<—- Back to Amazon Affiliate Lesson #1
Ok, so if you read Lesson #1, you know that you can’t just plop a bunch of Amazon ads or links without giving your visitors some value. Sorry to burst your bubble there. Now that you’re adding some value on a site, what next?
Goal #1: Get People To Click On Your Amazon Link!
Legitimately get your visitor to click on a link to Amazon.com that includes your affiliate tag and thus mark them for your commission.
So for example, click on this Amazon book link. Do it. Don’t be shy. It’ll open in a new window. Seriously, it’s actually a really good book and I highly recommend it.
If you decide to buy that book that I linked to, I’ll get a commission of around 8% of your purchase price. In fact, if you buy ANYTHING from Amazon.com in the next 24 hours, I’ll most likely get a commission on that too. We’ll go into more details on that in later lessons.
Did you click that link? If you didn’t, you at least considered it didn’t you? Come on, admit it.
What does an Amazon affiliate tagged link look like? Let’s take a closer look:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814409954?ie=UTF8&tag=playstation11-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0814409954
Most of it tells Amazon exactly which widget or link you clicked on, allowing them to better analyze their traffic. The only part we care about is the “tag=playstation11-20″ part. That’s one of my affiliate tags. Amazon only lets you manually create 100 affiliate tags in your account, which helps you track which links are making you money and which ones aren’t. Remember, when someone clicks on a link with your affiliate tag on it then buys something, you make money!
So What Is The Best Amazon Widget To Use?
None of them. Seriously. They all stink.
When was the last time you were on a website and clicked on a banner or sidebar widget?
Most people surfing the Internet have developed ad blindness by now. They tune out everything but what they’re reading.
Put your links in your text where people will actually read it. For example, click here to see a book about how to quit your job and work from home full time. It’s a real published book that’s currently #1 on a bestseller list at Amazon, not some fly by night eBook or website asking you for money. And here is another book about making money online that’s actually even higher on the full bestseller list
See what I did there? You either clicked on them or thought about clicking on those links didn’t you? I targeted to the audience that will be reading this post and gave a text link in my content that would appeal to you.
How Do I Make Amazon Text Links Like That?
Login to the Amazon Associates interface at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com, and then go surf Amazon.com. The Site Stripe will appear at the top of each page. Click on Link To This Page and choose “Text Only”. You’ll get a text link for the product you are looking at. Right click on that text link and choose “Copy Link Location” to grab the link.
Can I Cheat The Amazon Cookie?
It’s important to get them to click through to Amazon with no funny business or YOU WILL GET BANNED FROM THE AMAZON AFFILIATE PROGRAM! By funny business I mean opening a hidden image or iframe or javascript to mimic a user clicking through to Amazon. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. If you do, don’t do it!
How does Amazon know if you are cheating? They track everyone that enters their site you know. They can tell what you’ve looked at in the past, what you’ve bought, what you’ve rated, where you hover your mouse pointer over and more! If you send 100 people to Amazon.com and 99 of them never move their mouse pointer over the page, that tells Amazon you are cheating. Again, just don’t do it.
Does It Work?
Heck yeah it works. On average I get a 15% click through rate on my Amazon sites using this technique, for every 1000 page views, I get 150 clicks to Amazon. Depending on the time of year I get conversions from a low of 6% in January to a high over 20% in December. Meaning of those 150 clicks per 1000 page views, I’ll get between 10 and 30 sales depending on the time of year.
Note that NOT all traffic will convert this well. It has to be well targeted. You need to match people with the products they are looking for.
Stay Tuned for Amazon Affiliates Lesson #3: Targeting Your Traffic
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Great series! Now I can get started doing things the right way. Do product reviews, such as book reviews work at all? I took about 5 books and basically souped up some of the reviews from amazon on them.
Book reviews can work well, and lots of people make money on them. You have to figure out how to get your review to rise above the actual page at Amazon on a search for it to be effective.
Rule #1: DON’T COPY ANYTHING FROM THE AMAZON PAGE! Google HATES that and will drop your page like a stone if you have any duplicate content from a big shopping site. Write your own unique review.
Rule #2: Find a keyword related to the book that the book doesn’t rank well for, write a single post review targeting that keyword.
