Amazon

Anybody making money?

[Scooter24]

My site is a huge photo gallery with 2100 images from seven countries. I get about 1000-1500 visitors/day (maybe more - these are the webalizer statistics). About two weeks ago I became an Amazon associate and put on each of the seven country gallery entry pages three links (with icons) to popular guide books (Lonely Planet and so on).
In the past six days there were 105 click-throughs, but nobody bought a book. In fact nobody has yet bought a book, which makes me wonder if I'll ever manage to sell a book.
On the other hand the guide books are prominently displayed at the bottom of the country gallery pages, so Amazon gets a lot of exposure - virtually for free. Seems like a good deal for Amazon, but not a good deal for me.
Anyway, is there any site owner out there who makes a reasonable amount of money with Amazon? (reasonable = more than just a few $/month)
I'm thinking about dumping the links.

[Jane_Doe]

Anyway, is there any site owner out there who makes a reasonable amount of money with Amazon? (reasonable = more than just a few $/month)

Yes, Amazon can convert really well, but it depends on the site and the target auduience. With my sites, I've found only pages with very targeted traffic sell books well. I recently made too general of a site and sales were very poor. So I went back to more specific pages and sales increased again.

If people are finding your sites for photo or country related terms, then this may not be a group interested in buying guide books. My kids look up web sites all of the time with pictures of countries, animals and famous people for school reports, but the only purchases they ever make online are for Magic cards.

[1Lit]

I make a measily amount with Amazon. Even though I only link directly to individual books, only 2% of sales earn me 15% commission. 98% are 5% or 2.5% for second-hand products. That is a complete joke.

I would recommend you look at CJ or elsewhere for an affiliate program that pays at least 10% commission. Otherwise you will only be earning pennies for every 200 visitors you send to their convulted site :(

[chiyo]

We are running a trial of Amazon again after ignoring them for 3 years. Many highly selected books (with our own reviews), and Web services generated highly targeted books for each page where we also sell Amazon. They are delivering Amazon around 150 uniques and 350 page views a day. We are averaging around 1.50c per day revenue. We have yet to get that acclaimed 10% though 50% of links are "direct". Amazon is getting brilliant exposure, and our ROI (expeneses made up of staff time setting up scripts and writing reviews) is negative to the extreme.

On the other hand our banner and text ads are making us around $25 per day, with almost no staff time at all.

Amazon also means higher page loading times and links to them, very often quite a few per page, which means we run the risk of looking like an Amazon affiliate.

Some people are making a lot from Amazon, and we aint one of them. We will cease the trial in January unless the Xmas season sees a major increase in performance!

[firstmark]

Don't you think a poster affiliate program might work better than books from Amazon?

[Jane_Doe]

I know people complain about not getting the 15% with Amazon, but it does happen. Last month 15% percent of my books sales were at the 15% commission. The month before 21% were at the 15% commission. My units to visitors converion ratio is at 9.75% for the quarter. So far some sites, Amazon does convert quite well and they do pay the 15%.

[edited by: Jane_Doe at 5:02 am (utc) on Nov. 10, 2002]

[Dante_Maure]

Don't you think a poster affiliate program might work better than books from Amazon?

firstmark could be right.

While I'm a massive advocate of peer support and learning from others, what other webmasters think is far less relevant than what your visitors think.

Set up a simple survey prominently linked on all of your pages with questions that will help you establish...

- Why visitors are coming to your site
- What they are interested in specifically
- What they want to spend money on

I'd also suggest offering some kind of incentive to increase participation. A free download, screensaver, ebook, or password protected page that is relevant and attractive to your current audience.

[onlineleben]

As already stated, you can make money with amazon. it depends on how focused your site is and on how good you pre-sell.
If you are no good at referring traffic for Travel-Books, why not try something photo related (guessing that your site with 2100 pics also has some good info for teh photo enthusiats.

[firstmark]

Also if you could create a poster image that would not infringe any copyrights you could have cafepress sell it for you with you making money on each sale with no risk.