Making Money With Amazon

Amazon is one of the best places to look on the Internet if you are trying to find a good affiliate program. Amazon was in fact one of the first affiliate marketing programs to be set up in 1997 and it has a wide range of products and is a great platform for selling.

It is a good way for self-published authors and traditional publishers to sell books but it is also possible to sell books and other products as an affiliate. The commission is reasonable and, as with most affiliate programs, the more you sell the higher your percentage gets. If you have your own website, it is easy to set up an aStore of Amazon products on your own site and you can opt to sell particular titles or allow Amazon to vary them according to what's popular at the moment.

Starting your own Amazon affiliate store

If you really wanted to go into affiliate marketing for Amazon in a big way, you could set up your own website where you can review and promote Amazon products. Setting up a store is really easy and you can start making money pretty quickly.

It helps with your marketing if you have a particular theme, such as sports or wild animals, for example, as this helps you to target your potential customers. The way to start is to do your research and find a market that doesn't have too much competition. Do some keyword research and find some niche areas with little opposition.

Once you've found your niche, take a look through Amazon's list of titles and check that there will be enough good books for you to choose from that fit in with your theme. Once you have your niche market organized and a list of titles to promote, you need to setup your website -- there are plenty of web building sites available to choose from and it is pretty easy these days to set up your own website.

Think of a catchy name for your business and set up your domain name and hosting and begin to put together your affiliate store. Try to keep your design simple and make sure your text is easy to read -- you can't really go wrong with a plain white background and a dark colored font. Avoid too much clutter on your site as your Amazon store itself needs to take pride of place.

To set up your Amazon affiliate store, go to the affiliate program page and create an account. Once this is set up Amazon will be able to track any customers that buy through your store and pay your commission. Then, simply follow the instructions and set up your affiliate store. You may notice that there are adverts running on your page and this is the default setting. These adverts won't make you any money, and they can distract your visitors from buying your main products, so make sure you change the settings so that adverts do not appear.

Promoting your Amazon store

Once you are set up and ready to go, you need to get some traffic to your site. If you have chosen your products from Amazon carefully, you will have a set of books, DVDs, audio and other products all related to a theme. This makes targeting your market much easier because you can use keywords with your search engine optimization to capture those people searching the Internet with those words.

You can also find your prospective customers on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, MySpace and Linkedin, as well as the numerous blogs, forums and chat rooms that you will find on the Internet.

You could try pay per click advertising through Google's AdWords and Yahoo’s Search Marketing and you could also try Facebook advertising as this is great for targeting your market, plus you are able to put in a photo in a Facebook ad, which also helps.

You could try e-mailing various businesses that might be interested in your products and you can also post your own promotional video on YouTube or advertise to other people's videos on YouTube.

Another way to market your site on the Internet is to write articles which can be posted on article submission sites or used as giveaways to relevant Internet businesses to use for their web content.

Don't just rely on Internet marketing, you could have some leaflets printed to distribute locally, advertise in various relevant trade journals, magazines and newspapers and you could create some stories to use as press releases.

Another idea for promoting your Amazon books and information products is to start a book club -- either in your local community, all for a wider community online. You would recommend books based on your book club readers and if you ran a book club online, you could have a chat room, blog or forum where people can contribute their book reviews and chat about the latest great books. All this will help to promote your Amazon store and once it's all up and running, it should not take very much effort to manage and your commission payments will come in automatically.