Make Money With Amazon Associates! Amazon Associates is an extra way of earning an additional income on your website, whilst getting content written at the same time. For those of you that donʼt know, this is Amazonʼs commission scheme where you can start to earn money by just linking to their products on your site. The beauty of this program is that you can kill two birds with one stone by making money from the content that you would have written anyway. ! The trick to making money from Amazon is to post content often that links to Amazon through your website and with your Amazon ID. This can range from a Top 20 list of products you recommend to people in your niche, to just a simple link in your content, where you might recommend something to your readers, perhaps if youʼre reviewing a single product. To be honest, and this may surprise you, but it doesnʼt really matter what youʼre linking to, just so long as youʼre linking to Amazon. ! Once youʼve started to sell a few items through your website, and this will happen fairly quickly, then youʼll notice that what people are buying are not often products that youʼve linked to, in fact itʼs rarely even products in your niche. Since opening my account roughly six months ago, Iʼve sold 256 different items, but from that, only 57 items were actually listed on my site, and the remaining 199 were items that people had found from going onto Amazon though my website and browsing for themselves. It really doesnʼt matter what youʼre linking to, just so long as youʼre linking to something vaguely relevant.! I personally try to write a post every couple of months that links to either a lot of different products that I recommend, or I chose a product that I like and I review it. The conversion rate for reviewing products you like is a lot better than when you review multiple products in a single post because you can write in much more detail about it. Iʼve not tried reviewing something I donʼt like, but I shouldnʼt think that it would do such a fantastic job of getting people to spend money through the site, but at the end of the day, the link is still there, and people will still click on it. Iʼve reviewed three products so far. The first one was a camera strap that I use, which Iʼve sold nine of, but I also linked to similar alternatives, and Iʼve sold four of them. The commission on these straps were only about $3 each, but it proved to be a worthwhile experiment. The third product I reviewed was another product I use and believe in, and Iʼve sold five of those, the only difference being that the commission on each is around $17.

Setting Up! Youʼll notice that so far Iʼve only talked in dollars, and even though Iʼm British, thereʼs a very good reason for this. When I look at my Google Analytics, I can see that around 66% of my traffic comes from America, whereas only 10% comes from the UK. If I were to provide links to the UK then I would be losing out because itʼs a much smaller market. This is a little bit frustrating that youʼre only reaching part of your market, but there are ways around this. ! There is a plugin called Amazon Affiliate Link Localizer which not only automatically changes any Amazon link on your site to use your affiliate ID, but it also changes the link to point to the userʼs local Amazon store. This means that if your visitor is visiting from the UK theyʼll get a link to Amazon.co.uk, and if theyʼre visiting from the US theyʼll get a link to the same product on Amazon.com - All you have to do is provide all your affiliate IDs.! It doesnʼt matter if the link is in your post, in your comments, or anywhere else on your page – itʼll be converted automatically. This can make a noticeable difference to your earnings, from a very small amount of effort. As I said, 66% of my traffic came from America, and 10% came from the UK, so by simply installing this plugin, I can tap into the UK market and increase my earnings by approximately 15%. With the exception of checking that the plugin works after you make the odd update, you very much just install this plugin, and leave it to do its thing.! There are still reasons to want to go through Amazon itself though because you may want to include the product images as well to help convert the visitors easier, but this does take out most of the legwork for you.

Commission Rate! The more you sell, the higher your commission becomes, at least in most cases. When youʼre selling general products, you start off with a 4% commission rate each month, but that soon increases to 6% after just 6 sales. Then incremental steps of 0.5% increase your commission all the way up to 8.5% after youʼve sold 3131 products. Unfortunately, this only applies to general sale items as they have the biggest mark up, and youʼll only ever make a maximum of 4% on electrical goods, even if youʼre selling you 10,000th product. There are some exceptions where youʼll earn a higher commission, such as digital goods (mp3, video, etc.) which are set at 10%, but some of them are capped at $1.50, meaning you canʼt really earn too much from them, but they will push up your

commission rate for general products. At the end of each month, your commission rate goes back down to 4% and you start again.

! If youʼre only linking to electronics, then it may be while before you start to earn a good living from your sales, just donʼt expect for it to grow over night. I write a tutorial website so Iʼm expected to mostly produce tutorials. This means that as much as I would like to constantly write reviews which I will effectively be paid to write, I canʼt flood my readers with stuff that theyʼre not interested in. As I slowly start to include more and more reviews (Iʼm aiming for one a month in 2012), I will be able to build up links that will continue to pay me. Itʼs not just a one off payment after all...

Sustaining Associates! One of the best things about Amazon Associates is that once youʼve built a link on your website, you can just leave it, and as your website grows, so will your earnings. I might be making a couple hundred dollars a month at the moment, but my website is only eight months old, so itʼs got plenty of growing left to do. Iʼve recently started to see a boost in traffic from search engines, and this is whatʼs going to start paying me money in the long run. ! Reviewing products is a crowded market because itʼs easy to write, and easy to make money from, so everyoneʼs at it. The trick is to chose a product thatʼs not been reviewed too much, perhaps a brand new product thatʼs a little bit niched. I mention above that there was a product that I was earning a $17 commission on, and that was one of those products. Since the review went up on the website a month and a half ago, Iʼve had 320 visitors from Google, and about 85% of those had never been to the site before. As my site continues to grow, all these old and forgotten links will start to come into action with Google and Iʼll be making a passive income.! Itʼs important to get started on Amazon early because the sooner you build a following and start to rank higher for your referring posts, the easier it will be to break into a higher percentage rate each month. Itʼs the sort of thing that sits and does a lot of the work for you so that you can sit back and watch the money come in. Even though it may seem like a lot of effort to make a big post that no one is really reading when you start out, it will still prove to be worth it as it makes you money in the years to come.! When I like to write a bit top list with lots of links I recommend, I will throw in loads of photos and links to everything, as well as extra links for accessories for the items on the list. I want to market it as a one-stop shop for people to come and find presents for people with a love of photography. And this is relevant to every niche; let me show you just how easy it is to come up with your own:

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! My money from Amazon is increasing each month, and all I have to do is keep my website online to keep the money coming in. When I set up my first links, I didnʼt even think Iʼd make any money from it at all, so much so, that I actually didnʼt even log back into my associates account. It was only a couple months later that I received an email from Amazon telling me that I needed to set up a payment method, that I really saw the potential.

Donʼt put this off any longer, set up your account today.