How To Make Money With Amazon

Rather than diving straight into the mechanics of the Amazon Associate scheme, it's probably worth taking a quick look at why it works so well.

Simply put it's a matter of trust. The Amazon website is probably one of the best known on the web. It is well laid out and visitors will already be aware of it. They will expect to be "sold" when they arrive at the site. In fact Amazon is so well known and trusted that they don't even need to have the lowest price (although they often will have) in order to make a sale.

The website itself encourages visitors to buy, there are all sorts of different routes to making a sale, recommendations for you (if you are a returning customer), recommendations based upon what you just viewed, further recommendations based upon what you just put in your basket etc. They know what they're doing those Amazons.

Also important is the fact that Amazon have a truly awesome selection of goods for sale. Books, CDs and DVDs are all there of course - but you can buy just about anything you want on Amazon these days - computers, mobile phones, AA batteries, shoes, groceries, guitars, garden tools, digital cameras ... the list goes on (and on).

Visitors to the Amazon website can choose from a huge range of products, which are usually very competitively priced and which include some very well known brand names which are, like Amazon itself, universally known and trusted.

Well I suppose you could say that of course it's easy to sell to people who already want to buy - it is a little obvious I agree. On the other hand, being obvious and "just common sense" doesn't make it any less true.

We can probably assume that someone who searches for the phrase "buy ps3" on Google, Yahoo or MSN might be a (very) good potential customer if you could somehow get them to Amazon's PS3 page via your affiliate link.

No hard sell, no need to persuade anyone that they need to buy a games console, no need to persuade them that the PS3 is better than the XBox 360 or the Wii (which you will also be happy to sell them of course). Just putting people who already know they want to buy in touch with the product they want at a good price, and often with the option of free delivery.

One of the nice things about Amazon is that it's a transparent market place. Put it another way - they tell you exactly what's selling well and what price customers are happy to pay for it.

If, for example, you log onto your Amazon webpage and click on the "software" tab you will see a box entitled "Top Sellers in Software" on the right hand side of the page. This is updated on an hourly basis and will normally show you the top 5 or top 10 best selling software titles.

This is valuable information. You can be pretty sure that if a product is in the Amazon bestseller list then it's selling well and there is a high demand for it.

If you are just starting out with Amazon then you should probably select a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 20 products to promote. You can always add more later as you get the hang of it.

Some products sell well at different times of the year - try to pick a range of products to average this effect out. For example, you could start off with 2 or 3 software titles, 2 or 3 electronic items, 2 or 3 games consoles, 2 or 3 items from the home & kitchen area etc.

Pick items which have a high price tag - it means more commission for you. The books, CDs and DVDs which Amazon is so well known for just don't justify your investment of time and money (unless you already have a specialised, high traffic website that is).

Always pick very well known brand names so that you build the trust level as high as you can. If in doubt about which of two options to choose from, always choose the best known brand.

Once you're up and running you can add to the range of products you promote. There are a number of ways you can choose products for your expanded portfolio and we'll have a brief look at these later. In the meantime, here's a summary of how to pick your first few products:

This is fairly simple. There are a number of alternatives, all of which will work - possibly with varying degrees of success and at different speeds.

You know what your list of product offerings is and, with a little imagination, you can probably think how visitors may search for these products.

Let's generate a generic list of keywords that potential buyers might use. We can just use the following to start with:

[Product name] - fairly obvious
[Product name] variant - MS instead of Microsoft, PS3 instead of Playstation 3 etc.
Buy [product name] - again fairly obvious
[Product name] discount - anyone looking for a discount is probably ready to buy
[Product name] special offer - likewise, special offer seekers are probably ready to buy
[Product name] deal - looking for a deal, another good buying signal
[Product name] promotion - same theory as discount, special offer and deal
Product serial number - Anyone searching for a product by serial number is hot to trot

You could expand this further - but you get the idea. So if, for example, we were promoting Microsoft Office Home & Student Edition 2007, we could quickly come up with the following, just for the name variants:

Microsoft Office Home and Student Edition 2007
MS Office Home and Student Edition 2007
Microsoft Office 2007
MS Office 2007
Microsoft Office Home Edition
MS Office Home Edition
Microsoft Office Student Edition
MS Office Student Edition

Then, simply by adding the qualifiers - buy, discount, deal, etc. we could very quickly come up with a long list of keywords.

You can probably go out and buy some very sophisticated keyword tools should you wish - but it's most likely not necessary to do this when you're starting out.

The Google keyword tool is very good for providing suggestions. It's free and you can access it whether or not you have a Google Adwords account. The link below will take you there:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Now that you've selected a suitable list of keywords, how you use them is a matter of choice.

