Hi all! I have been blogging for ages but have decided to trial Amazon affiliate program on one of my blogs. I decided on the carousel widget, because it seemed to fit best with my design. Worship Blog I have a carousel widget with worship music at the top of each post, and a carousel with recommended books at the bottom of each post. For some reason they are not showing up for me, but I would love to know your opinion on my placement and anything I could do to improve my profitability.
They just show fine at my end. Imho, i find the placement obtrusive perhaps its just me. I prefer them to be after an article or at the footer.
Looks fine to me. All be it annoying though. I've never been a fan of the flashy stuff, and really think it turns a lot of people off. Also, when it comes to a blog its been my experience that you stand a better chance monetizing PPC than selling products outright. Amazon products tend to sell better, and yield a higher rate of return in a "store" format. Either way, placement looks fine.
Thanks for the opinions. I have a pretty big monitor, so it's not to intrusive for me at all.. But I might look into just promoting a few related products mentioned in the post instead of the flash thingo at the top.
Amazon has MP3 download widgets that will fit in your sidebar, that use your space more efficiently than the carousel you have at the top. That way users can preview songs and download them as well, and you can have many more songs and albums than that carousel will hold. If you are going to use Amazon, why not embed an astore into a page to offer books as well, and maybe some other products. How is the adsense working for you ? Could that space be used to sell products instead ? If you have a small amount of targeted traffic, you will do better selling product than PPC. Right now you don't have enough content to do any damage on SERPs, and I notice most of your content that you do have is scripture quotes with no reflection on what they mean to you. To be honest, I don't like the template at all if your intent is to make money, it is very limited in space and does not give you much opportunity to add multimedia like videos of sermons, self help and spiritual guidance from some of the more popular "gurus" and faith based professionals. More content is the first thing I would tackle. If this is a passion then that shouldn't be hard.
I really appreciate your thoughts! I will give it a while before I judge how adsense is doing, as I am still building traffic. Which will come with more posts. In regards to amazon I think I will remove the carousel one, and maybe at the bottom of each post have a 'what I currently listening to:" use the single mp3 widget from amazon. I am still trying to get into itunes affiliate program as I think more people would buy single songs from itunes than amazon. Also with the template, I will have a look around and see if I can find something better. thanks!
Don't put too much on music downloads. They pay crap, and for the most part when it comes to popular music, people (who actually pay for music) don't click to buy form random third party sites since many who use digital downloads already have some program installed that they would just open up to order from. At 10 cents a download, music downloads are not really worth the space that they take up on the blog. Just my 2 cents, but I spent many months trying to promote downloads, and it is not worth the effort unless you have a lot of traffic.
500,000+ impressions of my carousel widgets on over 20 different niche sites has resulted in no sales what so ever..... Make sure to look at all of your link types in Amazon Associates and how they convert when planning your sites and what to use to on them to earn revenues.
HTey are showing fine but I have to agree with them being obtrusive. People go to a blog to learn and usually read opinions, not to purchase tings. I would think that if you added the widget to an actual store from it may work better for you in terms of conversions.
You have an attractive site and for the most part I think you are on the right track. In the past I have made the mistake of throwing in the towel too early, or selling a site at the beginning of its success. Stick with it and you'll do very well. It takes time. My best site took about a years worth of very hard marketing before it started paying off. And I was spending probably $500/month on links, but that site now does $6-10,000 per month.