A few Amazon affiliate tips and my earnings of Mar. 2011

• Tweet

• Tweet

I’ve been a happy Amazon affiliate for over a year now and the monthly revenues have been steadily climbing up ever since I started promoting their products galore. The most recent month, Mar. 2011 has ended up making me over $400 in commissions or advertising fees. Attached on the right is the screenshot. Considering I didn’t do much work, it’s really awesome to have a nice side income that’s gonna last for a while — which is the beauty of SEO! Once you done the hard work the right way, it’s gonna last for at least a few years and even grow by itself!

So I’ve got a few tips to share with you if you just started on Amazon to make money.

If you’ve got a blog:

These are tips for people who aren’t technically oriented but blog a lot.

1. Don’t promote a product or widget on a site-wide level. My experience is it almost never works out. Go article level.
2. Add a relevant product at the end of every blog post. It takes extra minutes for a post but it would definitely yield great results. Relevance is the key here. Find the most reviewed and best received product such as a book that carries the information relevant to your blog post. Find the product that best complements your post.
3. Write articles in the mind of promoting one or more of the popular products at Amazon. Do not write to hype how good the product is, instead, write in your genuine tone to solve the readers’ or visitors’ problem and drop your Amazon affiliate links in-between the helpful words, naturally leading them to purchase the products.
4. If you’ve used a product, write a genuine review! People love personal writings. Write a review and be personal. Then link to Amazon page under your affiliate ID.
5. Target micro-niches and go long tail. The smallest product (in terms of price) would make you the most money. Most people who fail in Internet marketing fail to realize this. Small is big.

If you know how to build a website all by yourself:

These are tips for people who develop websites by themselves.

1. Create a comparison shopping site / search engine that integrates a lot of different vendors. Visitors arrive on your page to compare the prices and terms of each vendor (including Amazon’s) and decide where to spend the money — by clicking your affiliate links. This is the mogul approach. It is great but you have to dedicate a lot of time and energy to make and maintain it. I built Dante Books off this ISBN database which is essentially a books directory site with limited price comparison. For now, it leads only to Amazon. 😉
2. Add relevant products to your existing sites. For example, the traffic of a golf courses directory would be very much interested in the golf equipment.
3. Create a review club of certain products. People can come to share their reviews. An online book club would be very fun to create and maintain!
4. Create a rebate site. When customers order under your name and you earn 7% of the deal, give 3% rebate to the customer.

To make the most of Amazon Associate Program or any other affiliate programs:

Some general guidelines in making affiliate programs work.

1. Use a clean, white design with minimum images unless it’s for the sale / conversion.
2. Put content the first thing. Do NOT distract the readers from the content for any reason. Get rid of other ads. Less is more.
3. Blend your affiliate links in the content as if it’s a very helpful and indispensable resource to compensate your point.
4. Write the content within 2-minutes reading time’s length. Use at least one list, ordered or unordered, in each article. Plant at least one affiliate link in the list.

There could be more, but I’ve got to find something to eat now.