Amazon Affiliate Links Do Make Money
Just discovered this guy here from this post here and I have to say I agree with his article on the forum and his ideas about Amazon. I’ve always done well with Amazon and it’s one reason I hesitate to go to contextual ads as my main income source. In fact, although I started out this new empire with that idea, I’ve seriously scaled back on the context ads and started using more Amazon and other affiliate links on my sites. I just couldn’t stand the thought of tying too much into one single program or income stream.
One thing I’ve noticed is that many marketers suggest you put up vague links that say things like "Click here to visit the … website" or "Click here to buy this at …" I’ve tried this on a couple of websites and I have to say, my old method seems to work better, my old method simply being a link in the post wherever I mention the product with the product name hyperlinked using an affiliate link, and a link such as "More info about …" or "Buy … " at the end of the description or post.
I’ve never been one who believes in all that silliness of telling your visitors that you’re using an affiliate link. Who cares? Links are links and everyone knows that. Common sense says if you can make a few pennies from linking to something you were going to link to anyway, you should do it and anyone who thinks bad of you because of that is probably a socialist. ;) (Private joke here. LOL.) All I can say is that I’m a capitalist and I’m proud of it.
Through Amazon, I’ve made a total of $253.51 this year from a few sites I run that I haven’t updated in a long time. I wish it were more money but frankly, when I built these sites, I knew nothing about keyword research or promotion, and even now that I do, I don’t usually bother with any of those older sites. Many of these older sites also promote extremely low value products. To be exact, it took 576 products sold to make that income, which comes to a commission of just a hair over $0.44 per sale.
According to my Amazon report my conversion rate is 6.77%.
I have just put one site online that links to Amazon and another affiliate program that I do okay with which pays me a 5% commission, and the sites I previously built to test out the "Click here to visit the … website" or "Click here to buy this at …" method of linking are about to be converted back to my previous way of linking so I can check for an increase in sales and conversions.
Back to the topic of this guy’s advice. I don’t know him, and I don’t know if he’s an honest fellow or not, but everything he says makes sense to me, and I’ve been using Amazon to monetize my websites since 2001.
I’ll be reading more of his stuff.
I have two days left in this week and I have about 16 more pieces of high-quality content to create for my current website project. Since I’m serious about this challenge I’ve set myself, this means it’s time to get back to work.
I intend to persevere, work hard, and deliver!
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