Is Amazon Associates Program Worth it?

1) Yes

2) Yes

But it's the same as anything... it's not easy, you have to work it right. Find specific products that cater for the needs and requirement of your niche.

See my response in red. Hope it helps

1) Yes
2) Amazon is a affiliate network, not a CPA network, therefore cannot be compared with each other.

If you're a newbie, then making a good income from Amazon affiliate program in a short amount of time will be quite difficult. You only make a small % per sale.

But the reason many people like the Amazon program is because they are reliable, trusted and is a well known brand.

I personally like affiliate programs that pay at least 50% or more per sale.

Yes, it is worth it as long as you have good search rankings.

Me and my business partner make a full time living from Amazon. We currently average close to $15k a month and in December made just over $32,000. It is definitely doable and we know of people making more than us.

Prior to this we used to use merchants from Commission Junction and Linkshare and other similar networks. They resulted in some sales but not much. Amazon really made the difference in our business.

PaulaC Do you target Google US or Google AU?

I've read alot of your posts & I bought your Amazon profit plan ebook (which is amazing ) a while back. I also heard your pod cast interview which had some great info too.

It was your success & information that first drove me to make money with Amazon. I have started to see some success & 2011 is looking very good for me.

One thing that really got me was how much the UK Amazon affiliate structure differs from the US.

Amazon UK cap all commissions at £7 per sale which is really bad. I only found this out after selling a £300 item & got £7 commission.

Also with Amazon US to get the top commission of 8.50% you need to sell 3,000+ items but with Amazon UK you need to sell 30,000+ item to get the top commission. This makes it hard to get the top commission % in the UK.

I have no idea why the Amazon UK make it so much harder for their affilaites to make money but I'm still going to push ahead & see if I can make a good income from the program.

You can make a full time living with Amazon many have and I'm one of them, but just because a lot of us made it work this doesn't mean it will work for everyone, it's a lot of work just like it any business, you have to advertise your blog, split test, test and do more testing. But if you stay in this game and don't give up then yeah .... you will make a full time living from Amazon.

Tried it for a year...low returns and very demanding

thank you all for your answers but I still need more answers to the later questions

I have been trying to make money with Amazon for the past 8 months after following a course on the subject that I bought from Sara Young. Like all internet marketing it is very competative. I have so far found it difficult to find a product within any niche that is not already saturate with other affiliates.

The other problem is getting good listing on Google for my web pages which are usually wordpress or blogger blogs.

In order to get listed I am using article marketing and after several months am having some success with some keywords. However to date sales have been somewhat limited. I am still optimistic and feel that more success will come as I add more articles for different keyword.

I have and am still promoting a few CPA offers in the health and Fitness sector. Once again I am using article marketing to drive traffic to the web pages for these products.

Hope this is useful.

I think the whole "pay by cheque" issue is the biggest gripe I have with Amazon - otherwise I think that it is a great way to make money online. I wish they would follow Clickbank's lead and start allowing direct deposit for international affiliates.

As you probably know by now there are lots of people out there making a living promoting Amazon products. I recently changed my online strategy and decided to start doing some Amazon stuff as well and have already made a few sales after just a few weeks in without too much effort.

encouraging thank you

I'm new to IM and I'm personally starting as an Amazon Affiliate. I bought Dan Brock's course and it was great. I think the only thing I really need to get down is backlinking.

I just finished my first niche site... I have all my articles set to drip feed and I'll start back linking them as they come out. I just need to create a schedule and keep track.

On to my next niche site... and then I'll make another... and then I'll make another. I'm hoping to have atleast 10 sites within the next 3 months. Hell, I made my first complete one in under 5 days... I can only imagine how quick I'll be when I get good at it! I'm sort of a computer nerd though.

I'm really going to try not and pay attention to my stats because I know/believe If I do the right thing... conversions will start to occur maybe a few months down the line.

Regarding the comment from Brandstrom - post #19 "This seems like a major traffic leak since Amazon said affiliates don't get a commission if the customer clicks those links and buys from the other stores."

Perhaps these are the third party items which we do get commission from. (Check the Amazon Affiliate Earnings Report - At the bottom of the report there is a break down of Total Amazon.com items Shipped and Total Third party Items Shipped. I believe this may be referring to those items.

people just buy stuff but a few implement what they learn here

My biggest gripe with Amazon and the only reason I don't focus on them 100% is the fact that they don't pay lifetime commission if they did I would jump in with both feet

If you really want to know the nuts and bolts of earning a lot with Amazon, study PaulaC's blog (in her sig). I've been following her model and seeing great results.

