1000 Ways to Make Money Online

Ever want to make a living selling online but don’t feel like carrying an inventory, invoicing, shipping, paying a sales force, misc. business expenses, legal requirements, creating a catalogue, customer service, etcetera? You can earn an online income from being an Amazon Associate. I should correct myself; you’re not actually selling anything, merely providing a sales context for items that Amazon has in their catalog. Kind of like commission.

There are probably close to a thousand ways you can use the Amazon associate program to make a complete living online, but I want to focus on the program itself.

When you sign up for the Amazon associate program you get a user ID. Using a plethora of Amazon supplied tools; you can create links to products on Amazon that have your ID embedded in them. This way Amazon knows that you referred visitors to their site and you get paid a commission for whatever it is they buy. That’s right – anything they buy. This is great because if a visitor gets dragged away from your link to a nicer, more expensive version of whatever-the-hell you linked to, then you still get credit for directing them there. On top of this, you can select the performance based fee structure which will pay you a higher commission percentage on all of your visitors’ purchases; so as you sell more you make more (more than the more that you sold…what?)! That’s the absolute basics of how it works.

The best thing about the Amazon associate program is the tools they supply to help you create affiliate traffic to their site. The easiest of these is the toolbar that sits atop the Amazon page (once you’ve logged in). Whatever page you happened to be on you can just hit the “link to this page” button to get instant html code you just slap onto your webpage, article, etc. They also have 15 widgets that can be installed onto a blog or webpage that can display a rotating selection of items, create a search box for people to search on Amazon (for the lazy shoppers), provide recommendations, play mp3s, show slideshows, etc. Finally, they also have the aStore feature that allows you to set up a “storefront” that shows groups of Amazon items in an online catalog format. These are fully customizable and can even go so far as having an independent payment processing system (which is, of course, through Amazon).

Seeing as people love bullet points here are some bullet points of the Pros and Cons of the Program:

Pros:

• Amazon’s Huge Inventory – Amazon has an amazing inventory and just about anything you can buy, you can buy on Amazon. This is great because no matter what you write about you can pretty much find something to link to.
• Amazon’s Referral Tools – Amazon provides a huge assortment of tools that make building links, banners, and other creatives amazingly easy. See above.
• Everyone has an Amazon account – ok, well, almost everyone. Truth is it’s a lot harder to get people to come out of pocket when they have to search for their wallet and type in the digits.
• pays out after ten bucks of earnings – you do have a paypal account, don’t you?

Cons:

• Referral Rate is pretty low – in the vast world of affiliate marketing payouts are generally a lot higher.
• You can’t refer yourself – learned this one the hard way.
• It sucks to live in North Carolina – I’m not 100% on this, but from what about a dozen different website proclaim, Amazon pulled out of NC to avoid collecting taxes on the affiliate income. If you don’t live in NC it could still happen to you too as states look for ways to come up with more cash (frankly, I’m surprised NY hasn’t done something similar).

So you’re feeling good about the Amazon associate program. Now where can you use it?

Most of the time the program is used as an add-on to existing web infrastructure that you already have. For instance if you have a blog on gardening that you’ve been working on for a while, you can start including links on different garden products (gardening tools, composting bins, greenhouse equipment). You could mention them casually (“I found the Gerber Folding Shovel to be really handy because I can fold it up and put it in that stupid rolling garden cart I sit on”) or you could feature a product review that lays out the pros and cons of the stupid garden cart.

“But I don’t have a blog” or “my blog sucks, I hate it”. Well, one other suggestion that works fairly well is coupling an affiliate link with an article from sites like eHow. You can write a “how to” article on canning tomatoes and then look up to see if Amazon has any canning jars, or better yet, more expensive items like pressure cookers or stock pots. Tack on a couple of affiliate links (don’t get greedy) in the resources section and you’re good to go.

If you want more specific tips on Amazon associate program and how Darren from Pro Blogger has had some pretty big success over the years check out: 11 lessons I learned earning $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program

One final note: When dealing with affiliate marketing and in particular with affiliate marketing on blogs, the issue of disclosure comes up. There’s a certain camp that believes it’s important to maintain a level of trust with the readers which means pointing out that you make money off of these links. Then there’s the opposite side of the spectrum that states that you shouldn’t have to disclose anything and that links are links. It’s completely up to you how you use this. Just remember that disclosure isn’t a bad thing.

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