Affiliate Programs
(cont'd)
If you want to
become an eBay
affiliate, you'll need a Commission Junction account. Once
you sign up with CJ, you'll be able to display affiliate text links
and banners to eBay as well as post
on your site
real-time eBay listings targeted to your site's content. eBay
will pay you up to $45.00 for each active registered user you
send them, and up to $0.25 for each bid or Buy It Now transaction
that is referred from your site.
Amazon Associate Programssociate Program
Amazon Associate Program allows you to make a commission of 5% or
higher for sales originating from a link on your site. As you
know, Amazon sells everything, not just books. For a $2000
watch sold through your site, for example, you would make $100 or more--
not bad for selling a watch without owning a jewelry store!
If your site is non-commercial and
you don't want it to look like one, you can always sell books.
Far from being a distraction, the book ads actually enhance both the content and prestige of your site.
Amazon offers advanced, yet easy to use, reporting tools to allow
you to make the most of your efforts. Their link builder lets
you quickly create ads in various formats, including banners of
different sizes, search boxes, text links, recommended product
links and more. The ads are customizable to fit into your
site's format and color scheme.
There are scripts, such as
Amazon Store Manager, available for you to build an entire
Amazon storefront from which you'll earn commission on every sale.
Your store might target a specific niche by offering only a single
line of products, say DVD's.
If you run a website on horror movies, for example, you might
display DVD horror titles throughout the site and provide links to
your Amazon DVD store that offers a wider selection of titles. In
your store you would showcase horror titles to generate more sales.
To see working examples of working Amazon
storefronts, check out our Amazon
DVD Store and
Video Game
Store.
If you're running a Amazon storefront, it's
important (but not essential) to have a
complementary website with real content to promote
it. If you have a popular site on horror movies,
for instance, people will want to support
you by making their DVD purchases through your store.
After all, they'll spend the same amount of money buying through
your store as they would directly from Amazon.com.
While content is an effective way to promote an
affiliate storefront, it's not the only way. We run Google AdWords campaigns
to drive traffic to our Amazon stores. A
potential drawback of this strategy is running up a
huge AdWords bill and not being able to cover it
with your Amazon commissions. It's easy to get
lots of clicks from AdWords, but what you're really
after is a high conversion rate (the rate at
which the clicks translate into commissions).
So, if you're going to use pay-per-click advertising
to promote your store, choose your keywords wisely--
the more targeted your keywords are, the greater the
conversion rate. For example, the generic
keyword "DVD" may get you a lot of clicks to your
DVD store, but it may not get you many sales.
More targeted keywords such as "The Exorcist DVD" or
"movies on DVD" are more likely to generate sales.
Another consideration for using pay-per-click to
promote an affiliate store is
the price range of the line of products you're
selling. Higher priced products bring higher
commissions but are perhaps harder to sell. A $20
DVD sale will bring you $1 in commission. If
it took 20 clicks at 5 cents a click to get the
sale, then you'd be just breaking even. A sale
of car GPS system might earn you $50, but it will
take a lot more clicks to make a single sale.
Pay-per-click marketing is very much an art form;
succeeding in it requires the right mix of
knowledge, creativity, and trial-and-error.
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