So Mike, you have a single article called Addiction Books with 5 reviews on it. Split it into one post per review and pick a keyword. So for example, on the Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction book, figure out what exactly a parent would search for here. Make the post title an exact keyword phrase match like “Help For Parents Of Addicts” then make sure the review is at least 150 words long, preferably over 300 words. Then build links to that post. Do that over and over and over and over and over and over. It takes a while, but the traffic you get will snowball the more you do it.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer that. Once again, you have a fantastic resource here. I’ll look forward to more of your posts about web marketing and avoiding scams.
I just wanted to say thank you for your instruction! My Amazon affiliate sales are ramping up. My conversion rate is 16% and have already made $185 in sales for the month of may. (of course I only get 6.5% of that but it’s a better start then I could ever imagine!)This is just on following your advice alone. Thanks again.
Hi there, please critique my website! I’ve been working on it for the past 3 weeks now. I am getting few clickthroughs, and have yet to convert any traffic.. I’m wondering what the biggest turn-off for these visitors would be.
Http://longboardreviews.org
Any input would be greatly appreciated.. thank you!
I dont know part “navermatome-92531-22″.The number “92531″ is post id. How to they can put it to tag.Please help me!
You can’t put anything custom in your tag like a post id. It has
To appear exactly as you get it from Amazon.
Like I said in the article, some people have reported you can call Amazon and they’ll generate you 1500 affiliate tags to use for tracking purposes but you have to use what they give you.
Thanks you for help.As you said amazon only generate 1500 affiliate tags.But in the matome.naver.jp.They can insert alot of number to affiliate tags. This number use to identify who is posted this article.
Amazon pay money for matome.naver.jp . Then matome.naver.jp pay 3.5% this money for article posted user.
Tanaka, I’m guessing that once you do a certain amount of affiliate business with Amazon, they’ll make as many id tags as you want. They probably asked for a hundred thousand tags and Amazon generated and tied them to their account.
Hey.
So glad I stumbled upon your site. Great info. Will bookmark without a doubt (and this is my 2nd comment already, lol).
Anyways.. do you mind having a quick look through my affiliate site? I currently have 3 product posts that I want traffic to. The cuisinart, gaggia classic and samsung 4287. Let me know your honest opinion (but only if you have time of course).
I also just stumbled onto your site here. Link referrals had not occurred to me before, but you’re right, they do add a personal appeal and touch that is lacking with the widgets. Thanks for the advice.
Basically,WordPress sites with various plugins developed for Amazon affiliates are not effective ? Because all of them are pulling reviews from amazon pages, pictures and descriptions too, widgets are also main selling point of those plugins… I must try with links in text, because right now with a lot of visits and enough content on site I have awful conversions, not worth my time.
Hi El Plumber
I have been trying Amazon Associates advertizing for 2 months on a new website with very disappointing results, to the extent that I am wondering whether they operate a scam.
The website is to do with jewelry, sale of books & the Amazon line of jewelry.
This February gave 1150 visitors (from home page counter, total now is 2850) but only 50 clicks are recorded and no sales. My guess is that 1000 visitors would on average give 1000 clicks????
Why only 50? I have tested out the Amazon analysis by using a friends computer and clicking thru to the final page on an Amazon adv, say 20 times, diff adverts, and NOTHING is recorded in my Amazon analysis page. Also, I note that it is Amazon policy that Affiliate members are not allowed to buy stuff on their own account ….. if they did then they could check up to see whether Amazon had recorded the sale, or operated a scam. I would be interested to hear your comments . Also I will study your website advice in more detail. I live in Adelaide, Australia.
Cheers, Allano
Allan Taylor
Allan, I hate to tell you this, but that website it pretty terrible. Amazon Associates is no scam, BUT whomever you paid for that website may very well have scammed you if you paid more than $10 for that. Go read these lessons again. Are you providing any value to your users reading your site? Why would anyone click through to Amazon and buy anything from that site? Would you?
You have visitors and traffic but FROM WHERE? How did they get to your site? Are they interested in shopping? Are they interested in jewelery? Or is the “traffic” provided by the people that sold you the website? That site looks suspiciously like something from these guys and if so you should work very very hard starting right now to get your money back: http://electronplumber.com/is-the-online-hosting-network-a-scam/