Amazon Affiliate How To
By: John Elder posted in Affiliate Marketing
Hello good people!
As I walked to Starbucks this morning for my regular Venti coffee, I noticed something. It’s cold in Chicago!! I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, and a leather coat, and I was still cold. Bah…guess it’s just that time of the year again!
Today I want to talk about something besides Adsense, namely – how I make money as an Amazon.com affiliate.
Making money with Adsense is straight forward. You sign up, then place a snippet of code on your website which calls up and displays advertisements on your site. Simple, straightforward. But being an Amazon affiliate is a little more complicated.
Once you sign up (just head to https://affiliate-program.amazon.com), Amazon gives you some tools to create affiliate links that you can manually enter into each of the pages of each of your websites. But it’s a real pain..actually, its completely unworkable.
Why? Because you have to essentially create a link for every product you want to promote…and that would take forever and totally undermine the entire point of our quick and easy money making system. Yes, Amazon does have some widgets that you can sort of automate this process with, but they don’t work all that well so let’s just forget about them.
What’s the solution?
You need a third party process to handle your Amazon.com affiliate stuff. I call it my “amazon widget” here on the site. That’s not the actual name though; it’s actually called phpZon.
It’s basically a little plugin that you can add to your site template that will automatically add amazon listings to your website. It’s a great product that doesn’t cost all that much and works wonderfully.
Keep this in mind
phpZon comes in two versions, a wordpress version and an API version. If you use wordpress, you’ll need the wordpress version, but if (like me) you use regular hand coded HTML files, then the API version is the way to go.
Personally I own both (they come as a discounted bundle option if you want both) because I do still own about 30-50 wordpress sites.
Not only do you get the plugins themselves, but you also get access to Wade’s forum where you can get support for the product as well as get involved with a tremendous community of people just like us, all making money with adsense and affiliate marketing. It’s really one of the only few forums on the Internet that I watch closely.
And it boggles my mind that the forum is completely free when you buy phpZon.
Are you an eBay affiliate?
They also sell an eBay plugin as well…called phpBay. I own it as well, and use it for some other tricky things that I’ll discuss at a later time, though I’m not an eBay affiliate. But more on that later.
The bottom line is this. phpZon costs less than a hundred bucks. Last month I made over $800 in affiliate commissions from Amazon.com and this software is the reason. *shrugs* I’d grab a copy, then spend a couple days reading every single post in Wade’s forum. But that’s just me…
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
