Building an Amazon Affiliate Website
Build it and they will come
It’s another What’s Up Wednesday! Today, I’ll be looking at the popular idea of building an Amazon Affiliate website to strike it rich. And this supposedly will happen simply by promoting Amazon products. However using my experience as an Amazon associate, I’ll cover why it’s mostly baloney and much harder than you think.
Keeping Amazon listing up to date
As an Amazon affiliate myself, one of the most irritating things I constantly run into is making sure that the products listed on my website are still available and that the price is up to date. At the moment, I currently have 7 Amazon based affiliate websites and most of those sites have at least 75 products listed (my book site alone has over 1,100 products).
I also have 4 different approaches as to how I add Amazon products and keep them up to date the best I can. And I don’t use all of them at once for every site.
Approach #One
The most obvious one is to manually add them. It is very time consuming but the format I use is most convincing and has generated the most positive results. 2 of my sites are done in this manner, but require the most time (why I have a limited amount of products listed with each of these sites).
The next methods I use involve different premium WordPress applications. Each one is designed to help out Amazon associates add and manage products on their site(s).
Approach #Two
The first premium plugin does a good job transferring in the product information into a post like a review. This includes the item picture, product description, and some product reviews from Amazon. It can even pull a related video from YouTube if available.
However, it is lousy at updating pricing information and availability. It will also pull in products that have no commission basis. And it allows products to remain posted even if they’re no longer available. Unfortunately, 4 of my sites use this plugin.
Approach #Three
The other premium plugin also pulls in products with retail and discount pricing along with a picture. It adds your affiliate links within all clickable areas. And it pulls in Amazon reviews for the product. It also has the option to setup your site with an add to cart button. By doing this, it changes the affiliate cookie credit from 24 hours to 90 days.
However, the product display is ugly because it is setup like an eCommerce site. And it’s almost as bad as the Amazon associate direct created links. It will also pull in products that offer no commission and keep expired products listed. Only my one site uses this plugin.
Approach #Four
The fourth method I use is like a WordPress based application, but is unique from the others. It installs similar to WordPress. This application has its own theme (additional theme options available) along with built-in features that don’t require plugins.
It’s set up to look like a stand alone eCommerce site, filling in Amazon products as though they are your own. And it comes with a shopping cart. If you like your own “storefront” look, then it is great. But if you don’t, then plan on spending a lot of time customizing it not to look like a store.
On the positive side, this application quickly adds a number of products to your store. Then it ranks them and let you know which products offer a commission or not. Pricing is constantly monitored and updated within each hour. Any time a product is no longer available, the application pulls it from the site and lets you know.
It also provides a 90-day cookie for your link if someone adds a product to the shopping cart. Only one of my sites current use this method and takes up the least amount of my time. So far, it’s also my worst performing site However, it maybe more niche related than due to the application.
Result Summary
As you can see, maybe even relate, it is very time consuming to run just one Amazon site. With the first 3 methods, I have to rotate product posts from oldest post to the newest by updating it. When I do this, I also check to see if the item is still available and manually remove the post if it’s not. But it’s still hard to tell if the product offers a commission.
And if an item is no longer available, I remove it. I then replace it with a newer or a different model line. After doing this for the last few years, I finally said to myself this past weekend, there has to be a better way! There should be a way to do all this automatically. Without having to manually go through each product to see if it is still viable.
In search for a better solution
So I spent the better part of my past Saturday looking at different automation software. One that offers what I want it to do. To auto-post only commissionable items, remove items no longer available, while keeping prices current. What an eye opener!
As I was scanning through all those offers and evaluating the options available, it occurred to me (actually smacked me square in the face) how ridiculous this all was! Because of the ridiculously low commission percentage return I would get for doing all this. I mean, really!
Stop the Amazon madness
It’s a fact that Amazon has one of the worst payout commissions online today. At just a measly 4% and only a short 24-hour cookie, It’s madness. And there are no real additional benefits. Like when your visitor returns to Amazon a few days later and buys the item they saw on your site – you get NO commission.
Plus all the software solutions I looked at were expensive. So when I considered what I would have to shell out for that solution and compared it to my commissions, I would have lost big time.
The best month I’ve ever had with Amazon is when I sold nearly $500 in merchandise. And it only earned me a whopping $16.67. If I’d been involved with most other affiliate program, I would have earned 20, 30, 40 percent or higher. In commission terms, that’s at least $100 or more! So what am I doing with Amazon?
What helped put my epiphany over the top (to stop promoting Amazon products) is when I watched the following YouTube video- below. I happened to stumble across when I was viewing another vendor’s product demo. I decided to share it with you below:
As you just witnessed for yourself, I am not nuts and on the same track as this other experienced Amazon associate who ended up coming to a similar conclusion!
Solution
So what does it mean for you? Just that there are much better affiliate product options available to you than Amazon. Ones that have much better results – with much higher commissions than having to be part of Amazon.
One better solution I know about and recommend is a powerful program that will help you get on track. So if you’re looking to make the level of commissions that you deserve, then take a look at the Big Commission Blueprint.
As always, please let me know what you think. Leave your ideas, observations or questions you may have in the comment section below. 🙂
