Whats the secret?

To making money from Amazon?

 

Get *lots* of traffic and make sure they're people who want to buy the stuff you have links to. I hope that's not overly simplistic

 

Well you have to do a few things,

Craft a nice site that can avoid the dup penalty
Put it on a domain that's 3/4 years old +
Add it onto a site that is known for a few years offering reviews of a specific product.

I did that and within a few months the amazon site I "added" to the existing site was doing around $500-$800 per month in commission and doing really well in the serps. I sold it as it was an experiment at the time, but that was the make-up that worked for me.

 

Maybe niche sites are best for Amazon.

I have not made a single penny since I joined 4 years ago, but as soon as I set up a site for one of my customers, and put one of my Amazon links to test it, it returned $3.50 in less than 5 minutes.

Of course my customer's site has a domain related to a Hollywood celebrity and that could be the reason.

 

Good advice man.

 

I think the most important thing is using it on a site that the user knows will be trying to sell them something. I have a blog about investing, and I was initially using AdSense and Amazon, but I got rid of Amazon because it was not getting any clicks. Luckily, AdSense is working quite well!

 

From the huge variation in results here, and my own experience, I think the topic matters more than anything. It always surprised me that a low-traffic site on an obscure subject always made more Amazon money than other sites with two to four times the visitors which dealt with less obscure themes.

 

Alot of it is dumb luck as well. I set up an amazon feed script on a non-use domain of mine, and forgot about it. Months later, I logged into my Amazon account and found people purchasing the most random items (power saws, baby bottles, fishhooks, etc). Turns out that my feed was indexed and ranked well in Froogle.

 

It never worked for me. I even made nice spreads with book covers and write ups on sites that received lots of traffic. I made about 100$ a year. My pages are "prime real estate" and I made way more money displaying AdSense in that same space.

 

Keep it simple, don't over design and lose the focus of the page. The best bet is having people land on deep page in your site with exactly what they are looking for.

They want to see their item, with a way to buy it in like 1 second, or they are hitting the back button and going to the next result...

(Oh...and once you get to where you are making money...take it while you get it because you may drop out of the serps by the next quarter...)

 

I don't have the traffic yet, but actually the books will help my traffic. My site, www.edithomevideo.com will benefit greatly from the Amazon approval I got today. I can go select the video editing books I think people can use to enhance what I am teaching them. So can I actually have a link ... BOOKS .. and just put those Amazon books there? Similar to my Squido lens in the books section. That makes the most sense to me but will I be violating anything or colliding with the adsense on the page as well?

 

how would you go about avoiding this on a site which by nature has many similar pages? i have a real estate site which hundreds of pages that vary by only the location name and a short unique descrption of that location, so it has obviously been dropped down the rankings for a dupe penalty but i'm not sure how to tackle it, more unique content on each page?