I wrote reviews of products that cost $250 or so, and am averaging 10% of my amazon clicks turning into purchases for those products!

Although commissions are much lower than clickbank, conversion is way higher!

Here are a few tips (most of which I learned from Paula!)

1. Choose products that cost at least $xxx, so your commissions will be more significant than the .35 cents commissions I'd earn on the sale of a book.

2. Write helpful reviews of the product. The key being "helpful". Don't just rehash the description, spend a day researching everything you can find out about the product, and present it in an easy-to-read and friendly format.

3. Get SEO traffic by getting backlinks with your anchor text to your review pages until you are ranking well for your keywords. Target keywords like "product xyz review" so that you'll get traffic from people who have their hands on their wallet and want to buy this type of product.

4. Get the Preview Tool working on your site: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com...ciates/tips/t8 so that when people simply hover over your amazon text or image link, they get cookied into your affiliate link. (Test this out, it may be more or less effective in different niches.)

5. Don't worry about competition. Most people are lazy and will abandon their sites within a few weeks or months, meaning that it will be easy for you to outrank them if you keep at working on the same site, their sites' rankings will fall.

6. You don't need to get ALL the traffic in the world for that keyword to make a good living. If you can rank in the top 3 spots in Google for a couple of different long-tail variations of your keyword, all that traffic can bring you a nice amount of money. So what if some traffic goes to other sites? Does Walmart lose sleep because some people shop at Target?

7. Work on ONE SITE at a time! Many people want a cluster of 10 or 50 sites that each earn a couple of bucks a day. While that can work, you'll be spending an enormous amount of energy just checking your stats and logging into each site to do tweaking! Additionally, the amount of backlinks pointing to a domain is a big factor in google. So, if you are working on backlinks for your page example.com/blue-widgets, you are also indirectly boosting the rankings of your other pages like example.com/red-widgets, because you are bringing more backlinks to the domain as a whole - which is impossible when you're spread across a bunch of sites.

8. Don't stop doing these steps until you have at least 100 visitors daily from the search engines for your target keywords. Once you have that much traffic, you can do split testing and tweak. But, most people will give up way before they have 100 visitors from their keywords daily.

9. Keep imagining a point in time - maybe 10 or 18 months from now - when you are selling 25 $250 products through your site daily. At 7.5% commission, that is $18.75 x $468.75 every day. Yes, you'll have some expenses, you might be outsourcing some backlink building and article writing, but $468 daily can support most families in style. And you won't have to deal with customer service, returns, emails for support, and can take a couple of weeks off at at time without harming your stream of income!

Hi Julie, you are missing the big point, even if a digital product pay much % of commission, they usually sell on $7 or $97.

On the flip side, one physical product can cost $5,000 which will pay you $200 @ only 4% rate.

It is easier to market a real product than a digital one, because you have a large number of consumers who are willing to buy that product.

Just see: On the Christmas, people buy real gifts as presents, but not ebooks/softwars. They spend lots of money on this season; just as the guru amazon affiliates have mentioned on this thread, they got some huge commission on this Christmas season. Makes sense?

This is a really valuable discussion.

Think about this: Ask your real-life friends and relatives this question:

"Have you ever bought an ebook?"

I did an informal survey of my friends, and they all said, "no."

Then I asked the same group of people, "What's the most recent 3 purchases you've made online?"

And the answer always included amazon within the past few weeks or months!

Most everyone orders from amazon. More and more people order things online every day that they would not have thought to order online a year or three ago (when they were more used to driving to brick and mortor stores.)

Even I, who have been in IM for 5 years, find myself ordering categories of products for my house that I used to drive to Walmart or Target for to save time.

And Amazon does an INCREDIBLE job of converting visitors into customers and upselling and cross-selling. Our job as affiliates is to get "product-hungry" regular folks over to amazon, then let amazon work their magic.

Ok, back to work to tweak some of my review pages.

One more tip: Use a plugin like "all in one seo" on your WP site and pay attention to what the "snippet" of text that is displayed on your SE result says - that will dramatically affect how many people click through to your listing, even if you're not in the top spot or two, you can get much more traffic by putting in 160 characters of highly targeted information, rather than just letting Google pick up the first 160 characters in your post, which may just be introductory words.

