Amazon Associate Program

Anyone making good money on this?

It's only 4% of the item purchased price but it stores cookies in that persons computer so whatever they purchase on amazon for 24 hours you get credited with 4% of the purchase price.

What do you think? Is that true?

you can check everything you want about amazon affiliate here:


You will find all answers there.

It works for me. I make an extra $120/month with it. Not a whole lot, but it's all part of the solution.

CoyoteAssassin said:

It works for me. I make an extra $120/month with it. Not a whole lot, but it's all part of the solution.

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The product I am selling has a price of $3.99-$23.

What is the price of one sole unit of your product?

Most of the time it's a p.i.t.a. to make any serious money with them. And they're very strict... if you're aggressive you'll get your account reviewed/suspended at some point. That's when they're the worst. It can take weeks to talk to someone and months to resolve.

If your plan is to send shady traffic... don't. They don't like it and they won't pay you. Plus, they take so freaking long to pay out that they're highly likely to sniff you out before the check comes due.

If you have a good plan (and usually loads of traffic) then you can definitely make it work, though. You move up the commission scale pretty quickly and can get to 8.5% with relative ease.

Don't bother pimping low-end stuff, though... it's not worth it for the nickels and dimes you'll make selling books and such.

My best month I made just a shade over $46,000 with them, so it's definitely possible to make good money as an associate. But most associates don't even come close to making anything serious (like just about every other affiliate program).

And they're famous for slapping affiliates that rake it with them. They made me agree to a new affiliate agreement once I starting making good money every month. They basically said they would pay me for everything except the item I was promoting. Go figure.

Strange way to do business... but they definitely don't think they need affiliates at this point (imo). And they treat you that way. Any big associate I know has at least one horror story working with them.

So it's kind of strange... in some ways they're the most affiliate friendly site around because of their product selection and how easy they make it to get started. On the other hand, they're far and away the worst I've ever dealt with at the higher end.

Get creative, though, and you can do well.

One last thing... I don't think I've seen a slower-paying program than Amazon. Takes months to get paid. It's a hard way to go if you're paying for your traffic. You've got to be able to float it for an unusually long time. Could be expensive.

Oh (last thing... for real), and they're tracking is the worst. Virtually non-existent, really. So it can be difficult to optimize paid campaigns. As in virtually impossible.

Good luck.

Only play the game with them if you are selling high ticket items. Don't expect money with $4-$23 stuff. Max you make in that is just under a dollar if the very best item is sold.

If you can sell a big ticket item (eg: Laptops), the good news is that the Amazon name is EXTREMELY reputable, but honestly, I'd look for just as reputable a name amongst consumers-of-the-product-you-are-selling and go with their less generic name recognition but higher commission.

I sell nothing but DVDs and make about 50/month on some pretty simple autopilot sites.

Biggest tip I can give anyone starting in the Amazon associates is to make sure you change your affiliate commission scheme to increasing. They have two options a strict rate of 4% or another options where for every X amount of items you sell your commission rises. Of course its the strict 4% option is set by default..

I made a lot with Amazon expensive products, 1 sell for 1 site make me around $200.

I try not to sell the electronic as it commission rate fix at 4%, other products you can get up to 8% if you got a lot of sell that month.

I have success to sell bestselling products, even it has a lot of competition (high competition is good right?)

I am an active affiliate and I can tell you that it's not a walk in the park.
Either you have dozens of amazon dedicated websites or you have it as an addon in an active website.

Either way, the payout is way too low to make serious money. That's what I think (and experience/d).
I get 0.16c / 4$ sales, etc... It's really not worth the time if you don't have a killing strategy. (Even when you reach the 6%, and I do reach it - It's really nothing).

JohnnyRabbit... I can't PM you back, so here's my feedback (without giving away your site or product)...

With a product price that low you'll be facing 2 primary challenges. First, you'll need a ton of traffic to make any decent money (although I don't know what your financial goal is). So you're relying almost entirely on the 24-hour cookie for your primary monetization.