You can use PPC and this is my own first option. I value my time and I know that, using the techniques outlined, I will see a good return on my investment, so it's a natural choice for me.

If you're a bit wary of PPC, you can use other cost free or low cost methods - article marketing, forum marketing, squidoo, myspace etc.

You can use most of the above with a direct linking strategy (sending your visitor straight to Amazon) and this will give you the highest conversion rate. Amazon trust - remember?

However, some article sites and forums don't like affiliate links and you may wish to build either landing pages or a specific site for these.

If you decide to build a landing page or a complete site then you can use normal SEO techniques to drive traffic to it.

Don't forget that you're capitalising on the Amazon brand and the trust it engenders. Make any landing pages or sites you build "sympathetic" to the Amazon look - lots of Amazon banners, graphics, search boxes etc. (these are all provided for your use by the Amazon Associate scheme).

Your conversion rate may be a little lower this way, but you'll still make plenty sales.

Once you've been running for a little while and made a few sales you'll start getting even more information to help you identify the products that people are buying.

Remember - you will get credit for anything that customers buy within 24 hours of arriving at Amazon, even if they don't buy it through a link that you are advertising.

So you may start to notice some patterns - maybe you'll see that you're selling quite a few Sony digital cameras on a regular basis.

Why not think about advertising these, along with any other products that keep cropping up in your sales without the benefit of advertising?

Between the Amazon bestseller lists and your own sales figures you have a wealth of information available to you to help ensure that you are promoting the hottest selling products available.

And that information is updated hourly (bestsellers) and daily (your personal sales figures)- it's bang up to date. You've got better market research than a lot of multi-national companies right at your fingertips. How can you fail?

One of the easiest ways to maximize your profits is to use mainly direct links when advertising. Amazon gives you an extra 2.5% commission for items sold via direct links. This is explained in more depth at the Amazon Associate website.

However, you can't advertise everything via direct links, there's just too much stuff. Not to worry, the bonus sales you get from spin off sales - additional sales made when someone has bought something via your link are very nice indeed. You can encourage this by giving a little thought to what you're promoting.

For example, if you're advertising games consoles then it's not unreasonable to expect that you could pick up some extra spin off sales in the form of games, extra controllers, memory cards, cables etc. At certain times of the year, the games accessories can run to around 30% of the price of the console.

Similarly, if someone has just bought a dvd player then they might very well buy a couple of dvds to play on it.

Customers buying digital cameras will often buy a camera case/bag/pouch along with a memory card. If you're lucky you might sell a waterproof housing or even a zoom or wide angle lens (not cheap).

Don't forget, even if some of the spin off sales are for relatively low cost items, Amazon pay commission based on a sliding scale - increasing as the number of sales go up. So those DVDs and books that you're selling on the back of your main offer could really make a difference to your commission at the end of the month.

You might also want to consider how buying patterns vary over the course of the year. Is Mother's Day coming up? What would sell well?

How about Christmas? What would sell well then? The answer is just about everything - so if you're using PPC save a little extra for some additional advertising. If you're not using PPC then think about - it could be your Christmas present to yourself.

As you might expect from a company like Amazon, they provide their Associates with a host of tools to help them sell stuff in the most efficient manner.

As well as the normal banners, graphical ads, text links etc. there are a variety of different types of ads (Amazon call them "widgets") which can be used. There's bound to be something you can use that will work well with your website.

One of the latest widgets - released in July 2008 - is a selection of RSS feeds. These are great because they can provide you with the very latest hot items and supply you with fresh updated content for your website, blog or Squidoo lens.

At the moment you can choose from the following feeds:

* Bestsellers of various Categories

* Bestsellers of Sub-Categories

* New Releases

* Most gifted Products

* Most Wished For Products

So fresh content + hot products for you. Not bad eh? The example below is the most wished for DVDS according to Amazon UK.

I hope I've given you some idea of the possibilities for making money using the Amazon Associate scheme.

It really is a bit of a goldmine. If you try it and use PPC, then you will have the odd day here and there when you lose money. However, these are few and far between if you do it right - I have never lost money over the course of a month. Normally I expect to make somewhere between 70% and 150% profit per month.

If you go down the article/SEO route then you have nothing to lose but your time.

I've concentrated mainly on the potential of the scheme. I'm assuming that most Squidooers have some knowledge of the Amazon Associate scheme as a result of their Squidoo experience. There are plenty of lenses which explain article marketing, SEO and Google Adwords a good deal better than I could.

However, if anyone is still puzzled regarding any aspect then just drop a note in the guest book and I'll be happy to expand if possible.