Upping the Ante With My Amazon Links: Can Amazon Actually Make Me Money?

I've had no success being an Amazon affiliate.

The payout rate is pathetically low - just 4% when you're starting!

In the last year, I've had 3 sales, earning me a dollar and some change. Egad!

At this rate it will be a decade before I earn enough money to even hit the payout threshold!

Then just today I found a post on Darren's ProBlogger page about using Amazon, titled 9 Reasons Why I'm An Amazon Affiliate, which has opened my mind up to the possibilities available as an affiliate.

Basically, his strategy is to seed various posts with Amazon links across his many blogs. After doing this on many posts after many months (or years), the amount of links pointing back to Amazon is huge, and the amount of residual affiliate income he's making slowly builds up. Shockingly, he stated making something like $2,500 a month from Amazon. (Keep in mind he has one of the most heavily trafficked blogs in the world. But still!)

This sounded like a reasonable approach, and I realized I could go back and seed many posts related to books, movies, and other products with Amazon links, on my different blogs. So that's what I've started doing today.

I even decided to just be really straightforward and create a store on my website related to books and movies that my blog discusses.

I will probably cross-post this store to 3 blogs total, all related to the same niche subject. It will be interesting to see how much - if any? - money this brings in.

Further updates to come!