I use a combination of Hub Pages, Squidoo, and my own Amazon store fronts, using an awesome Amazon store script. It is a nice, steady income indeed.

Basically, it's just research a niche, buy a good url (or use existing domain), create Amazon store, repeat

The fact is there is more traffic out there than you can shake a stick at and people are buying stuff online like mad, heck, "I'm" buying stuff online like mad. There is so much money to be made selling physical products it's insane. Amazon is massive, and people just love to buy stuff there. Having said that, they are far from the only source for physical products...Buy.com,linkshare,Commission Junction etc etc. If your willing to do the work it's hard "NOT" to make money. The fact is you can "& DO" make money in your sleep.

I dont know anyone who is making a ton of money of amazon or any other program would bother spending so much energy to sell things on how to make money doing so. I use amazon and make a living off it and in no way have time to write or help people make money doing it themselves lol . Seems like a lot of bs . For the amount of time I would spend doing that I could double or triple my amazon income and that is much better for the long term.

Hi, Smartdoctor:
From what I know about Amazon Associates, it's well worth the time and effort. I'm just now in the process of creating some "sites" that will connect with Amazon, but it's been highly recommended to me, and I know others who are making lots of $$ every month through their associate accounts.
Good Luck!!!

I know that you can make a really good living from being an Amazonassociate..I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of people that made serious money on Amazon

Yes you can make great money with Amazon!

Ellen C. Braun touched on this above, but for those of you who are making this work, do you find there's a good price range of products to stay between?

In other words, if you're selling only $5 products, you won't make much commission, so it makes sense to market higher-priced products.

But can you go too high? I wonder if there's a point where a lot of people won't spend that much for a product online, because they want to see it in a store or try it out. So is there like an upper limit where it's not worth marketing things that sell for more than $1,000? $2,000?

I think including Amazon is worth it.

On my Adsense websites, I will usually reference a book or product as a recommended example item to help the reader solve a problem. I could care less whether or not they buy that particular product. I don't have to spend time writing copy on a product I've never used by looking at other reviews. All I want is the click to get that cookie in a user's browser for 24 hours, and hope that the user buys something else later on. With a conversion rate of 5-10%, I'm pretty happy with just getting that cookie in there. I would rather have the user exit via an Adsense click. But if they don't click on it, I'll settle for the Amazon cookie.

Lots of great info in this post and I wanted to chime in and provide some info on my results.

Unlike some IM'ers, I have a full-time job and sell my own Clickbank products and other products on Clickbank in both the IM space and other niches. I've passively been involved in selling on Amazon for while and when I began to see so much junk being sold on Clickbank I turned my direction back to Amazon.

I started revamping a few of my sites in June of 2010 and made less than $200. I began mixing my sites (2-3 of them) with reviews, articles and video reviews. I created traffic using core SEO methods, video posting and backlinking.

In the span of a month I was able to increase my traffic and my amazon commissions from less than $200 to over $800. The next month was even better.

While I love the initial setup and getting everything going, I hate the maintenance because I'm lazy. Typically after a month or so I'll use some auto posting plugins that keep the site looking good. I've managed to keep most of my top rankings for my sites and most are within the first page of Google.

A few tips I've learned that I can pass on. I have a site that promotes smaller dollar value, popular products...think impulse buys. These alone push my volume and commission percentages up very quickly each month. I actually dont care how much I make from this site, the entire purpose is to get my order quantities up for commissions on bigger orders.

My bigger dollar order sites are detailed, better reviews, less "noise". I always add in accessories for those big dollar products if available. My big dollar product sites almost always have video reviews. Just simple powerpoint presentations that I've designed to be product-review stylized. A little goes a long way.

I never sell on my sites. Every is based on reviews and social proof. If people are on my sites it's because they are already in buying mode. My job is to push them off the fence on the right side while delivering helpful information.

SO for those asking, YES, the Associates program is worth it. In fact, I actually recommend Amazon over Clickbank and eBay Partner programs for anyone that actually wants to make their first money (or any money) online.

You won't make $45,137 in 30 days from the start like some of those push button Clickbank products, but if you want to start seeing results, give it a try.

