Amazon Stores Profitable?

NWCougar

NWCougar

Go Seahawks
Sep 11, 2010
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Seattle, WA
I have a blog about playing a certain musical instrument and would like to add a store to it. I figure just becoming an Amazon affiliate and posting their products would be good enough.

Is being an amazon affiliate profitable these days for a niche product like mine? I'm not looking to make big bank, just want a store option to bring in a little side income.

What is the best way to integrate an Amazon marketplace with my wordpress blog?

Than you
 


Amazon will always be good for a couple bucks if you have decent traffic.

They are such a pervasive merchant on the web that you will see a lot of unrelated sales if you are sending a lot of traffic to them. Someone will click a guitar at 9AM, and end up buying a case of baby formula 6 hours later. You'll get like $1.09 or something.

You won't see really strong numbers unless you are ranking incredibly well for keywords with strong purchase intent. If your Amazon affiliate store was #1 for "Buy Guitars" query on google, I estimate you'd be making about $500-$1000 a day.

But you won't, because guitarcenter.com is number 1 and they are a 500 million company who you can't compete with.
 
NWCougar said:
Is being an amazon affiliate profitable these days for a niche product like mine?
Click to expand...

It all depends on your audience. A big part of Amazon affiliate income is from the unexpected stuff people buy after they get your cookie. If your visitors are generally a shopping crowd, you'll be getting some cash in. The commission from the DVDs, vitamins, books, lubricant or other crap they usually buy.

If your site is purely informational though and you publish your free trombone lessons for kids, - don't expect to be selling trombones every day.

NWCougar said:
What is the best way to integrate an Amazon marketplace with my wordpress blog?
Click to expand...

Banners, in-text review links, search widgets or even wprobot all can work. Again, depends on your visitors and your type of content. If your site is frequented by active consumers, pretty much all you need is find a creative way to push them over to Amazon with your cookie. If your traffic is broke or informational, then all you can do is create posts/pages addressing certain buying keywords in your niche and SE1 them to the top, but you'll be facing competition, extra work.

So yeah, I'd say try to analyze your audience and think of things they might need and ways they might behave. It all works, but you need to find that button to push.

Edit: TechS nailed it above.
 
200,000 Targeted Unique Visitors brought me in around ~$800/Month. Number that clicked through to Amazon Affiliate links was around 10%, 20,000 UV. Was doing $80-$100 days, ran that promotion for a week. All legit. But the comp is really high, and it's hard to make real $ unless people are buying expensive stuff. I can hit 300/orders a month but it doesn't mean anything if all the orders are under $10..

Only benefit I see is when I sold 4 household items, each was $350. That was a nice boost to start the day.. $1400 x 7% = $98 commission. But the number of people at buy bulk/expensive stuff is much, much smaller and more targeted. And it doesn't happen often.

All in all, if you an extra $20-30/Month to cover hosting go for it. But don't expect to do big numbers with it, unless you're ultra-targeting shoppers already in 24 hour or less buy mode.
 
Use it until you find something better.

You WILL find something better eventually.
 
I've never used banners to link to Amazon, rather custom made buttons. There are items people think "Amazon" when shopping for them. For those people I had sites which mimic price comparison sites so there was clear massage Amazon has the best price on this item. Once people clicked "buy now" or "visit store" or whatever they already had in mind that this is the best offer. Trust on Amazon site is obviously massive. You need to have something on your site to convince unconvinced that this guitar is really good bla bla bla (reviews, maybe: "What Carlos Santana said about it" or "10 famous guitarists who started with this model").

Obviously you have to choose some more expensive items (like $100 plus) to get any commission worth your time. Also: perhaps it is worth to invest some time so your site doesn't look like typical Amazon site.

I guess there are some people making good money with Amazon - just like there are some making good money with AdSense and other stuff. The point is to master some way of monetization.
 
I had a great method that got shut down fairly quick. For 2 weeks straight I would copy hot deals from slickdeals.net and then repost them to fatwallet.com using my referral link.
This worked great for about two weeks until fatwallet caught on and made drastic changes to users posting and auto changed amazon links to their referral.

I did about 3-5 deals a day and that brought in about 80$ a day
 
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