Amazon Associate Program

The Amazon Associate program is essentially an affiliate marketing program to help anyone who wishes to sell Amazon products. Individuals like sellers, website owners, bloggers, stay-home moms & dad and others are leveraging on this opportunity.

Basically, Associates can create Amazon product links, banners, widgets and aStores and post them on their websites or blog sites in order to monetize their websites and blog sites.

When customers click through those links and buy Amazon products from their sites, Associates earn up to 8.5% (Canada) and 15% (US) in referral fees. It's free to join and the tools provided make it easy to use.

Note: You DON'T get paid to refer others to become Associates - you only earn a referral fee when customers buy from your unique links.

Amazon provides detailed affiliate reports in order to identify consumer preferences, traffic, conversion rates, earnings, link types, etc. to help effectively optimize the performance of the program. You can use this information to determine what's working and what's not, and accordingly make necessary changes.

One of the key ingredients in making any blog or website successful is by drawing targeted traffic to it. If you read that sentence again, you will notice I said "targeted" traffic. You want interested people to come to your blog or website so they can benefit from your content and ultimately shop.

Today, most people when they are looking for something whether it be answers to specific questions, directions to a destination or comparison shopping, they use search engines. I'm sure at some point you've "Googled" when looking for stuff. Currently some of the most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing (MSN).

In this particular section, I'm not going to get too in-depth into search engines, however, sufficed to say that people are using the internet (through search engines) when looking for stuff. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. Simply put, SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to your website or blog.

So let's discuss how we can achieve this, thereby bringing your website or blog to the forefront of those people looking for the content, services or products you have to offer.

Content is Still King
One of the most important things to always keep in mind is to provide quality content. As they say "Content is king"! Some people are so focused on SEO that they compromise on the content, please don't do that. There is are ways to balance the two as I discuss below, the power of using keywords and keyword phrases in your content. Also, another important aspect about content is to keep it focused and not cover too many topics in one post or page.

Inbound links
Inbound links is another aspect of SEO which will help in optimizing your sites. Search engines looks for quality and high rank links that your sites are connected to. There are many ways of doing this - one of the effective ways to do so is to interact with other website owners or bloggers in the same area of interest as you.

Another way to get inbound links is to join groups or directories of similar interest to your topics and submit your links to these sites.

Keyword Research
Keyword or keyword phrase research will help you before you write your content so you are aware of how to incorporate them into your content - in essence, you're making your content "keyword rich". Google has a free tool called Google Keyword Tool.

Basically, once you identify the keywords or keyword phrases, you ensure that you include these in your URL, title, sub-title, bold keywords, name images with keywords and of course include them in the body of your message/post. Having said so, please don't stuff your content with keywords. The norm is to not exceed about 15%, some go higher, but I would not recommend that and more importantly keep it relevant to your topic.

Blog Organization
Organize your blog or website so as to allow readers to easily find your information. This can be done in several ways: having a neat archive of posts or articles which are listed under specific topics, having a site map, table of contents, inter-linking your posts and pages to one another so as to facilitate easy access to relevant content, making it easy for readers to go back to the Home page (if they get lost).

Pinging
Pinging search engines is a way of nudging them to let them know that you have updated your website or blog. Sometimes it does take a while until your website or blog is indexed by search engines and pinging them is a way to do so instead of waiting.

You can either notify them individually, like using this Google Ping Tool to notify the Google search engine or notify multiple search engines at once. To notify multiple search engine at once, check this Squidoo lens that covers several Ping Service Websites.

Blog Updating
And finally, don't forget to keep your website or blog updated regularly bearing in mind that SEO is a process and may/will not happen overnight. The key is remaining consistent with quality content and like I said, keeping it regularly up-to-date!

Search Engine Optimization: Buy at Amazon.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.
Updated: May 28, 2012