As you know on the web there are about three major ways that you can make money:
-
Sell a Product or Service
-
Accept Donations
-
Place Advertisements in your Content
Most of the web is attempting to sell a product or service to people. There are a few open source projects that take donations along with some other sites. And lastly in the blog sphere we operate mostly on advertising. Because I blog mostly to contribute to the community and not to make money I leave those pesky advertisements out of my blog. However if I was going to advertise I would definately do it with Amazons affilitiate program.
Basically with their affiliate program you are given a choice of serveral widgets you can place on your website or blog. If your visitor clicks on it and makes a purchase of anything on amazons website you get a cut. The percentages are broken down like this:
|
Total Items
Shipped |
CE Products |
Kindle, Video on Demand
MP3, Game Download |
Endless.com |
General |
| 1-6 |
4% |
10% |
15% |
4% |
| 7-30 |
4% |
10% |
15% |
6% |
| 31-110 |
4% |
10% |
15% |
6.5% |
| 111-320 |
4% |
10% |
15% |
7% |
Some products on amazon are actually not sold by amazon, with those you get a flat 4%. There are some caps on this program though such as $25 cap on personal computers and downloadable digital media is capped at $1.50 each.
The application process takes about five minutes and is pretty painless, you can apply here. Now that you are an affliate you will notice when you go to amazons regular website a grey toolbar will appear at the top of the page. You can use this toolbar to track your sales and create product specific widgets. In my case I would want to advertise my book so I go to that page on amazon and then hit the "Link to this page" button to create a custom widget that looks like this:
This widget can have its colors and boardering adjusted to better fit your website or blogs theme. A lot of bloggers I know actually write book reports on books and then use these widgets to entice people to purchase. I'll do an update later on how well this particular widget does :).
Lastly they have some great pre built widgets for amazon searches, and popular products that might be useful. There is also an api to create dynamic widgets to adapt the product offering to the article you are presenting. Lots of people are reporting better results with the amazon widget than with even google adsense, especially when the product is closely associated with the website content. Good Luck.
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