Ads for books: best option?

Tourism website with links to guidebooks

[wolfadeus]

My website targets international tourists (mainly from the US) that seek general travel advice; my website offers a lot of sightseeing information, and beyond google ads I thought that one link to a guidebook per sight-page would be a good idea.

Do you have any experience with links of that kind? Which program is recommendable? I thought of amazon. Thanks for your advice! W.

[Acekicker]

Why not set up an affiliate account with travelocity, oribits, priceline, ect?

I have no experience with what you are talking about but those kinds of businesses pop into mind as being logical. I think you can get commisions for life if someone signs up via one of your links, kinda like ebay.

[Beagle]

In addition to Acekicker's ideas, you could also link to Amazon items. The more you can target the customers and what they're looking for, the better you can do with product links such as Amazon's, and it sounds as if your individual pages would be very targeted. You could even offer more than one book per page if you want - but it also helps if you can write a short description of the book and why you might recommend it.

Amazon also has cameras, clothes, and all kinds of other things a traveler might want. If you set up an affiliate account, you can link to any of their items. There are other affiliate programs for books, but Amazon is the only one that has all the other items, too, "under one roof."

[wolfadeus]

Thank you, Beagle! That sort of thing was what I've had in my mind. I already got google ads, and I don't want to make the site spammy, but a single reference to a guidebook would make both useful information for the users and additional revenue for me.

Is the amazon affiliate program a pay-per-click thing like adsense?

[Bidera]

I am reasonably sure Amazon is affiliate program. That is you make money only when someone buys a book from your link.

Apparently some people actually manage to make a living this way.

[Beagle]

Bidera's correct - With amazon you get a commission on what's sold, not pay-per-click, which is the reason targeting what your audience wants and doing some "pre-selling" (telling them why they might want to buy the book or other item) helps. Usually works best on information/content sites where you can link to relevant items.

The general experience is that "making a go of it" with only affiliate links takes a lot more work than using adsense because of the preselling necessary, but even if you don't want to spend the time writing articles and book reviews, affiliate links can be a useful add-on to a site using adsense especially if it's a content-rich site. The commission basis is also why I suggested looking at other travel-related items such as cameras; the more something costs, the higher your commission (with some limitations).

If you want, the amazon links can be strictly text links, so don't need to look like "ads" at all if you don't want them to.

[wolfadeus]

Thank you very much! This is the information I needed. Best, W.