Amazon Affiliates can make you a few pennies or a few benjamins!
[Click for larger view]
As you can see from the above picture I made a few dollars using Amazon Affiliates as a monetization strategy. Let me be clear that I was not actively using this as a core piece of my overall financial strategy but very much a passive one.
In other words, occasionally I would promote a book that I had just completed reading and shared it via Twitter or my blog. Over the course of 1 year I converted nearly 100 items making nearly $100. Not bad, right?
It’s quite reasonable to believe that if I were to actively begin executing strategically with Amazon Affiliates that I’d be able to make significantly more (and some make a lot of money via Amazon).
Here’s a look at my actual ‘Click and Conversion’ rate:
Amazon Affiliate Conversion Rates for 2010
5.32% is a so-so conversion rate. I’ve heard of people with some crazy-high double-digits! These bloggers have significant influence on their community and are extremely strategic and wise about the products they endorse and share. They might only share one, two, or even just three a year and make tens of thousands of dollars on those three recommendations!
One great number was a 33% conversion rate for a product I shared on Christmas of this year! That was quite nice. Timing is important as well as the product and context of your community!
Hopefully this is an encouragement that it’s both possible and definitely reasonable for even a new blogger to potentially break-even by simply using one affiliate program!
Confused by the terminology? Here’s what Amazon tells us:
- Revenue - The money paid to Amazon or a third-party vendor for the purchase of products.
- Advertising Fees – The sum of base advertising fees and premium fees generated from the sale of products at Amazon.com and its subsidiaries, such as Endless.com and SmallParts.com.
- Clicks – The number of clicks visitors have made on your Associates links.
- Conversion – The number of items shipped divided by the number of clicks on your links, expressed as a percentage. For example, if your links got 200 clicks and those referrals generated 18 shipped items, your conversion would be 18/200=0.09, or 9%.
- Product Link Clicks – The number of clicks visitors have made on product links to specific products you’ve chosen.
So what are your thoughts? Have you tried out Amazon’s Affiliate Program? What’s your experience been?
I am primarily a book blogger so Amazon is my primary revenue. I will make right around $300 this year from them. My conversion rate is usually around 5% on a monthly basis. But I actively promote free books which are counted as clicks but not conversions (I assume because it is a free sale and the payment rate I based on number of sales.) You can infure how many free sales you have and I am guessing I had around 1500 free books ‘sold’ on Amazon this year. But I also had 40 kindles sold through my blog which I am pretty happy with (that made up a significant porton of my revenue). I am going to start highlighting kindle sales not just free books to try and increase reveue.
that’s awesome! would you like to do a guest post about this experience?
This is a great post, since I have been lazy about checking out the affiliate programs.
This has certainly opened my eyes to the importance of implementing this program on my sites.
If I understand it right, you take the Conversion percentage and multiply that times the Total Advertising Fees Revenue to get the $99.18. (Although I came up with $102.06)
So you made $99.18 just to have a link pointing people to another product?
Wow, I hope you generate some more posts on this topic.
Thanks for the insight.
conversion is the amount of purchases made as it relates to the amount of clicks.
so i made $99.18 based on the commission structure per sale.
You want to hear something crazy? I can’t participate in Amazon associates, or most other affiliate programs, because I live in North Carolina. Our state government made some unwise changes to the tax laws, so Amazon and others just decided to stop having NC affiliates.
Not really a big deal to me personally, but I’ve read about others who instantly lost tens of thousands of dollars of annual income when Amazon bolted from NC.
wow. that is insane!!!
Didn’t that almost go down here in California as well? I think @Loren is talking about the dreaded affiliate tax [boo!] I’ve heard through the grape vine that Gov. Jerry Brown of California supports this affiliate tax…scary stuff since most of my income comes from affiliate marketing. Seems like everybody wants their slice of the pie these days. Guess I might have to move to Texas
yikes. i haven’t heard much of this to be honest.
I’ve been curious about Amazon Affiliates so thank you for sharing this. I’m still in the quality content and design phase (don’t worry, I’ll be using StandardTheme soon) so actively pursuing revenue won’t be on the radar for awhile.
However, since I do some book, movie, tech reviews on my personal blog (reserved for random slices of life) might take advantage of the passive revenue stream.
Thanks again. Happy New Year!
sure thing bro! have a great one too!
I’m going to check into Amazon Affiliates since I have been doing some voluntary, unpaid, product reviews on my blog. I suppose this could be linked to products available through Amazon. I’ll have to check it out.
hah! do the dance!
I’m hoping to start using Amazon Affilliates next year to earn an income. It all seems so confusing though. The attracting people to buy a product is where I will probably struggle.
what is confusing specifically?
I know you created this one yourself, but where do you get most of your pictures from? Do you take them yourself or are you subscribed to a website?
PS – I LOVE standard theme!
thanks dude!
i get them at places that have creative commons license.
Hi John:
I know I’m late on this thread but am also interested in legit image usage. Can you a) point me to one of your favorite sites to use b) point me to where you’ve already written about this or c) cover the topic in a future post?
Thanks!
clay,
covering this in a future post! i use google’s commercial free images in filtering.
I’ve messed around with it. Pretty much putting a link up on my blog when I review or discuss a book. To be honest I had not thought about sending out the occasional tweet saying what I had just finished reading. That’s a really good idea.
cool! let us know how it works!
John,
What do you use with Amazon? Links, Widgets, aStore? How do you advertise with them?
i use the direct links to amazon.com
I actively use my Amazon Affiliate account and for 2011 averaged about $450 per month. Yes, per month. Had one month over $1000. Almost none of that is from my personal blog though. My company manages several email newsletters for clients where we use my affiliate code whenever linking to books or other products. We don’t require clients to use our code but if they agree to let us then we do and we give them a small break in their rate… but it usually works to our advantage because of the residual sales / commissions that Amazon generates.
Woops. Meant 2010 averaged that. Geesh… too early, not enough coffee yet.
and does your business take these?
To date, I have earned 84 cents. At the rate I’m going it’ll be a few decades until I reach the minimum pay-out
I’m not actively promoting anything yet though, so it doesn’t bother me – everything in life has a learning curve (is this why the world is round?)
yup!
i have a half-complete series on amazon… not sure if i’ll get to finish it though.
I have a small niche website on foster care. I put a text link at the bottom of each post that says “Great books on foster care”. That was 2 weeks ago and it looks as if I’m now making a little less than $10/week. My conversion rate so far is 17%.
I’m about to put up a banner ad on the Amazon Mom program that I LoVE since I get free 2 day shipping on everything I order! (kind of like Prime) I’m thinking of sharing my savings with my readers on a post but don’t want to stray too far away from my foster care niche since I post only twice a week.
Just discovered your blog. Love it!
you’re doing such a great job!