I have a site currently running Adsense, with anything up to 6000 impressions a day and an extremely low CTR and payoff. The ads google serves up rarely seem to be even passably related to my site so I'm not sure how I earn that $1 a day anyway. The site is a dictionary - I have a couple of thousand entries and I was thinking Amazon might work ... I mean, I can stick a link to a book about pigs on the page about pigs, while google gives me an ad for some free farm game, which probably pays 0.01 a click. Most common words like that adsense has abysmal results for. Having never used Amazon before, can you completely control what is shown on each page? And do you guys think it would be a good idea for a dictionary site?
Hey, Of course you should recommend books, but it could be hard. Yes, you can choose a specific product and paste the HTML code wherever you want. Also, if someone else clicks on the link but buys something completely different, you still get paid, which is good. You'll just have to try, but for now, don't be too hapy, it might be hard, especially cause it's 4% (its ok with more expensive products). You can also consider CJ if it won't work.
Ooh, control. What a novelty I'm waiting for the approval at the moment but that shouldn't be an issue, its a good site and gets quite respectable traffic. $1 a day is very low for 4000-6000 views a day and rising, damn those sucky keyword based ads. I have a feeling the only ads that are getting clicked on are the stock photography ads (which are mostly on my index pages not the nodes with content) so I don't mind handing over some screen realestate from google to amazon to give this a go. Might try it for a month or two and report back here!
Well, I'm approved (as of this morning) and slowly starting to stick amazon links through the existing pages, which is going to take a while. It is really, really nice being able to put links on that actually have something to do with my content. Hopefully this pays a little better than Google at $1-2 a day.
I hope you can make sales with your Amazon.....try to promote products with higher price because Amazon give lower commission compared to another affiliates.
I've made one sale of 150 clicks so far, which isn't toooo bad. Only have the amazon links on a few pages, I kinda forgot to turn off 'admin only' on most of the ones I was putting in. Ooops! I imagine it takes a long time to actually see a trend in this ...
It will take a while to see if it is worth promoting Amazon on your site. I have a similar problem with one of my sites, that gets 1000s of visitors a day but is very hard to monetise. Sometimes you have to think a little deeper - build up a relationship with your visitors by getting them to register an account, add comments etc. Then somehow try to get an understanding of why they are visiting your site. The more you dig into it the more ideas you will get to monetise.