com" does so well.
I don't think that anyone is making big money with Amazon. Everyone already knows about Amazon. If they are going to buy a book, they'll just type "www.amazon.com" into their brower address bar.
You Really Don't Get It.
Most people suck at using search engines. They don't pick the right search terms. They don't know how to combine them. They're bad at reading results. They just take the first three things that pop up.
Good affiliate sites refine searches for users who don't know how to refine searches themselves. People do sloppy, generalized searches, and if they're lucky, they stumble into a specialized site that's already done the specialized searching for them.
And, unlike some merchants, I think Amazon actually gets that. That's why they're working on better integrating the Alexa/Google stuff into amazon.com proper. If they do it right, they can steer users towards speciality sites that will feed the user right back into Amazon.
"Suggestive selling" and contextual recomendations go a long way to making the sale.Sure people know about amazon - that is why my little 3 inches column space that is labelled "suggested reading from Amazon.com" does so well.
Now, this exactly what, i would be doing for my content sites also and hpefully fetch me some revenue, if i can do the integration in a very intelligent way.
What i generally see is, while some of them are making some good amount of dollars from amazon, other affiliates, for some reason or the other are not seeing much success. Some of us get it right while other take time to make it work for them probably?
I'll give it a shot this time around with AWS and see if i can get it to work for me in terms of monetisation.
Thanks for any further inputs.
Cheers
Last quarter I made $5,586.35. Yes, it's worth it. Once I'm in the 250% bonus level, next week, I might have a $500.00 day thanks to the holiday season.
I've heard of people making quite a lot of money, like you, but there are also some frustrated webmasters, I think.
Surely G has something up their sleeves for other product categories also. So its a step by step process!
Any ideas? on the effect of Google new initiative print.google.com on these afiiliate sites.
Cheers
I recently changed to using Web Services, with a shopping cart on our site and the user only transferred to Amazon at checkout.
The difference has been stunning. Income has increased by a factor of about 10 and though the change is less than 6 weeks old it is not a Christmas present type topic, in fact if anything it is less likely that people would buy when they are in gift buying mode.
It took a little time to set up as in addition to displaying all results in relavent Amazon categories we spent quite a bit of time creating custom categories where books and other items we know will be of particular use and interest to our users are organised for them in a different (better!) way than they are on Amazon. We also post new titles and recommendations that change weekly. It is work, but it works.
Basically I think if you have a well targetted site with, as a result, well qualified traffic for what you offer through Amazon, and then make it very easy for people to find stuff they want, they will buy it and you will earn decent money.
It's certainly more effort than Adsense, but it is a worthwhile addition to a range of revenue streams.
