Money Keywords

How To Use Amazon Associates On Blogs & Websites To Maximize Your Internet Earnings

Amazon Associates is the latest major affiliate programme designed to monetize your blog or website. How does it work and how simple is it to use? How can you maximize your online earning potential? This article answers these questions.

The Google Adsense affiliate programme has been around for years and there are already several competitors in activity, particularly for those resident in the US. However, there’s now a completely new affiliate programme for bloggers and website owners all over the world to mazimize their chances of earning money online.

Amazon Associates is similar to Adsense in that adverts will appear on your site, but gives you far greater freedon over which products you choose to display and how you can actually display them. This may prove very beneficial to bloggers, who are now able to promote products specific to their blog’s content (i.g. if you have video games realated sites amazon will display gaming consoles and video game products).

You are able to sign up to whichever Amazon Associates programme you prefer – US, UK, Europe, etc – or you can sign up for mutiple accounts in different currencies, which is very useful for those whose traffic is international. This means you can promote the best books available on blogging (if that’s your blog’s main subject matter) from various countries, ensuring visitors from all over the world will find your blog equally helpful. However, when advertising products in a currency other than your own you will be paid by cheque, so will require a bank account that accepts foreign currencies (usually a business account). Alternatively, you can choose to be paid in vouchers to spend on the appropriate site, but this isn’t going to boost your earnings so should be avoided if possible.

To benefit fully from the system you will need to spend some time choosing exact products, relevant to your blog content, then adding them to widgets and installing the widgets to your blog or website; if you don’t Amazon will automatically choose your products (in the way adsense chooses your ads) and will often repeat the same products in several widgets or posts, thus minimising your potential earnings. You can also add individual products (as many as you wish) to each blog post, in the form of a text link, an image, or both.

You are also able to add a full Amazon store to your site, filling it with individual proucts or choosing entire categories you believe will interest your readers. This store can be set to open in a new window or can be embedded into your website so it looks laike a part of your webpage. Setting up and maintaining the system is far more time consuming than running adsense ads, but I can see the potential for far higher earnings if the programme is used carefully and the blog or website recieves enough traffic.

Amazon has created all sorts of wonderful widgets to maximise you internet earning, from banner ads and favourite product collections to flash slideshows, and you can often change the size to help you integrate the widgets to your particular website/blog in a professional-looking manner. You are also able to add simple text links which display pop-up product reviews when hovered over. This means any product you might mention when blogging (book or album tiitle, or virtually any other product you care to think of, from Amazon’s vast selection) has the potential to become a link with all the information required by a buyer – price (new and used), average customer rating, stock level etc. – and a button to add the item to their basket without leaving your blog or website. As long as they pay for it within 90 days you get 5% commission, and this rate will increase as you provide more referrals. Brilliant!

Setting up an Amazon Associates account through Blogger is very simple: you simply click on the ‘Monetize’ tab as if you were about to create an adsense account, but choose Amazon Associates instead. Here you’ll be directed to set up an Amazon Associates account in your chosen currency in order to get started adding products or widgets to your site. If you’re not using Blogger you should visit Amazon Associates and set up an account. Full instructions will then be given as to how to proceed.

To see for yourself how the Amazon Associates product adverts look on a Blogger blog please visit the blog address on my profile page, where the programme is already installed and fully functioning.