A few days ago I made a post about the brand new Amazon Associates Product Preview feature for their Product Links. This post is going to give you a comprehensive overview of all of the Amazon Associates link types that you may use on your site to link to Amazon. I will also give you some practical advise on how to taylor some of these links to better suit your purposes.
Before you can take advantage of the Amazon Associate links, you must be a part of the Amazon Associates program. If you are not a member already, click here to join -- it takes seconds and will enable you to add Amazon content to your site and monetize your traffic. Don't worry if you already have other means to make money; Amazon Associates program gives you an additional, incremental way to make even more on your site.
Typical Content Site Layout
If you are a typical content site or a blog, you will have the following layout:
While most monetization programs give you a chance to fill up your advertising slots, Amazon provides you a way to link your site to Amazon from both, the advertising slots and the main page content of your site.
To give you a comparison to the offline world of television, the advertising links are similar to watching commercials on TV (e.g. a Volvo commercial) while the content links are similar to products that are part of the main TV program (e.g. a character of a show driving a Volvo). Certainly, there is room for both ways to monetize your site and if you are focused solely on the advertizing slots, you are missing a fantastic way to make additional revenue.
Amazon Advertising Link Types
Amazon has several link types that are designed to be placed in your advertising slots on the page. These link types compete for placement with other advertising programs, such as Google AdSense, AdBrite, TextAds, Kanoodle, etc. However, unlike other advertising programs which provide ads for a large number of potential advertisers, for which you have little control of, Amazon advertising links have only a single advertiser: Amazon.com.
Having Amazon as the sole advertiser has its advantages and disadvantages. I'll start with the disadvantages first (to end on a more positive note!).
- Disadvantage 1: You only have a single advertiser competing for placement, so there is lack of built-in advertising price inflation. While various advertisers of other programs bid prices up against each other to win the coveted placement (causing you to make more money), Amazon typically keeps their margins and percentage of payouts steady.
- Disadvantage 2: Because Amazon typically has poor margins (as do other retailers), percentage of their payouts is not as generous as some other programs that solicit advertisers having significantly higher margins, and as a result, being able to afford higher affiliate commission rates.
- Disadvantage 3: Being the only advertiser allows Amazon to pay you on a Cost-Per-Action (CPA) basis. This means they only pay you when a user coming from your site completes (and does not cancel) a purchase from Amazon. As a result, you absorb the risk that your site's viewer clicks on an Amazon Ad, goes to Amazon and does not complete a purchase (or completes it more than 24 hours after the click), for which you make nothing. Other popular advertising programs pay you on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) basis, which means you get paid (albeit a small amount but it all adds up) on each click your site generates for the advertiser.
- Advantage 1: With Amazon as the single advertiser, your visitors see a trusted brand on your site. While most other programs accept advertisers that can be quite shady, without an easy way to tell if you can trust them with a credit card, you can be assured that Amazon will not misuse your customers' privacy or renege on its promise to deliver a product.
- Advantage 2: Because Amazon is a trusted brand, you are likely to see better conversions (higher % of people making a purchase) than with other CPA affiliate programs. I am sure that you've clicked on many ads but not complete a purchase because the site just did not seem trustworthy. One advantage of Amazon is that if you trust anybody online, you'll trust Amazon.
- Advantage 3: Amazon has millions of products across 35 different categories in its catalog. No other advertiser can claim this depth of product offers. Most advertisers can only boast a few different options for their visitors. With Amazon, if your viewer clicks on an ad for an iPod and later decides to purchase a windshield wiper instead, you still get the credit and the corresponding commission.
- Advantage 4: Because Amazon pays on a CPA basis rather than on CPC basis, the program removes any incentive for people to simply click on ads. This significantly reduces general fraud (and eliminates click fraud completely). With Amazon, you don't have to worry about clicking on your own ads or getting reduced payouts due to click fraud.
The following are Amazon link types that are designed specifically for the advertising slots:
- Recommended Product Links
- Omakase Links
- Easy Links
- Search Boxes
Page Content Links
Other than Amazon, there are few programs that provide you with the wealth of opportunities to monetize the main content of your web site or blog entry. Amazon's page content links allow you to offer your readers a way to purchase a product that you specifically discuss in the main portion of your site. Because these offers are so directly related to what you are discussing on your site, they are typically not associated with "advertising". Instead, this is what typical users would consider to be part of the main site content.
What differentiates these links from other links is that they allow you to pick the specific product or page from the Amazon catalog that you would like to feature and discuss on your site. For example, being an entrepreneur myself, I have read an excellent book on formation of Google
As you can see, product links give you an ability to send a powerful message to your readers. As a result, these links are able to give you click-through and conversion rates much higher than anything you can get via the advertising links. In the end, if you match products with the content of your site well, you have a chance to make as much if not more from your content links as you would with your advertising links.
The following are Amazon link types that are designed for the main content of your site:
- Product Links
- Text Links
- aStore
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