I'm new to amazon, switched from Clickbank since there are a lot of scams goin on CB, I wanna start focusing on amazon. my question is, should I create an amazon Store (those stores with built in shopping cart?) mostly I'll make product reviews which will be posted on my blog, should the reviews link directly to amazon products with amazon affiliate links, or wouldn't it better if I have my own amazon store with the built in shopping cart?? thanks-
Reviews tend to work great with direct product links. You can also have images built in as well. Then there's widgets. And they have some really cool ones that you can integrate in sidebars or wherever you want. If you can, try to use affiliate links multiple times within your articles. Link the text, put up affiliate links with images at the end of the article etc. Make them go to amazon at least. You never know what they'll find and purchase. As for amazon aStores, they are a disaster to say the least. I already tried them with some traffic domains of mine, and trust me you're far better off with affiliatenichescript dot com or even associate-o-matic dot com I prefer affiliatenichescript but if you're not on a budget, you can start off with associate-o-matic (free version). There is a quick learning curve if you need specific product categories featured (like I did), but nothing impossible of course. You can integrate them within your site, or use them to make a stand alone shopping website. Just make sure you add some content if you want to gain decent rankings. At least for the home page. I usually see people adding custom home pages with cool images, text content and stuff like that. The idea is to gain solid rankings and at the same time make them see why they should shop at your site. And this is always done within the script itself. Both associate-o-matic and affiliatenichescript support custom pages. If used right, very powerful stuff as far as marketing/seo and pre-selling goes. I'm also thinking about widgets lately and how I could integrate them to "enhance" the overall user experience. There's many roads that you could go, and that's what I like about amazon the most. There's so much possibilities, almost every site can be monetized with them in a variety of ways. Other than that, if you have some sites where you don't know which products to feature, put up an amazon banner (you have category banners as well) somewhere and see if that brings you something. Often, it's enough to just refer people to amazon and then let amazon do it's job. I see sales totally unrelated to items that I'm promoting. Very cool if you have decent traffic across your websites. I also never liked clickbank, they seemed like too much hype to me. I decided to work with amazon and ship over some physical products instead. I'm glad I did.
Amazon works okay, but you have to be very careful when using them. They will ban you in a heart beat if anything goes against their terms of policy. If your products are already listed in amazons database your store will be easy to set up. If not you have to manually enter all barcodes and wait for up two weeks (if I remember correctly). For an easy webstore, I would recommend using google checkout. They are easy to work with, they have links so you can put webstores in blogs, and all sorts of nice methods. I think they are the easiest to start with. Also once your store becomes bigger you can track everything which is very useful to increase conversions. Google has very few limitations and is very easy to work with compared to amazon. I have multiple businesses and it has always been easier to start with google checkout or paypal, I like google much better partially because they understand that businesses can be classified as it's own entity and won't run off your personal credit score unless you tell it to. Overall I'm not a fan of Amazon, they only plus is that you might sell a few items through amazon if you spend a lot of time keeping track of prices to keep yours the best price.
I have found writing a short review and posting it on Snipsly.com or Zimbio.com and linking direct to Amazon has worked fine. Also consider a video review to rank higher and quicker.