Learning how to promote Amazon affiliate program

[achiever]

Hi Gene,

My name is Alexander Marlin and I live on this little Isle called St. Maarten in the Caribbean.

I am very much interested in learning how to promote Amazon affiliate program.
Been online making money with affiliate programs for the past couple years, but I am very much interested in Amazon associate program.

Can anyone shed some light and lead me to a great resource, program, or any information that can get me started with Amazon affiliate program?

Any help will be appreciated, thanks.

[GeneKavner]

Hi Achiever --

I'll give a bit of a step-by-step process.

1. Sign up to join the Amazon Associates Program . It's free and very easy to do. You will be directed to Amazon.com where you will need to answer several easy questions and you'll be all signed up.

2. Surf around on Amazon.com. See what products on Amazon catalog are likely to match the nature of your site. If there are specific several products that match your site exactly, you will build links to them from the Amazon Associate Central site using the "Build Links" - "Product Links" menu.

3. If your site matches a range of products that could be matched by a particular search term (e.g. "Affiliate Marketing" or "Cool New Electronics"), you will be able to build a link using Amazon's "Build Links" - "Recommended Product Links" menu.

4. If you would like to build a whole store of products for your site, you should think about building your own "aStore", which is also accessible via the Amazon Associate Central site.

Once you have built links, simply insert them on your site in the most likely place where your visitors will click on them. Don't bury them way below the fold where someone has to page-down to reach.

Always remember that the better you match the products from Amazon to the topic of your site, the better conversion you will have.

Once you have done the above, you need to get traffic coming to your site. You can purchase traffic via various Pay-per-click engines or work on your site to drive it's page-rank up so that it could be found via the Google search terms.

Hope this made sense! Post if you have any more questions.

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Gene! Very nice overview.

[purdue512]

There are also MANY sites / products that have been built on the Amazon API. This means that the site programmatically contacts the Amazon databases via web services, below the awareness of the end-user. This allows for Amazon products to be seen on thousands of sites... Many of these sites allow you to put your Amazon Associate ID on their site. Some revenue-share, some allow you to keep it all. Some allow you to build a little niche store of your own...

I believe most people shy away from this approach because they want to keep the link juice all to themselves. However, if you're a beginner, it can be a great way to get into it.

[shayne54]

Doesn't the 24hr cookie suck though? I have sent a little bit of highly targeted traffic to my astore website and still no sales. I'm sure that amazon has profited from my traffic, its just that their 24hr cookie blows. sorry for my language

[Blackpool]

That is a brilliant overview, and with the 24 hour cookie is this true, need clarification on this please.

[Linda Buquet]

Yes it's correct. 24 hour cookie. But I would think the trusted brand in part makes up for it. just don't promote computers, high end electronics and other things that tend to have a long buy cycle.

[bambosi]

I think make a review blog is the best way to promote amazon

[Trendog]

24 hour cookie I didn't know.
Great info, thanks.