Making Money with Amazon

If you have a credit card and 25 USD at your disposal, you can set up your affiliate account with Amazon and start earning an amazing 15% commission from all affiliate sales.

Now you may have heard this endless number of times but with Amazon, it truly is a heaven for affiliates. It is one of the best paying affiliate marketplaces ever, not only in terms of generous commissions but also in a way that you can depend on to be a reliable source of income for a long time. Apart from becoming an Amazon affiliate, there are countless other ways to earn from Amazon.

Amazon – A Brief History

Jeff Bezos laid foundation of Amazon way back in 1994 and went online in 1995. Earlier the company was called “Cadabra Inc” but later, the name was changed to Amazon as it implies the company’s large size.

Amazon did not sell multiple kinds of products in the beginning; it was just a good old online bookstore and later they diversified into electronic items, furniture, apparel, foods, toys and others.

For people in the online business, you will be surprised to know that Amazon never made any profit or a substantial amount of profit for the first four years.

Since Amazon incorporated and issued its first initial public offering in the year 1997, there were complaints from shareholders who were not earning any profits from their investment.

But this soon changed when the Internet bubble burst in 2000 and many Internet / online businesses went down. But, Amazon sustained itself – its persistence and perseverance didn’t go to waste and they earned their first quarterly profit of 5 million USD in 2001.

A tip: The founder never lost hope or faith in the business tactic or model he was following and went through four grueling years sustaining business expenses and maintaining a high value driven service to consumers – this should be the attitude of new age Internet marketers. NEVER GIVE UP.

Making Money with Amazon – What Are Your Options?

Keeping aside the option of becoming a seller on Amazon, which means you create an account and sell your products, you have three other options to think about:

Becoming an Amazon Advertiser

In this option, you have the chance to display your product in front of millions of qualified shoppers and follow a cost – per – click advertising on Amazon.

You can use ‘Amazon Product Ads’ to drive traffic to your website. The blueprint to follow – you create a free account, upload your product catalog, enter your budget, Amazon displays them with highly targeted shoppers and you pay only when someone clicks on those ads and is redirected to your website to make a purchase. You don’t have to pay Amazon for allowing shoppers to pay a visit to your website.

Currently, the Amazon Advertiser offer is available for baby products, computers, electronic items, health and beauty, home products, jewelry, office products, shoes, toys, watches and children toys – if you are dealing with any of the products above, you can set up Amazon account easily.

Becoming an Amazon Affiliate

If you have a website that is a few months old and has a purpose (keep in mind the Google’s Farmer Update 2011), you can set up an account with Amazon Affiliate program. When you advertise Amazon products on your website and visitors from your website actually buy from those ads, you get up to 15% in referral fees.

The affiliate program is available for almost all Amazon products but check out in detail after your sign up. Doing thorough product research is important because you would want a product that sells and not something that looks ‘good’ on your website.

The Amazon affiliate program was launched in 1996. Do the math – they have a 15 year track record behind them and you can definitely trust that kind of experience.

For a start, you can begin with link building and adding widgets on your site. Use Amazon links and banners to add an endless number of products to your website. You can use custom-made Amazon widgets to provide an interactive experience for people visiting your web page.

You can create links and widgets from any Amazon page – it is called Site Stripe. With Site Stripe, you can “create links directly from the Amazon.com site without having to visit Associates Central” (Amazon).

Becoming an Independent Publisher

Are you a writer and looking for ways to publish your book? Surely the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing option will sound like a godsend as compared to waiting and sulking to get publishers to notice your book and then publish it after 2-3 years, unless of course, they find it so worthless that it goes into the shredder!!!

You can reverse all this by becoming an independent publisher with Amazon’s Kindle edition of new – age publishing technology. With Kindle, you can create and publish a complete version of your book within minutes and start promoting it.

Kindle is “fast, free and easy” (Amazon). Not only this, you get to participate in a 70% royalty earning program when people purchase your book. Moreover, your self – published book will be available for purchase on Kindle supported devices – iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, PC, Blackberry, Mac and Android devices.

Furthermore, if you want a little variation, you can go for “on – demand” publishing through Amazon’s “Create Space” program.

Here, you advertise to millions of potential buyers and only self – publish the book when consumers want them. Create Space works on “on – demand” model and thus, you create the product when customers order.

This way you don’t have to pile up on books, unlike how the brick and mortar publishing industry works. The self published books on Create Space can be made available through CDs, DVDs, books, MP3 and video download format.

Finally, to enable potential buyers to search about your book, Amazon has formulated a revolutionary search engine strategy where the search engine uses actual words from inside participating books and displays them on search results page – this is known as Amazon “Inside Search.”

Customers can also preview sample pages from your book to assure that it is the title they are looking for.

Conclusion

You have three options to making money with Amazon – while advertising with Amazon is an indirect way because you earn only when shoppers visit your website through Amazon links; the other two options are such that you can earn directly from Amazon.

Nevertheless, all three ways can turn into a reliable source of income in the long term. Just make sure that you are advertising or turning into an affiliate for the right kind of product (read: “a product that sells”) and if you have written a great fiction or non – fiction, sign up with Kindle first.

Do you like Kindle? Let’s hear your pro’s or con’s about it. Leave a comment below!