I targeted a few opportunistic phrases for amazon and turned over almost 2 grand of their stock in the last 40 days. The comish is hardly worth it. I picked something more expensive to have a go with but will probably move on from amazon pretty soon. I'm using search based traffic to a page profiling the product (only using 4 pages - 1 product profile per page). Is anyone doing well with amazon that is open to sharing some tips?
That's about what I have done as well on my site. This is actually the best quarter that I have had ever. A 5-6% commision will get you that. $2000 is never going to get you much more than $150. If you were going to make a job out of it you would have to sell over $55,000 worth of stuff a month. All that you can do is try to get 30 times more traffic to your site (or have 30 other sites). Personally I still find I get more money through AdSense. You have to do something pretty clever to make a great amount of money on these things. DigitalPoint's other ventures are just that kind of clever however, he keeps his trade secrets to himself.
We made more than that our first quarter and will make nearly a G this quarter, but as you said....it is hardly worth it. I think you have the right idea Dominic, find a more expensive product to work on. Since this is totally comission based, the bigger ticket items are the way to go. Funny thing is, we end up selling mostly random things that people browse on to buy after they click on our product links. To be honest, I think Amazon's system is pretty bad, but you can leverage their content and make a few bucks doing it, so what the hay.
I have been a member of Amazon since 99 and my profits keep increasing. I don't come clase to making a living off of Amazon but I am doing ok considering most of my products are under $20. There are some people who do very well with Amazon.
Most of these people who make a bundle off of Amazon are probably keeping silent on the matter. btw I finally got my hosting provider to admit they have tape backups and they will most like charge me a whopping $20 for the restore. $20? Who cares, that's so little to get back my several hundred posts.
Amazon aren't much of a revenue generator by comparison to other affiliates. Doesn't mean they aren't worth including as an additional element but as a primary generator, it's a no-go, imho.
Target very carefully and choose reasonably priced products - at around 5% a $10 book is 50c - need to sell alot of books that way. Ebay affliate could be another worthwhile option. You get money for each sign up even if they don't bid on the product I believe.
Use Amazon's Web Services, such as MrRats script. http://www.mrrat.com/aws/ The down side is that there's way more competition now than a few years ago. Right now I'm making about $700 a quarter, while back in Q4 03 I made $7,500. For scripts, mod_rewrite helps BIG time. Rumor has it that a nice PR can help the store.
I barely make the minimum payout amount ($10) per quarter with Amazon. I make more than 10x that with adsense. Still, it is nice to be able to link to any product and potentially make a buck off of it, and I don't like to have all of my eggs in one basket...so I think Amazon and adsense compliment each other farily well.
I have never had any success with individual links. The only way I could see them working is if you have a site where they could help the user a great deal (Like if this site had a link to an SEO book that was written by DigitalPoint).
I'm having more success targeting more expensive items, but the competition is of course tougher. Will see how we go this quarter then decide.
I've never made any money with adsense...trying to change that here: http://www.introville.com but still no dice.
I sell amazon products daily. Its about what you are targeting and the traffic you are getting. Getting 1,000,000 uniques a day for 'car' is probably worse than 100 for 'buy a blue Honda online'