Tuesday
Money Making With Amazon
| Today I'm continuing with programs with which I have tried to make money. I'm still on the A's and today it's the old favourite Amazon. Like a lot of people I've used Amazon for years for buying bits and pieces, mostly books. It is said that, with any form of selling, you have to like the products. Remembering this fact, it didn't therefore take me long to sign on as an affiliate when I started my blogs twelve months back. Unfortunately everything that 'is said' isn't necessarily true. I haven't been over successful with making money with Amazon. In fact it's mostly been a waste of time to date. As an example for this month (29 days) I have had 1760 clicks to the Amazon website. Now that sounds good - it's around 60 clicks per day. But that's the best bit! All of these clicks have only amounted to two sales and commission of £1.29 (about $3.55).  As I'm sure we all appreciate there are lots of positive things to say about being an Amazon affiliate but first the negative and, I suppose, the reality - at least as far as my experience goes.Cons 1. The commission isn't too hot at only 5%. 2. A lot of the products are low priced (i.e. books, CD's and DVD's) and therefore the commission doesn't amount to much when you get a sale for such items. Yes, there are more expensive items but my own sales have only been books, CD's and maps - not sure why maps. 3. I'm an affiliate for the UK Amazon, but a lot of my visitors come from other countries and are therefore unlikely to actually buy from the UK website, where prices are shown in UK currency. Trying now to be positive, Amazon is generally improving their selling aids and these make up a lot of their good points. Pros 1. A reliable, established company. 2. Low payout figure (just £10 in UK - about $20) 3. Lots of promotional tools which include: (a) Have your own aStore - or several if you wish. (b) Slideshows, as above. (c) Product clouds. (d) Favourite and Wish lists. (e) Context links - I use these on my celebrity blog. (f) Banners and search boxes. (g) Product links .... and so on and so on. To Sum Up To be successful with Amazon I feel that you need good traffic from the same country as per the Amazon website which you are promoting. I'm trying out a new blog I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here which is aimed at UK residents. It's about the reality show, of the same name, which starts on November 12th. It'll only be a short run blog as the series doesn't last very long but it's more of a trial or experiment to see if I can make some money from UK products. I've got Amazon context ads on the blog. I just wish I could say that the Amazon affiliate programme is fantastic but, based on my own experience I can't. Perhaps I haven't been promoting it properly. It might be solely my fault but I keep on thinking that 5% commission is pretty poor no matter how you look at it. Mike's Rating: 2/5 It's always good and I suppose easy to write about money making programs where we have been successful. It's just as important though to show that not everything that glitters is gold. Hopefully you will have been much more successful with Amazon than I have. Good luck, Mike. Labels: Amazon, make money, making money |
I've never been a fan of Amazon affiliates, the product range is good the comission rates are way to low.
Amazon affiliate links may not be the best for certain blogs. However if you run a tv or camera site which the prices for them are $1000+ then those commission checks are very nice if your readers actually buy them off your recommendations.
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Just wondering, does most of your traffic come from the U.S. or the U.K. Does that influence which programs you sign up with? I mean looking back would you have signed up for the U.S. Amazon instead had you known what you know now?
Great blog, enjoy reading it very much. This has been a great influence on the direction of my blog. Not so sure about the new template but you will have to let us know how well it works. Cheers!
Matt: The 5% is extremely poor and if you only sell say a CD it's hardly worth the effort.
Mitch: I'm sure you are right. A product based blog or niche could do well with Amazon - and the other 'shopping' type programs.
Martyn: Not too sure about the new template either! My main traffic is from the USA so maybe should have signed up with Amazon USA - but at the time didn't think of this. We do need 'horses for courses' so to speak when choosing money making programs.
Thanks for the comments,
Mike.
Strangely I found that for the first couple of weeks with an Amazon aStore I was doing alright. At least well, enough to keep me interested.
Since then I've gotten nothing. That is until this week when I got a $0.47 commission for someone who bought a record from Amazon.
This wasn't something that I directly advertised. It was just a case of someone who clicked on my link and still had the cookie on their computer when they bought the item.
I am relying on a couple of million of those type of sales in the run-up to Christmas!
I was promoting a site with the main focus of selling amazon products and in the early stages of it I was making quite a few sales, then all of a sudden a bunch of competing sites in the niche I was targeting started popping up and I stopped focusing on it, couldn't compete.
Still making sales though, I have an astore I don't promote and that affiliate site which gets very little traffic now. For October I've had 245 clicks and made 6 sales for profits of $16.76.
Commissions are stank though, but learning from my first attempt at it, well I'm gonna give it another shot, just have to find me a new niche I can dominate.
I agree with your observations Mike. I put links on my site to relevant Amazon products and do not see them generate many sales and the few sales I get usually amount to $.50 to $1 in commission.
I've only had one sale with Amazon. Agree with martyn's point re US traffic clicking on the links to find the items are in £'s.
P.S. I love the new template