I’ve been an Amazon Associate for a couple of years now and it has been a bit of fun. Poking around on Amazon.com looking for something interesting to try and sell has helped to wile away the occasional hour. I didn’t know they had a whole line of sex toys when I started, but I do now.
The best way to make money as an Amazon Affiliate is to put text links in all your posts. Books and movies may still be the first things that spring to mind, but Amazon has a ton of stuff for sale these days. I am not making a ton of money on Amazon, but it is pretty close to passive income. Once you have a post written and the links in place, they will be there for as long as your blog is there.
Looking over my sales for the past couple of years I have sold an interesting array of products for Amazon.com. My sales have been in Apparel & Accessories, Beauty, Books, Computer & Video Games, DVD, Electronics, Gourmet Foods, Health & Personal Care, Kitchen & Housewares, MP3 Downloads, Other, Sports & Outdoors, Tools & Hardware, Toys & Games, and VHS. By far the largest of these groups is Books, since I do tend to prattle on about books rather a lot, this makes sense. The Apparel and the Sports are a bit baffling, as I don’t talk about clothing much.
But that is part of the beauty of being an Amazon Associate, if they leave your site by an Amazon link and go to Amazon and buy anything-you get a commission on whatever it is they end up buying. By and large though, people buy things that make sense to me that they should be buying. A couple of people bought Damanhur:Temples of Humankind-a kind of secret society that was featured on CBS Sunday Morning a couple of months ago and I wrote a post about. The most expensive item anyone has bought on my advice was a Prosciutto Di Parma Imported from Italy.
The Carousel widget for Amazon Associates looks really good. It’s one of those things that Amazon Associates like, but I can’t see that it has gotten me any sales yet. Maybe I’m just not spinning the right stuff. I don’t think I’ve sold any jewelry yet. . .
