Making Big Money with Amazon Affiliate Sales
January 17, 2010 – 3:40 pm
I know it has been a painfully long time since I’ve updated anything to this blog. Heck, my last post was in March of 09 and, ironically, discussed how often you should post to your blog. My reasons for the extended absence are simple - I’ve been working at my “real” job. Yeah, not the work I want to be doing either but the very demanding and depressing work of winding down a global business. Simply put, I’m working myself out of a job. The good news is that the end is near and I’ll have some spare time to apply to updating this and other blogs. The bad news is that I’ll be unemployed and very much burdened with hunting for a “real” job because I’ve been so neglectful in hunting for self-employed business alternatives that I’m in no position to get out from under “the man.”
Having said that, I’ve not been entirely idle. I’ve continued experimenting with internet marketing and have learned a lot of valuable lessons that will lend themselves to some good content here. A lot of these lessons are of the learn-from-your-mistakes variety but, frankly, those are the most valuable lessons we can learn. It is tough to learn strictly from success. You have to fall face down in the mud a few times to learn how to avoid those mistakes as your online business grows. And, let me tell you folks, I’ve learned plenty.
One of my early experiments was with Amazon affiliate advertising. I’ve set up a handful of blogs selling Amazon products and one Amazon store but did little to nothing to promote those sites. Until last Friday I managed to sell about $900 worth of products. That sounds ok until you realize that my cut of those sales equates to barely $40 of revenue in almost a year of these sites being up. Hardly worth the effort, right? Not so fast.
All told I’ve sold barely a dozen items. In comparison with my favorite method of internet marketing using Google Adsense, those are terrible returns. But a recent experiment coupled with the application of some analysis has me actually encouraged.
First, I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was at my meager earnings. When you first sign up as an Amazon affiliate, you can clearly see you’ll make about 4% on sales. Sell a $100 item and you’ll pocket about $4.00. In my book, that’s a weak return, but there are some ways you can do better and the clear solution is volume.
If you want to make money online with Amazon affiliate sites, your philosophy should be no different than with any other blog or online store in that your objective is to maximize earnings with a minimum amount of effort. If I want to work my tail off for money, I can simply work two jobs. I don’t want that, though, which is why I keep coming back to internet marketing when I think of ways to become self-employed. Regardless the type of internet marketing you set your sights on, the single best way to improve earnings is to increase volume. You can either increase the number of sales you get based on a relatively fixed number of visitors or you can increase the number of visitors in hopes of capturing more sales.
The former approach is the most difficult and most limited in terms of improvement but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. Experimentation is the key. That means experimenting with ad placement, ad colors, themes (if you’re using a blog) and content. For example, an ad at the bottom of a post will almost always perform worse than an ad above or immediately below a post title. As another example, weak content may or may not perform as well as a quality, in-depth review chalk full of info for your prospective buyer.
There’s an upper end on returns with the first method because, once optimized in terms of ad placement, content and other variables, you can’t really do anything more to generate sales on a fixed number of visitors. That’s where increased visitor volume becomes key.
As I’ve mentioned before in posts relating to other types of internet property monetization, just slapping up a blog with content (no matter how good it is) and ads (no matter how optimized they are) will lead you down a path of discouraging failure again and again. If you really want to make a go of this internet marketing stuff, you simply can’t neglect the importance of marketing your blog or site to attract visitors. The single most important element of that is links. Keyword anchored links, specifically. For those of you who haven’t read my previous posts or those of the pros I’ve linked to, I’ll quickly explain what a keyword anchored link is.
Let’s say I want to promote a great post on a cool site so I tell you to click here for a great video blog about internet marketing. You’ll notice that the words “click here” are a clickable link and if you click on it you’ll find yourself at Allyn Hane’s brilliant video blog where you can learn lots of great information on internet marketing from a guy who is really getting it done (he recently sold a site for $30,000.00). Unfortunately, that link doesn’t do Allyn a bit of good. If a billion of us link to Allyn’s site using the words “click here” then Allyn’s site will rank well in the SERPs (think Google search) for the search term “click here.” Anybody going to Google and searching for information on the words “click here” would wind up on his site. That doesn’t do him any good because he isn’t selling anything related to the words “click here” and you aren’t buying anything related to the words “click here” even if he were selling it.
