Amazon Affiliate Program And How To Make The Most Of It

Posted on June 4, 2009
Filed Under Recommended

If you’re not yet using the Amazon affiliate program, you may be losing on quite some income.

I’ve already shared my experiences with Amazon Context links before, but this program has been cancelled by Amazon and now you have to build links yourself.

My earnings with Amazon has not been comparable with how much I made with Adsense and Chitika but then I changed a few pages and focused more on Amazon affiliate links.

The results can be seen on the picture…

So what do you need to do to increase your earnings with Amazon affiliate program?

1. The affiliate links convert best if your site is product based and people are actually looking to buy something. If you have an informational site, then your conversion will be very low.

2. The conversion according to my stats is from in-content links which point to a product. The widgets like Omakase and other types of banners do not convert well.

3. If you have product based pages, sneak in one or max two affiliate links so that people get on Amazon. Most people trust Amazon and have shopped there before. They will buy tons of other stuff besides the products you promote. I get around 70% sales of products which I don’t directly promote (books, DVDs, video games, …)

4. Promote products that have lots of 4 and 5 star reviews. That way the visitor will be reassured that the product is really worth buying.

5. My best converting pages (on a couple of sites) are those with »best« in the keyword. (best vacuum cleaner, etc.) People who type in Google »best vacuum cleaner« want to know which one is best and buy it. They are not looking to research for hours themselves but they want an expert opinion and move on.

So I’ve recommend top vacuums based on Amazon reviews and made a very comprehensive page where I recommend top 5 vacuums. That page converts really well.

The earnings from Amazon affiliate program have almost caught up with Chitika and Adsense last month and I keep adding one or two links to most new reviews I post.

See if you can implement Amazon links into your site and get those extra dollars squeezed out of your site’s potential…

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Comments

28 Responses to “Amazon Affiliate Program And How To Make The Most Of It”

Yogi on June 4th, 2009 1:41 pm

Thanks Tomaz….one more pearl from you

If someone seriously wants to be financially free following your blog is all one needs to do…i am not there yet…but very soon am getting there…will keep you posted.
Mark van Tuel on June 5th, 2009 2:31 am

Hi tomaz nice post!
Do you add amazon affiliate links and infolinks on the same page?
Tomaz on June 5th, 2009 2:58 am

Hi Mark,

No, I have removed Infolinks and use Amazon instead.

With Amazon link I control which words will be affiliate links but with Infolinks the words get underlined automatically and they often don’t make sense for the topic of that page…
John on June 7th, 2009 8:15 am

Tomaz, do you have an affiliate to sign up for Amazon?
Tomaz on June 7th, 2009 9:58 am

Thanks for the offer, John, but Amazon doesn’t have a referral program.
Jerrick on June 8th, 2009 9:44 pm

Hi Tomaz,

Do you have to go into Amazon and add links to each product individual (e.g dyson vacuum cleaner?)

So suppose you have 400 pages website, does it mean you have to create 400 different links? Do you make use of SSI for amazon links?
Tomaz on June 9th, 2009 12:52 am

Hi Jerrick,

Yes, if you review Dyson DC15 vacuum, then there’s no other way then going to Amazon Affiliate program, finding that product and making a link. I know it sounds a lot to fix 400 pages, but that’s not what you should do after 400 pages.

It’s what you should do every time you build a new page (product review) therefore this only takes you maybe an extra minute or two.
Jerrick on June 9th, 2009 8:21 am

Thanks! Great article once again, going to implement it now and see the results.
Mark van Tuel on June 9th, 2009 3:57 pm

Hi Tomaz,

Was wondering if the code that’s from amazon’s product link is originally generated by amazon.

I ask this because if i select a product i get a different source code than on your website. Also noticed that for example: http://www.vacuumwizard.com/best-vacuum-cleaner.html there comes a pop up when you go over the link with the mouse. If i copy my code into my website it only views the text link but no product info screen. I understand you added the nofollow tag yourself.

Also contacted amazon support but they don’t know what causes the problem. I am also an sbi user, using the block builder.

Thanks in advance
Ian on June 9th, 2009 10:59 pm

Hi Tomaz, thanks for the great post on Amazon. On my houseboat website, we provide many answers to questions that get submitted, and I think that Amazon links to suitable products would be a great way to help my readers.

Thanks again for a great post, IAN…
Tomaz on June 10th, 2009 1:00 am

@Mark van Tuel: You need to add the code for the Product Previews. If you go to “Links & Banners”, you’ll see a menu on the left that starts with Product Links. When you click on Product Links, a new page will show up but you’ll also get 2 new links in that menu: Product Previews and Kindle Chicklet.

At Product Previews you’ll get the code that you need to add to your pages with Amazon links…
David Dutton, Jr. on June 10th, 2009 1:57 pm

Hey Tomaz

Question for you…

I was thinking just a second ago that you don’t try and get people to optin at all on your vacuum site. They just read the articles and some click the links.