Jeff

She means pages. But, what does it matter? Pages. Posts. Don't over think it

Most of my reviews are on pages and my posts are posts. Works wonderfully for me

You can make a living off of both of them...don't let anyone tell you one only one thing works....develop a clear exact plan and stick with it..you can get either of them to work....master the area you are in....thats what those who are top do...

Correct me if I am wrong here, but doesn't Amazon set a session cookie only? Meaning you'll only get paid if your referral buys on the initial visit and if they leave and come back later no $??? It sounds like they don't really stack the deck to favor anyone but themselves. I know there are strategies and tactics that can make amazon viable and even lucrative for affiliates, but it just isn't for me.

Do you think Amazon will become saturated? I know there's many niches but there is only so many of them and it seems that more and more people are becoming Amazon affiliates all the time and are competing to get on the 1st page of Google for the highly searched keywords in their niche.

Yesterday someone bought a product to keep cats out of their garden on my site. Of all random things! (That's not something I promote, but with Amazon you get credit when people buy anything at all through your affiliate link!)

Like Paula advises, I've found that really high-quality reviews work best. I read up on all the technical details, and explain the features and benefits in every day language, which people really appreciate. It takes me 6+ hours to write one review - and that is because I spend hours gathering the relevant information, breaking it down into bite-sized pieces, and presenting it pleasantly.

I don't write long reviews and I do well. I do a brief overview of the product, list features, then pros and cons, social proof, and then summarize. I also might link to a youtube video. As long as I'm getting traffic to my page (which I think is what making money on amazon is all about), I'm getting sales.

Yeah I think it's worth it. The commissions are low, but the products tend to convert a lot better than clickbank. Promote amazon products in addition to CPA and other affiliate programs. It's best not to have all your eggs in one basket anyways.

It's sort of like everything else, stay with it until you become an expert, most lose focus and move on for some reason.

It's like shopping in a store, something catches there eye and they move on.

I feel its worth it if you know what you are doing and understand the terms of service, payout system etc. There are literally thousands of products (probably more) to promote in different niches and its a trusted company, but the thing is to make sure you do not get discouraged. In the beginning, you may start out selling hundreds of dollars worth of products and ending up with 10-20 dollars worth of commissions and feel you are being cheated, which is why it’s important to read the fine print and make sure you understand it.

It depends what you get good at. The top people in CPA would never mess around with amazon's 4% commissions. But the people making gonzo with amazon probably don't do any CPA. I personally think you have to be smarter to make your money doing straight CPA than stuff like amazon sites. I fall into the amazon category... I could never get CPA to consistently be profitable, but I can make one hell of an information site. Go figure.

hi there. is it better to have your product descriptions as pages or as blog posts on your site?

Kea55,

I think it comes down to the number of product descriptions you will have. If it is only going to be a few, then pages would be okay, but if you are going to have hundreds, then use posts.

I'm making a full time income building Amazon sites for others. The Amazon thing is so popular right now and there are some people who don't know how to do it the right way. I've learned from Jan Roos (who posted in this thread), PaulaC (who posted in this thread), Dan Brock and the Niche Affiliate Program by Chris Guthrie.

So it's not just a matter of writing a review site and slapping it up there, there is a lot more involved than that. Jan's WSO is good to learn how. I think it's the best out of all that I mentioned.

I never used amazon as a affiliate but going off what i read from other marketers.
I would prefer CPA Networks: Why (higher pay,more freedom,have your own affiliate manager to talk too, can get paid weekly if you choose etc)

I think yes. I use it and I make 20$ per week with it.

Very encouraging and inspiring thread..

I have learnt a lot from this thread. Thanks everyone

Its very worth it. I like it because there are endless products that you can choose to promote for every niche imaginable, as well as all price ranges.

I would say yes you could earn a full time income with Amazon. They don't pay a ton of money per product but the products are everyday products people buy anyway. So it's not hard to sell at all. People are looking for them anyway. You just have to create the sites and get it in front of the buyers. Easy money!

I am quite new to internet marketing and wanted to market Amazon products by using sites such as Snipsly and Xomba. I intended to write good, informative articles and try to get traffic in this way.

But I have read that to get an Amazon Associates account you need to have a website with several pages.

Does anyone know what the situation is with regard to getting an Amazon Associates account?

Well I just started with Amazon about a month ago and so far I have not made a sale yet,but I am positive that things will be OK very soon when I start getting that very much valued traffic. As for whether you can make a living from Amazon, I would say possible but difficult.