Introduction
When you’re just starting out as a blogger, you’re keen to make money
in any way you can, and a great way to do this is by opening up and
using an Amazon Associate account. It allows you to pepper your articles
with custom HTML links to Amazon, which sends you a commission for
every product sold. The great thing about these links is that they stay
on your website forever and will continue to send you money for years to
come.Setting Up Your Account
Before you do anything, you need to have a close look at your
analytics and find out where the majority of your traffic is coming
from. If your website is about local crafts in the north of Canada, you
of course want to use a Canadian Associates account, but for most
websites, a US one is most suitable. I’m British, but I use a US account
because I want to appeal to as many people as I can, even if that means
I have to wait longer for the money.
Linking
When you’ve got your account, making the links are pretty self
explanatory, but I’ll walk you through it. When you’re logged in, you
can browse Amazon and you’ll see that you have a tool bar at the top of
the page with a number of options. When you’re on the page you want to
link to, just click on ‘Link to this page’ and follow the instructions,
depending on what you want your link to look like. I only ever use the
text only option as I like to make custom images, but it’s really up to
you. I also shorten the titles as the full title is usually too long for
what I want to use it for, and then I highlight the HTML and paste it
in the HTML section of my post page. As you’ll see from the image below,
my ID is embedded into this code so that whenever anyone clicks on the
link, Amazon will know who sent them.
Your Commission / Advertising Fee
The more you sell, the higher your commission becomes, at least in
most cases. When you’re 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 you’ve sold 3131 products. Unfortunately, this only
applies to general sale items as they have the biggest mark up, and
you’ll only ever make a maximum of 4% on electrical goods, even if
you’re selling you 10,00oth product. There are some exceptions where
you’ll earn more money, such as digital good (mp3, video, etc.) which
are set at 10%, but some of them are capped at $1.50, meaning you can’t
really earn too much from them, but they will push up your commission
rate. At the end of each month, your commission rate goes back down to
4% and you start again.
All this considered, regardless of your niche, if you sell a lot of
products, you can make a lot of money. I’ve put together some plans for
the future in which I’m going to be reviewing more products in a way
that’s particularly useful to the reader, encouraging them to buy. Not
only that, but I’m going to include links to alternative products and
accessories with photos to match, helping to ensure the sale. I’ve
actually had some pretty unexpected results from my experience with
Amazon Associates, which is encouraging me to keep it up.
Making Money
When I first set up my account, I linked to a top list of photography
gear, but I didn’t really expect to sell much from it, so I just left
it alone. Then I got an email from amazon telling me that I needed to
update my payment options as I was owed over $100, which surprised me as
we’d only had about 3-4000 visits to the list. Turns out that it
doesn’t take much to start selling your products through the blog; my top list didn’t even have any photos. That was when I realized that I needed to have a good look at what was making me money.
The unusual thing that I’ve noticed from studying my reports is that
out of the 124 items that I’ve sold through my website, only 19 of those
were items that were actually listed on my site. What this means is
that people were coming to my site, going to amazon and seeing products
elsewhere which they wanted and then bought those instead. I’ve had all
sorts of products bought through me, from a camera flash to a ‘Where’s
Waldo?’ fancy dress costume for adults.
You don’t earn money on products that are returned, or if you try to
buy for yourself through your own links, but usually this doesn’t make a
lot of difference. It usually takes a few days for the sale to go
through from your orders report to your earnings report, and show you
your commission, but if you’re really impatient you can work it out for
yourself. I just sold a camera and two lenses for $2350 and the
commission on that will be $94, so as you can see, these small links can
start to add up. None of the items that make up that money were listed
on my website, or even mentioned before, which goes to show that just
having these links on your site can make you some decent money.
If you really want to encourage people to buy through your website,
then you need to make it easy for them to do so. By this I mean writing
monthly lists of products that you recommend for different reasons,
complete with a description, review and photo. Make the list as inviting
as possible and as popular with the search engines as you can, and
it’ll only be a matter of time before you’re making commissions on the
sale of a wide variety of items. Have a look at the screen shot below,
taken from my Ultimate Office Shopping Guide and you’ll see how I like to put together my lists.
Getting Paid
When it comes to payment, you have a three options; bank transfer,
cheque, or store credit. As I’m in the UK and using a US account, they
won’t transfer the money, and US store credit isn’t much use to me, I
have them send a cheque. Usually there’s a $15 fee for this, but this is
waived because I can’t get the money through any other means. I’m sure
that if I did live in America then I would be forever shopping on Amazon
and take no money away from it.
The great thing about being able to keep them money in Amazon is that
you can use this money as part of a prize offer on your website.
Encourage people to like your Facebook page and then when you’ve reached
1000, or whatever your target is, you pick one at random and give them
the money as a gift card. This is one of the best ways to get people to
like your page as it’s hard to turn down potentially free money, and
it’s not as if it’s coming straight out of your pocket