For a fun experiment that illustrates this point, go to Google and type in “click here” without the quotes in the search field. The number one item for that search term is Adobe’s website. Why? Is Adobe selling some click-here-products? Of course not. The reason they rank so high in search for click here is because millions (or billions) of people and sites have sent them authority for that term by telling people things along the lines of “to install adobe, click here.”
For a link to have value to an internet marketer, it must be keyword anchored. To illustrate that, I’ll recommend Allyn’s site again but this time will recommend you visit Allyn’s site because it is probably the best internet marketing video blog out there. Now that link has real value to Allyn (or, it would if my site had any value in its own right and were passing on real juice). That keyword anchored link provides Allyn some authority for a whole variety of terms based on the words it contains.
- Best internet marketing video blog
- Best internet marketing blog
- Best internet marketing
- Best blog
- Best marketing blog
- Internet marketing video
- Internet marketing blog
- Marketing video
- Marketing blog
- Etc…
So all that tangential information leads us back to what I’m saying about Amazon affiliate sites; no matter how good your blog or its content or its ad placement, if you aren’t getting sufficient visitors, you won’t make sufficient sales and you won’t be able to translate that lousy 4% cut on each sale into real, legitimate profits. If you want to make a living with Amazon affiliate advertising, you have to follow all the good advice Griz and Courtney Tuttle and Allyn have repeated again and again… you have to build keyword anchored links to your site in order to build keyword authority in order to elevate in the search rankings in order to capture a bigger visitor share in order to get more sales in order to make Amazon affiliate advertising worth doing.
To summarize, the key to earning money with ANY web property is to:
- Market a salable product
- Earn the highest possible search engine ranking for key terms related to that product
- Attract the greatest number of visitors possible to get their eyes on your advertising or sales pitch
- Convert the maximum possible number of visitors into buyers as you can
To do all of the above you need to:
- Take the time to research your product and related keywords
- Build authority for your keywords by earning quality keyword anchored links
- Produce quality, useful, helpful content
- Optimize your ad styles and placement
As I said, I threw up a few Amazon affiliate sites and links but did nothing to build search engine position for those sites or to optimize ad positions. Needless to say, my earnings and converted sales have been nothing short of dismal. But just last Friday my wife and I decided we’d add Amazon links to one of our sites that is getting an unexpectedly high visitor rate and a wonderful thing happened.
The site in question was actually a forgettable one. Not even a site, actually, but a hub page we set up on hubpages.com with no real thought or interest of making any money off of it. To our surprise, though, it is one of our most visited hubs because it is helpful to parents. You’ll find that’s often the case as you experiment with various keywords. Sometimes they do exactly what you expect but, very often, their performance (for better or for worse) is surprising. Those that legitimately help people in any way often exceed our expectations.
Anyway, we tossed a few Amazon ads on this single hub and, in one day, sold more products (relatively inexpensive products though they may be) in a single day than we’ve sold on all our other Amazon affiliate sites combined in a year. Almost 3 times as many sales, in fact! Yes, they are low priced products and, yes, it’ll take a long time before those sales translate into any earnings worth writing home about but the message to me is clear… Amazon affiliate sites CAN work providing they get enough visitors who are interested in a product.
I won’t tell you you’ll get rich overnight with Amazon affiliate advertising but I will say that, done right, the money you earn IF you do it right can be pleasantly surprising. Just remember that the same rules about building authority and search-specific visitors applies just as much here as it does to any other web property and that the real reward is in the simplicity of the venture. Setting up multiple blogs or hubs with Amazon affiliate ads will require some upfront effort but shouldn’t be a non-stop time bandit for the rest of your life. Once you have a good property up and have generated good content, strong authority and a good visitor rate, you can move on to your next project. You’ll only need to come back to update content when needed (for example, when a new product or new information comes out).
In terms of being self employed through internet marketing with Amazon affiliate sites, your objective is to build multiple streams of income through multiple vehicles that don’t represent a constant burden to your time in terms of upkeep so you can continue to build more earning vehicles. Amazon advertising fits this bill perfectly. All you need to do is get to it, experiment and learn from your mistakes as I have. And, rest assured, I’ll be revisiting some of those stagnant sites that mislead me down a path of presumed defeat and turning them into earners I can be proud of.
Happy New Year to all.
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