The cookie definitely works. But I wouldn't use it for my primary monetization without stacking the odds more in my favor that it will be meaningful revenue (more on that in a second).

That leads to the 2nd challenge you're likely to face... you're not promoting a product that naturally leads to other sales. Any additional purchases made by your traffic will be purely incidental to your promotional efforts.

So, if I were promoting a lower-end product I would try and stack the deck for myself. And I would do that by promoting a product that naturally leads to secondary purchases.

For example, I once successfully promoted video game console controllers. It's not something I would typically promote standalone because the commissions aren't high enough. But gamers are highly likely to also purchase a hot-selling game, additional accessories, or multiple controllers.

So I could drive traffic to a fairly low-end product knowing there was a high likelihood that ancillory purchases would be made because of the product / market I selected. Does that make sense?

So I ended up selling a *lot* of $60 video games because I was promoting a $20 controller.

Your promotion has a couple of ways you might be able to drive higher secondary sales... but it's a bit of a stretch to get there.

This post is running longer than I anticipated, but let me wrap up with the only 3 strategies I know of that consistently work with Amazon...

1. Butt-tons of traffic and monetize the sheer volume. (I've never pulled this off because I don't drive that kind of traffic. Most of the other serious AA's I know that make bank use a high-traffic monetization model, though).

2. Promote a high-end (typically $250+) product(s) that can stand on its own as a revenue stream. Your traffic will be niche traffic, but Amazon does a great job converting this kind of traffic and it can be very worthwhile. This is the primary method I've used to do very well with Amazon.

3. Promote products that have organic upsells and companion products that will naturally and consistently bump your average sale to multiples of the raw product you're promoting. If you can combine this with #2 you've got a goldmine.

I know there are other ways to make a little bit of money on Amazon. But for real money you need to pick your promotions very strategically and know what the buyer is likely to do once they hit Amazon. Or just have a butt-ton of traffic ;-)

I have a few product review sites that I monetize with Amazon. Yes their payout is not the best but they have a very large selection of products and almost everyone knows and trusts Amazon.

One of the great thing I find about being an Amazon affiliate is becuase of their size and the number of people that purchase from them, that I find that I am getting sales for products that I dont have affiliate links for on my sites. So people are either visiting via one of my affiliate links and then end up heading over to a differnt secion and then purchase some books or other products, or days weeks later when they go to purchase something else my cookie is still present so I get the sale.

exchageis said:

One of the great thing I find about being an Amazon affiliate is becuase of their size and the number of people that purchase from them, that I find that I am getting sales for products that I dont have affiliate links for on my sites. So people are either visiting via one of my affiliate links and then end up heading over to a differnt secion and then purchase some books or other products, or days weeks later when they go to purchase something else my cookie is still present so I get the sale.

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I get that quite a bit myself. It's a pleasant surprise, tho. The best thing about Amazon is their HUGE variety of selections that can be made.

On a couple of my sites the goal is JUST to get them to the Amazon site.

It helps!

RM

It`s all about the niche products, I got $500 last month with amazon aff. program.
Set up astore with hing value product(ex. canon camera), build bulk niche name with product you want to sell.
Blackhat method is not against Amazon`s TOS.

Cheers

dup.. sorry

I made a mini site for amazon affiliate program 10 days ago, and already sold 16 items. $75 profit.. not bad I think, this can be optimized for a better profits.

IMO, google doesn't like amazon affiliated sites too much if your site age within a year. Also, be carefull and protect yourself from the trademark problems. I had one site with exact product name in domain, so I have recieved an email from lawyer and had to gave domain to them.

How can you really expect to get traffic to a site that has no content but just straight up products?

It's never worked that well for me personally. CPC ads in place of an amazon ad always do better.

I have a 180 clicks so far and no sales. Think i may go back to adsense.

the450man said:

I have a 180 clicks so far and no sales. Think i may go back to adsense.

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yep you should give up already! lol