How I average $500 Per Month With Amazon Associates Program

[chotoan]

People who know me, know that I'm an Amazon fanatic and for good reason. Amazon allows me to earn an income via commissions on sales generated through my website.

I've watched lots of people on the this forum and others discuss the difficulties of making a dollar with amazon, but hopefully after this post, some people will take my advice and start making more money.

Ok, so many of you are skeptical and because of that, I'll go ahead and post a couple of screenshots for you taken from my Associates Central page to show you the money.

I'm sure someone out there is saying well of course you did good during the holiday shopping. So here's another screenshot from the opposite side of the calender:

Ok, after showing you the money, I hope to have some of your attention now.

Some background:
I've joined the amazon associates program since about 2004 maybe '05, but I never really started putting effort into it, until about 2006. At the time, I was already making good money from my day job, and I wasn't too focused with the couple of dollars i was getting from Amazon. Adding amazon products into my site was really an after thought, and I figured that I might make a couple of dollars to pay for my hosting.

I'm going to share with you right now what I think are some of the biggest mistakes that many of the amazon associates do, and why many struggle to actually make some money from the program.

The big secret:
The reason why so many people either fail or don't earn as much as they can even with all of the effort that they do is because they never bothered to setup a professional e-commerce website in the first place. Now before you take offense at what I said, let me be specific.

Many people have decided to build a quality content site with good information and resources, original content and even communities based around a common interest. That's great to be honest, and I wish more people did that. I used to say that if I have great content and people come to my site to get it, that I could easily sell a product or two related to the topic of the discussion. It seems logical that people might come to my site because they searched on something they were interested in, and might happen to purchase while they are at my site. I've seen associates monetize they're website as an after thought, by adding banners, search boxes, ads, widgets and more, but there are several reasons why this is all wrong.

1. People who came to your site because of your good content are at most likely to be one time purchases
2. People generally purchase from professionally designed retail sites
3. You earn more money using Amazon Web Services
4. Having a shopping cart allows your visitors to checkout on your site, versus being sent directly to amazon
5. If you simply refer people to amazon without providing additional service, then the visitor doesn't have a reason to come back and shop with you
6. Most associates are too focused simply on making a sale and haven't even considered that they should be focused on building a brand and serving they're website visitors as actual customers
7. Possibly the biggest reason is that, there are websites trying to sell stuff that don't address the most basic of shopping questions like, who you are, how to make a refund, or are exchanges available
8. When I'm searching for content, I don't just happen to buy a related product from the article. Maybe impulse shoppers might, but I'm not one myself
9. When I'm actually going to shop, I go to retail websites
10. Blogs and Forums should be added to your retail site, not be the basis of it


I could probably go on an on with that list, but what I'm essentially trying to get at, is that if you really want to make more money with the amazon associates program, that you should stop trying to approach it as something that can add to monetize your site, and start approaching it more like a genuine e-commerce business. Your site shouldn't be content first with retail second. If you want to succeed in e-retail then retail should be first and foremost on the site with everything else secondary.

It took me a couple of years of messing around with retail and marketing to really learn that lesson. Today the majority of my amazon revenue comes from my shopping site http://www.orderitontheweb.com . It's not perfect, but I don't have to use ppc, get about 1,000 unique visitors daily, have over half a million pages indexed in google with a pr5 and it does well converting visitors into shoppers. My current trends show an average of 7.37% , which is great when you consider that most major retailers only convert between 5%-10% of their traffic.

After enjoying a small measure of success with my own amazon sites, I had some friends asking if I could help get a site setup for them. I got such a positive feedback from my friends and relatives that I explored the idea of setting up professional amazon websites as a solution provider. For me amazon associates was a hobby that today I'm happy to say I was able to do on a more full time basis. So I started a small startup doing what I enjoy. Today I'm lead developer and seo for my small start up E-commerce For Everyone (see my signature).

In closing, I hope that other amazon associates can find success as well, and that some of what I wrote might cause you to take a look at your own websites in a new way and address some of the things that are keeping you from making more from amazon associates.

If there is anyone else doing well with amazon, I'd encourage you to please list a few of the things that have helped you reach success. Like or dislike this topic? Please respond to this post and lets have a positive dialogue to learn from. Whoa, thanks for reading this all the way down to the end, lol.


thanks,
PuReWebDev

[chotoan]

Thanks!