I had joined Amazon in the start of last year to check how it works out. To be frank I have been quite successful as a webmaster for around 4 years now but I have never had much luck with Amazon. And I always want to make it big through affiliate sales although I still trust Adsense the most for my earnings. It is not that I have never made any sales or earnings through affiliate and maybe I have made nearly a thousand dollars through various affiliates like Clickbank, website affiliates etc. But it has never been anywhere near my adsense earnings. To be frank, I have almost invested nearly as much money as I have made in affiliate earnings if not more in trying to be a large affiliate publisher but hardly have had much luck. To try out Amazon I invested maybe a couple of hundred dollars last year and bought a few Amazon plugins, bought a domain for a niche and built the website and did SEO. It soon started to rank very well in google and I also kept updating the website with new products almost daily or every few days. I tried that for almost half a year and there was no sale and I left it as I thought that maybe Amazon does not work for me. I left it completely for nearly the last one year and today I just thought of checking my Amazon account by chance and I am quite pleasantly surprised. My website has made 11 sales this year and I have earned $40.58 in total. It is not much and is hardly even one-fourth of the initial investment for this website and hardly makes any difference in my earnings but it is quite good to see some earnings from an affiliate program that I had almost given up for good. This had made me think twice about Amazon and I may promote Amazon in a large manner with several website and niche using my paid Amazon plugin. I was quite surprised to be frank and so thought of sharing it with you all.
It sounds like your ventures didn't work so well because your sites didn't offer much value.. especially if they are auto blog type plugins. It is great to see sales however. I remember when I used to wake up each morning checking my accounts to see if I got anything Amazon is great but whatever you do, don't cut corners. Use your plugin to make great sites and don't try to build 100s of blogs, trick people etc. make websites you can be proud of! And you will be rewarded with sales
That is great. I remember my first sales...it was 10 skateboards, but since, I haven't made much. 2 helmets sold this month via a dead site I gave up on, but that's about it
Very good, but I have never had a buyer from amazon from my blog. This for me is to focus on building my blog for adsense.
hi thanks for sharing your progress its good to know that perestence is finally starting to pay off .I would tend to go much more for Amazon as most visitors to Amazon are looking to buy unlike say clickbank etc anyway good luck thanks peter mcgrath
FD I have many sites which I can be proud of really. I hardly build sales sites and as I said I am not that much into affiliate networks compared to Adsense etc. But to be very blunt and frank I have tried Amazon on quality sites and they hardly sell on quality sites. I have used Amazon on sites with several thousands of unique visitors every day but they never sold me a penny. Their 4% revenue share is not much encouraging too. If I make a few sales of Clickbank amounting to just 100 dollars I earn 75 dollars while Amazon would pay me only 4 dollars for the same. So, I have to make my calculations and use the real estate of my various websites usefully. They same day tracking cookie also does not help. I have tried on quality sites but they did not work and then I bought the paid plugins. I was not doing auto blog most of the time but updating myself though the plugin itself extract the Amazon posts thereby reducing my work. I am also not expecting something huge from Amazon but it was just good to see that I am receiving commissions from something I had nearly left. Best of luck and hope you click your sales soon. Adsense works for me better than affiliate programs. It is for you to decide which works better. Keep your focus on adsense and try to expand on affiliate as a binary website income. Congrats and best of luck. I agree that the chances of a sale might be higher with Amazon but the two biggest problems for me are that they pay only 4% commission and secondly they have a single day cookie or so. Clickbank pays nearly 75% commission on most products and they have around a month long cookie if not more. Thanks Jerlene. I normally do not reveal my keywords/niche but frank speaking Amazon earnings will not make any heavy difference to me and so would not care much. The website is based on the furniture niche.
It is good that you build qualitiy sites - I firmly believe no matter how you try to monetise your site, making something good is the only to guarantee success and make a website that performs long term. I have sites also with 1000s of unique visitors that would just not be suited to Amazon. It is about the motivation of the traffic, the niche and many other factors. In terms of the 4% revenue share this is different if you have a store model. If someone clicks a link and goes to Amazon, then you get the 4%, but if they add to basket on your site and checkout then it starts at 6% (and increases with the more products you sell). Also if you get them to add to cart (either by a direct link or by adding to a shopping cart on your site) you can get the comission for that for up to 90 days. Clickbank I haven't tried, so I can't really comment from experience, but my impression is that it is very specific - you must find a good product for your niche. There seems to be a lot of junk products on it - is it hard to filter them out?
Thanks for the report of experience, but 11 sales in a year is a long way from 10 sales a day, which would be interesting. A lot of work needs to be done.
Nice to see that you earned even a little from Amazon. I think you should do SEO so it can rank well. I have my site, barely a month old. I hate doing backlinks but it is really important. I read from other forums that sales spike up during December. Happy Holidays!
Congrats on your first sales. A lot of people knock amazon cause of their pay % but to me it doesn't bother me one bit when I see my payments =). The work I put into my amazon sites has paid all off and will keeping paying me for a long time if I just keep adding fresh content, getting quality backlinks and building new stores.. So keep working it doesn't happen over night but once the sales start rolling in makes it much more fun to build and promote new amazon sites.
Hey pree-sa- First step is to get a store made with amazon products. Design the site. Add some content and then start doing seo on your new store. What part are you up to?
Amazon affiliate is a bit different from other affiliate networks. This is my opinion. Getting sales is difficult and even if we gets one sale the commission rate is quiet low. Nearly 4-8%. I am a newbie. Maybe I am wrong but this is my personal view. But one thing there are lots of products to choose from and if we are able to sell a 1000$ product it is good. But remember it is very very difficult.