Do you feel you could make even more money by having people optin for a report or something and getting them to click the links?

Just curious.

Dave
Tomaz on June 10th, 2009 2:16 pm

Hey David,

I am already committed to a bi-weekly newsletter on my tennis site and don’t need more work. Really, if I had a newsletter I had to publish it regularly to have some effect.

And yes, I just need the people to read, click something and go away.
David Dutton, Jr. on June 11th, 2009 10:02 am

Yeah, I figured you just needed to drop the cookie.

I am going to test a video on my top 13 pages of my travel site endorsing “10 travel sites they must know about” and have it in ebook form for them to download.

Some will be CPA offers and some affiliate products.

D
rob Jarowski on June 12th, 2009 12:52 am

great article, who would have thought amazon affiliate would pay so much. I need to build a site that accomodates amazon.

I checked out your vacuum site to see how you implement the ads. I noticed you no longer use google adsense. Why no longer google?

rob
Tomaz on June 12th, 2009 1:05 am

Google didn’t like some fonts (blue color and near adsense ads so they were “confusing”) on my site and said they would stop serving ads on this site until I fix that. I did that, but no word from Google yet.
Marius on June 18th, 2009 7:54 am

Hi Tomaz,

Thanks for more great posts. A question to this one : what kind of click through rate do you see in average for your Amazon ads pages ? Have you noticed an increase in performance after adsense was taken down?

best regards,
Marius

Ps : Hit 1560 daily visitors for my marathon site yesterday
Tomaz on June 18th, 2009 9:49 am

Hi Marius,

Great traffic! Yes, I see slightly higher CTR for Amazon links but it’s hard to see how much. I DO see higher CTR (around 1% more – can see in my stats) on my Chitika ads now that I don’t have Adsense.

Amazon is currently my biggest earner. Who would have thought that… I used to earn around $200 per month with Amazon with the same traffic.
rob Jarowski on June 27th, 2009 9:47 am

tomoz – why don’t you try microsoft ads and are google going to let you put adsense back on?

Also, can you have infolinks with amazon?
Tomaz on June 27th, 2009 10:40 am

Rob,

Microsoft and Yahoo ads are available only for publishers from USA. ;( Yes, you can use Infolinks with Amazon…
Derek on November 9th, 2009 3:04 am

Hi Tomaz,

It’s reassuring to hear that someone is making some income from Amazon. My suspicion has long been that it must be possible. I have two questions for you…

1. I haven’t seen anything here about Amazon Stores. Are they to be grouped with Banners, Widgets, and so on, as things that just don’t work?

2. When you say ‘in content’ links work best, are image links preferred over text links? I do book and game reviews, for example, and am wondering whether I should make the image a link or the name a link (or both I guess)?

Great article, thanks!

Derek
Tomaz on November 9th, 2009 4:58 am

Hi Derek,

I haven’t used Amazon Stores much and I don’t see Amazon promote them much so maybe they don’t really work that well.

I think that text links with the Preview box popping up are best. I sometimes use images and add a link below the image as a text link.

It takes longer to set it up compared to just copy-pasting the iframe that Amazon provides, but to me it looks better and different than most affiliates so perhaps people are not affected by ad blindness.
Derek on November 9th, 2009 9:41 am

Thanks Tomaz,

I certainly agree that the non-Amazon-looking text links you provide look better than the standard salesy links. But if you include both an image and some sub-text (e.g. an image title), I’m wondering whether it makes any difference if you make the image a link as well as the text? I’m not talking about the standard ugly Amazon-box link, just two separate links.

Also, you answered another question I was going to ask – that was whether I should use the ‘preview’ script that Amazon now provides. I’ve started to experiment with it, but it would be good to konw if that works better for you than a preview-less Amazon link.

Cheers

Derek
Tomaz on November 9th, 2009 1:07 pm

Derek,

I haven’t tested so extensively whether the image as a link would work so well too. The positive side is that you have more chances of getting a click (2 links are better than 1) but you also have 2 affiliate links out instead of one – I think that counts something too in Google’s eyes regardless whether you use nofollow or not.
Fery on June 15th, 2010 4:38 am

Hello tomaz, i am new visitor to your site, just want to know do you think many programs out there which are offering getting success with amazon are not great? My friend offered me about this program before, but I don’t believe about it, because I believe there are many sites which discuss about getting money from amazon for free. Thanks for your information, it build my confidence more
Tomaz on June 15th, 2010 9:10 am

Hi Fery,

I wouldn’t trust any “program” that focuses ONLY on making money with Amazon. Your goal is to build a website that gets lots of free search engine traffic and then test various monetization options which may include the Amazon affiliate program.
a.g. on July 22nd, 2010 12:11 pm

Hi Tomaz,

At what stage do you start to insert your Amazon links?
Is it after you’ve built a certain number of pages or a certain number of visitors? .. what criteria do you use?
Tomaz on July 23rd, 2010 1:15 am

a.g., check my post about monetizing a website.