One of the most often asked questions by newbies in webmaster forums is how to make money from a website. The popular answer to this is usually Adsense, which is a good answer, most people seem to forget other tried and trusted ways to generate income from a website such as affiliates and other sources.
Team Player, an experienced webmaster at Webmaster Serve who has been generating revenue via Amazon affiliates for year wrote a brilliant post about this in the Site Monetization section of Webmaster Serve, excerpt from his post follows:
I doubt there are many people who haven`t heard of the online retail giant, Amazon. And as far as affiliate programs go, it has to be one of the most successful companies of all time.
Amazon is in the U.S., the UK, Canada, France, Germany, and Japan, so it is an international company in every respect, though the affiliate schemes run separately for each country.
Amazon is one of the most proactive companies I know of for promoting itself, either through online advertising, or through helping its affiliates to drive traffic to it.
How do you go about joining their affiliate program, or, as Amazon calls it, their Associates Program?
First of all the numbers. Commission rates are stepped from 4% to 8.5% under their `Performance` scheme. It isn’t the highest by any means, but, since most people know and trust Amazon, sales can be easier than with other lesser known programs.
Basically there are three ways to set up a site in order to sell Amazon products. Own site; storefront; Amazon`s own web store.
To get commissions from them, you need to sign up to the relevant Associates program for the country you are aiming their products at. That means that if your site is predominantly visited by people from the UK, for example, you need to be an Associate with the UK Amazon program. You can be registered as an Associate with ALL the countries, there`s no limit. If someone from, say, the US, clicks on one of your links, and they end up at the US Amazon site and make a purchase, you won`t receive any commission from that sale, unless you are also registered with the US Amazon, with your appropriate Associates code, or tag, in the link.
You can read the full article here.
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