Why You Should Consider Amazon Associates

When you think of affiliate marketing, what name springs to mind? If you're anything like me, then you probably think of Clickbank. After all, Clickbank is pretty much the biggest name in affiliate marketing. With a massive array of products available for you to promote, big commissions (of up to 75%) on offer, and even recurring products available, why would you go anywhere else?

For many affiliates, leaving the safe haven of Clickbank is an absolute no-no. However, in this blog post I'm going to show you why you should consider Amazon Associates (the affiliate program for Amazon.com) as your next port of call for finding highly profitable products. 

In my experience, far too few affiliate marketers use Amazon Associates to find great products to promote. There are all manner of excuses for why many affiliates choose not to use Amazon Associates, including:

• Lower commission rates than Clickbank. On Clickbank, you're probably going to get a commission rate of anywhere from 50-75% on any product worth promoting. With Amazon, the maximum commission rate is 15% (but it usually much lower) This puts many affiliates off, because you earn less per item sold.
• Stricter promotional rules. With Clickbank, provided you're not cookie stuffing or using super-Black hat methods to promote products, you can pretty much do what you want. However, with Amazon many affiliates seem to worry that their accounts could be suspended at any minute. For example, Amazon Associates' T.O.S forbids affiliates from promoting products via email (imagine if Clickbank banned this practice!) It is also forbidden to state the price of a product sold on Amazon, unless the price is served by an Amazon link!
• Too much choice. Virtually every physical product under the sun is available on Amazon. Many affiliates are put off because there is so much choice that it can be very confusing to know what to pick.

Without wishing to sound rude, these are all very poor excuses for not wanting to take the plunge with Amazon Associates. To put it another way, if you aren't using Amazon Associates then you are missing out on large amounts of money. Do you really want to leave money on the table? Of course you don't! 

Here's why you should consider Amazon Associates:

• Lower competition for products. Because there are so many average products on Clickbank, the ones that are good tend to be very competitive. On Amazon there are so many great products to promote that competition tends to be lower. The only exception to this rule is in the electronics category, where big brand name products can be difficult to promote successfully. 
• Easily target "exact match" keywords. When selling Clickbank products, the usual process for most affiliates is to target a long-tail keyword phrase (such as "natural weight loss tips") and then try to entice visitors to click through to a digital information product about weight loss. With Amazon, you have a massive potential customer base of people who are specifically searching for product names. Pick a reasonably popular product, do an "Exact" search with the Google Keyword Tool, and you'll see that people are searching for that product. Now create a page targeted to that keyword, build links, and watch the money roll in.
• Higher conversion rates. Amazon is one of the most trusted brands in the world. Just about anybody who has an Internet connection knows about Amazon, and has probably purchased from Amazon. Combine this with the huge variety of trusted, brand-name products that you can promote and it becomes easy to see why Amazon conversion rates are so high. With effective pre-selling, my conversion rate on Amazon is more than double that of any Clickbank product I promote.
• Earn through higher sales volume. You want to know the secret to success with Amazon Associates? Firstly, take great conversion rates. Secondly, sell big numbers of low-cost items to boost your commission rate (you get a higher commission rate when you sell more stuff). Finally, promote big ticket items to really give your bank balance a boost. If you want to live large with Amazon, then you need to focus on selling in bulk. Once you've climbed the commission rate ladder, start selling bigger items to make even more money.

Hopefully now you can see why you need to start promoting with Amazon Associates. If you're finding it tricky to get ahead with Clickbank, then you should definitely give Amazon a try. 

Pick a product, set up a laser-targeted page on your site, then drive traffic with SEO, Web 2.0 link building, and article marketing. 

To show you this method works, I've picked the following product:

I'm going to set up a page targeted to this product/keyword on my Diablo 3 website, and then I'm going to use Web 2.0 sites, SEO, and document sharing traffic to make sales and drive traffic. 

My goal? To make at least 10 sales of this product in the next month. In next week's blog post I'll give you a progress update.

I hope you've enjoyed this blog post! Go and join Amazon Associates, and then leave a comment below with any questions, comments, or tricks that you might have.