Using Amazon to Get Started Making Money As an Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketing is a well-established way for merchants to sell their goods on the web, and for people like me (and maybe like you) to earn commissions by promoting those merchants and their products.

Amazon.com pioneered affiliate marketing with its Associates program. This is still a good program for beginning web marketers wanting to get their feet wet.

If you have a web site, even if it"s just a personal blog, you can make money by inserting specially coded links on your pages; those links take the user to books or other items on Amazon. You make money when one of your visitors clicks through using your link and makes a purchase.

With this program, you don"t have to handle any physical goods. You don"t have to worry about processing payments or shipping packages to customers. You just send people to Amazon and receive a reward--in the form of a commission--when they buy something.

You can link to almost item sold on Amazon, but the best practice is to link to books or other products relating to your web site's theme. A really exciting idea is to create your own online bookstore in which you highlight hundreds of books in either one category or a few related categories.

Creating a bookstore in this way used to be a laborious process. Now it is unbelievably simple, thanks to a new tool Amazon has introduced on its Associates site. The tool allows you to generate an entire set of bookstore-type pages in a near-instant, and plug those pages into your site as easily as copying and pasting a few lines of code.

One less-than-super aspect of the Amazon Associates program is the size of its commissions-generally in the 5 percent neighborhood, sometimes a bit more depending on the types of items you link to and the volume of sales you make. Many other affiliate marketing programs pay higher commissions, some considerably higher.

Nevertheless, Amazon remains a great place to get started in affiliate marketing. The company provides its Associates with a variety of tools and suggestions for optimizing web sites to achieve the maximum success with its program. What you learn by participating as an Amazon Associate will serve you well no matter what other potentially more lucrative affiliate programs you go on to promote.

Keywords: