4 to 7% referall ridiculous?

Conversion stats for Feb 2009 as of now:
Ordered items: 3
Clicks: 354
Conversion: 0.85%

The above stats are for targeted visitors.

B and N offers similar services, but they use Google Publisher Program.

 

Here are my numbers for Jan 2009

Ordered items: 116
Clicks: 1918
Conversion: 6%

This is the first time I broke the 110 items mark, making a 7% commission on all my products (books). This month is looking even better.

My advice is still the same.

Create good content for your readers so they will buy and increase the number of items you sell.

 

The problem is that it reset every month, it should not be like this.

 

And accumulate to infinity?

 

It seems like Amazon may has higher pay out structures for a multi-tiered system. The industry average for 2nd tier is 2%. If you have the quality traffic the best money maker will be to find new affiliate programs for established companies just getting into the game. When you are one of the first to start making the company money and lots of it, you can demand a larger % of payout.

 

Personally, I do not see how you can sell "thousands of dollars worth of stuff" and only get $30 in commission? Not when your commission goes up with the more sales you get. If your sales are over $2,000 monthly, you should be getting a $100 check from amazon every month.

 

Parka: Congrats on good conversion rate.
Regarding creating good content, Amazon themselves provide content (Which, I think would be the best) to be included on the product page. Like most other people, I am also using the same. Do you write your own content for promoting books? Could you share as to how many Amazon products do you promote? Do you promote Amazon as part of your blogs or using static web sites (I mean, sites other than blogs or forums).

 

I do my own book reviews, published both on my blog and on Amazon.com.

I research by looking at the content Amazon provides, which are other customer reviews as well as their on-site editorial reviews. Looking at these reviews, I'll see how else I can help my readers by providing information not already found in these reviews.

E.g. If something is best reviewed by showing pictures, I'll take some photos and post on Amazon. I look at those who give low ratings and they give me an idea what type of readers would like it and I write that. Let's say the product is a computer hardware, I will write about system requirements and compatibility issues which is a concern to buyers.

So far I've about 180 product reviews on Amazon. These reviews include all sorts of stuff I bought. If it's just focusing on the niche of my blog, I would say it might be closer to 120 reviews.

On these reviews, I will ask Amazon readers to check out my other book reviews by visiting my profile page. On that page is my blog's url. It brings in a few visitors (below 20) to my site daily. Those visitors are premium traffic because they are on Amazon for a simple purpose, finding information about the items they want to buy.

Just don't post a url link in the review itself, Amazon doesn't allow that.

I think in summary it's this: Find out what's preventing people from completing a purchase, and provide the information they need to do so.

--

My conversion rate should be higher. But I have blog entries where I post new book releases (think 30 over Amazon links per entry). Visitors will click the links to find out about the book but typically won't buy them because they are either not out yet, or there aren't any unbiased customer reviews besides the on-site product descriptions. I won't buy them myself for the same reasons, but they serve as something useful for readers to find out what's coming out.

 

Thanks for detailed reply. Very useful hints for prospective Amezonians. However, most people use Amazon only as an extended revenue stream (expecting a hundred or two) per month. It is practically difficult to do research for such meager amounts. What one can infer (from this discussion) is that if one is not in a position to spend considerable amount of time promoting Amazon products, one can't expect more than, say 1 or 2% conversion rate. For those effectively promoting Amazon products, the conversion rate could be as high as 6-7%, but it requires continuous research and update of products, content, and links. In addition to these, of course, one should be able to deliver sufficient traffic. Considering all this, it is possible that hardly less than 1% of affiliates make any money on Amazon. Does Amazon provide any stats as to % of affiliates earning more than (or less than) x, 10x, 100x, etc.?

 

Yes, but there are 1000s of other sites with this same content on, and Google will ignore your site unless you blur the Amazon "footprint" a bit (or a lot) with your own content.

 

You missed out this specific point I made.

Sure people can copy content. But they cannot copy the brand image or reputation of a site that creates original content.

 

Parka, the stats
Ordered items: 3
Clicks: 354
Conversion: 0.85%
are for visitors that have effectively been referred to Amazon site (in other words, 354 visitors have been referred to Amazon, and 3 have converted). If the visitors are not interested, they wouldn't be clicking on the link and going to Amazon site (amazon.com). These are book links from relevant pages.

 

Sure, right up to the point where they terminate your account for no reason, refuse to reply to any of your messages and keep your money.

ePN is bull. Read the many forum posts about how crappy they are.

 

You have to add context to the links.

I've once tried to put a list of links in a sidebar. They are all related items and lots of people click through. But the conversion rate on Amazon is very bad.

Contrary, my book reviews only have one single iFrame at the bottom of the review, and the conversion rate is 10% for those iFrames. I'm pretty surprised by that number as well.

That's the difference between a link with and without context on a blog. Of course I've since removed the list of links.

 

There are plenty of internet companies that do it, and don't make nearly the money that Amazon does, and not all of them have affiliate programs:

eHarmony
Match.com
HouseValues.com
FreeCreditReport.com
MatchLock.com


Just to name a few.

 

Usually, there will be only one or maximum of two book links to Amazon.com from the web page. There's no list of links.

 

Oh. I mean something like below:

Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
...
...

All totally different books. Self selected books.

 

That's the main reason why I never really promotted Amazon, I think they are a total rip off. Your the ones bringing in the sales and they pay you 4% I'd take that as an insult!

 

Amazon's whole business model is designed around keeping overhead low. That said, without the "Us" they would not be as successful. People don't just go to Amazon directly looking for goods. They get there through some other means. That other means costs Amazon nothing, but makes them, something that they would not otherwise have seen.

If they closed their affiliate program tomorrow, they'd likely see about a 65% or more loss in sales, and a 75% loss in 3rd party sellers.

Their whole business model is built on having little to no overhead. This means letting other people sell their goods, ship their goods, and still others market those goods. Its what they are all about, and its why it works.

I think a lot of people are really missing out on the earning potential here.

So work your ass off for 10% or do nothing for 4%. Hmm... You are missing out on some good income IMO.

 

I can't believe your sticking up for them do you not think it's a joke, the only reason they can get away with it is because they know the Amazon brand is trusted and will lead into sales.