Amazon's Affiliate Program

**Dr. Domaining** · 07-01-2006, 09:38 PM

What are your opinions on it? Do you use it?

**sitedesigner** · 07-01-2006, 11:50 PM

I personally don't use it, but I have heard some good things about it as well as some bad things. In my opinion, I think it would be a good place to start if you wanted to do affiliate based selling.

**Dr. Domaining** · 07-01-2006, 11:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Matthew

I personally don't use it, but I have heard some good things about it as well as some bad things. In my opinion, I think it would be a good place to start if you wanted to do affiliate based selling.

Right, it all depends on the target market. One thing is for sure though, they are excellent for book related affiliations.

**sitedesigner** · 07-02-2006, 05:21 AM

Why are they so good with book related affilates? And how do they make so much money, if they provide the lowest prices ever?

**ergophobe** · 07-02-2006, 01:15 PM

Amazon = Low payout + low conversion

(of course, I'm a wannabe not a real earner, so maybe I just don't have the Amazon secret, but it seems like you would need huge traffic to make anything off Amazon)

**Hawaii SEO** · 07-04-2006, 06:42 AM

I met a guy at an affiliate conference a while back who is a real bookworm. This guy is the real deal. He knows who the hot new authors are before their book is even published. He knows who the consistent best sellers are, etc… It’s all about consuming then aggregating a million pieces of book and author trivia and taking action. After he has a hunch about a new title or author he will do the keyword research and bid on common author name misspellings and close proximities of titles, etc. It’s all PPC arbitrage. He only buys keywords that he believes will convert to a sale from past experience.

Bottom line... He drove over $4 million book sales to Amazon and earned an average 10% commission. He brought in about 400K Gross but he probably paid about 100K for the traffic.

It works for him because he’s a subject matter expert on Books. I don’t think it would work so well for me though.

**ergophobe** · 07-06-2006, 02:15 PM

Ahh, okay so that's what it takes to make big money at Amazon. I can see that.

So he's doing AdWords for
Dan Bronw
De Vinci Code

Things like that?

**ltn1dr** · 07-06-2006, 02:36 PM

Well, I'm adding Amazon's affiliate program to a site that I'm about to open it.

Its just going to be a little supplemental revenue and I'm not going to get my hopes up that its going to make me anything significant

**Hoang** · 07-06-2006, 02:50 PM

This program is good to make a few bucks on the side if you have a small site but really, you won't be making much. I only know a few people that are actually making tons of money with it.

**ltn1dr** · 07-06-2006, 02:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thien

This program is good to make a few bucks on the side if you have a small site but really, you won't be making much. I only know a few people that are actually making tons of money with it.

I guess this also is decided by what type of audience your site has.

I don't think that adding it to a site with the majority of its traffic being teens will make much money

**chovy** · 07-06-2006, 04:06 PM

I've read that it's possible to automatically pass your affiliate id to amazon.com links.

**Hawaii SEO** · 07-07-2006, 02:49 AM

Aloha Ergophobe,

Not exactly... he made it sound like he's good at predicting which books will become best sellers or cult classics.

He buys the keywords while they are still undervalued and makes his margin off of other book worms and early adopters like him who want to per-order the books and be the first to read it. He buys the keywords and PPC traffic Before they become best sellers, not after.

Some authors you've never heard of, have an extremely loyal following but not enough to make the best seller list or the news. Purchasing those type of keywords and misspelled variations of the book title and author names can be very profitable. You just need to be a subject matter expert and stay ahead of the curve.

I doubt you can profit from purchasing Harry Potter related keywords. It's just too popular and competitive. The time for that was right Before she published the first book & After the rave reviews from the unknown critics.

**lyndoman** · 07-07-2006, 04:21 AM

Apart from getting a discount on my own purchases Amazon have been rubbish for me. It does make a lot of money for one website though, and that's Amazon.com

**dealsguy** · 07-07-2006, 07:43 PM

I personally had no monetary success with Amazon. However, I managed to get a pretty good conversion rate. If I only could have more traffic....
I think they are not bad, they are different.

One problem is that their affiliate cookies last only 24 hours. To avoid that limit you need to make a customer put something in the shopping cart - that will set a 90 day cookie.
The other problem - if you sell anything sold by their partners, you get much smaller percent. Like 1% or something.

Well, probably the best place where we can find out about Amazon affiliate program is their own affiliate user forums.

**chovy** · 07-07-2006, 08:39 PM

a 24 hour affiliate cookie is pretty sh*tty when you're trying to help people make money from your site.

**aaanativearts** · 07-31-2006, 01:30 AM

I make a little with them but not enough to put much effort into it. Putting book banners on the side columns does practically nothing, and half their books are available used, which means you only get the 1% rate if the customer buys those. And the short cookie stinks. And I generally look for affiliate programs that pay me more like 20%.

I had better luck making a text link for a category of books and including it in my main navigation on niche sites where the visitors are concentrated on a specific interest. The link is based on a keyword search and leads to a page of Amazon results for the related keyword.

I've also tried recommending specific books as further reading in articles or at the end of them with limited success. Now I only bother with specific books that are hard to find in offline bookstores that my readers ask about a lot. For example, on my indian sites, there are always people wanting to know how to learn a certain indian language, so if Amazon has a book for that, I will list it in my languages section.