Hello I have been lurking in these forums for a while now and have seen some amusing and also some good posts. I am a newbie from the uk, am trying to get some beer money by starting out in affilate schemes and would love some advice. What is the best way of starting out with amazon? (I already have an id, as i signed up with amazon ages ago, but have not used them until now) Is astore any good? What about AOM? , is that a good route to go down for a newbie? Also I have heard grumblings about google not like amazon affiliates?, is this because of the java script or because google just does not like amazon? I also know I need to get hosting, problem is there are so many web hosting companys all having very similar schemes and all similar prices it is hard to choose which one. I have also signed up for clickbank this week, I will post in the clickbank forum as I need some advice on that as well. Any advice or help on amazon much appreciated. thanks
aStore is good if you have an existing website / blog with steady traffic. It *used* to be very good in fact (when you can use it as a standalone site) but recently Amazon has changed their terms to refuse the use of your aStore link as a "standalone" (means you cannot drive traffic *or paid search traffic* directly to aStore) and that changed things a lot. aStore resides on Amazon's domain i.e. astore.amazon.com/yourid-21 and what you can do with it is pretty limited. IMO Google loves Amazon, but whether big G loves Amazon's affiliates is an entirely different matter altogether. Even if you are using AOM, whatever content you fetch from Amazon is probably already displayed on Amazon's main site, and you will have to do loads of marketing, SEO etc. to rank your result higher than big A, and that is if your site results doesn't get thrown into the supplementary results by big G (a common complaint by users of the script mentioned). IMHO Amazon money is easy if you just want some beer money, but if you want more success with Amazon you need to treat it as if you are running the store like the owner. Just my 2 cents...
Agree with all the above. That's why I tend to think producing a decent blog where you "review" products (hmm, better if you actually KNOW the product, rather than just rehash what others have said!) and write unique content about them is what will get you results in the long run. That, and some sort of following or authority for your blog, gained by quality unique content and links - there's just no way round that, not long-term. Those out-of-the-box stores just won't hack it. I have had an Amazon store running on Mr. Rat's script (which is looking a little cheesy now), for a couple of years and only NOW is it really showing any results, though still only beer money. And that's, I think, only because I customised it and added my own content... Definitely a SERIOUS duplicate content issue with Amazon - you've GOT to do something original.
Well, i do agree with unRegistered, aStore is good if you have an existing website / blog with steady traffic.