What converts better links to Amazon home, a department, or specific product? My guess is a specific produc, but in my case that would take too long. Will I convert ok by linking to Amazon's home page or will the relevant department work better? Anyone know how much better?
Sending a visitor to the home page is much less likely to convert than to a specific product. Also, try to link to a product from a page on your site that is related to that product. I find that if you link through text on the page and you are mentioning that product in the text, that is going to be your best bet.
Only had a few conversions myself but linking to a specific product seems to work best, Interesting it though, that linking to a department resulted with my site with sales that were totally unrelated to the product I initially linked to. Imo, if you can link a specific page..but what's important above all to just get them there..most of time: more links to amazon=more links (dont make it spammy! backfires for sure!)
If you have targeted traffic then definitely link to specific product. Offer your visitors what they want to see or what they might want to see. For example: Let's say your site is about pet supplies. People are looking for information about pet supplies and come to your site from search engines for example. Then you should definitely add links to your main page and link them here Pet Supplies. So pet supplies is your niche "main gategory", you can add lot of sub-gategories. For example article about dog frisbees and link these products Dog Frisbees , now you have new sub gategory and you can add one under that, for example article about specific dog frisbee. ( you could write review or something and link it to specific product Petmate Designer Dog Flyer To Err Is Human.) This is how you should build your site Hopefully this helped.
Thanks for the info guys, its been a huge benefit reading the above posts. I tend to find though that with my blog - people tend to visit for the how to posts rather than product reviews. If they then click on a product review link its all good but in actually getting the traffic to the blog, product reviews don't work too well :s I guess it depends on which platform you are working from be it blog, website etc. too.
What you should do is link to the review page on the how to posts within the content. They are reading the how to article to find a solution for some problem. So offer them a solution
Sorry I think I may have explained it wrong. If I have a blog and I write a post "how to play cricket" and then I add some popular cricket bat links at the bottom, it doesn't convert many clicks to Amazon yet it does gain me a good few readers... however say I add a post "review of the xx cricket bat", I don't get no where near as many readers but I do receive some clicks to Amazon. I have just started a new blog to start from scratch on the Amazon affiliate program but this is my experience from previous tries. I would like to really make a go of it this time but I'm not sure whether to mix the blog posts up or just focus on one without the other. Trial and error
I completely understand what you are saying, it doesn't change what I said though. It all depends on the keywords you are targeting. Keywords like "how to play cricket" are really generic and searchers are just looking for information. They can still be good to target on your site because like you said it can generate a lot of traffic. However, a keyword like "how to improve golf swing" or something like that is much more targeted and searchers would be more likely to buy a product to fix the problem. It all comes down to the searchers intent when they are searching for something, do they want free info or are they looking to buy something...
Got ya! Thank you for your help, I completely understand now. People searching for product reviews are in the end more than likely deciding whether to buy the product or not. Wheras yes, I will get a lot more traffic from general articles but any conversions from these are likely to be by chance. Thanks again! I'm not usually this dumb
Yes it depends on the keyword you are targetting, and buying keywords convert the best (i.e "buy sony123456"). In that case, linking to the product page will certainly convert better. I have put link to the product page and to category page, and found that the link to product page converts better.