Amazon Affiliates

The book I read to research this post was Amazon Affiliate Niche Sites by Rawee M which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is about selling stuff as an affiliate which means you get a comission on what you sell and the company like Amazon handles sending the item out. With Amazon there is also various packages like Amazon Local worth trying where you get commision for people in your locality making purchases. It’s a good idea to have your own website and links to your Amazon pages where they can make the purchases. A lot of people use a hosted version of WordPress which can have plug ins to automate the various things. It avoids lots of programming. Some people use several sites to maximize the number going to their Amazon pages and will use something called thin content where you put a small amount of good content about the products to encourage the search engines to list them. You can also be an affiliate for more than one company collecting comissions on a variety of products. This book is around 100 pages so is a reasonable length. I enjoyed it and do recommend it. The book does also go through the processes of setting the various things up with a variety of tutorials.

Selling Groceries On Amazon

The book I read to research this post was  Selling Groceries And More On Amazon by Ben Mannino which is an excellent book that I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is around 100 pages so is a fairly decent length. I must admit I found this book inspiring. On Amazon grocery selling along with personal care items and beauty products need to be pre-approved by them before you can sell them. The main reason for this is Amazon think you need a bit of experience selling other stuff so you charge a workable price. Some people might be inclined to charge a very low price from which they can’t make a profit. The basic idea with this is you buy groceries at least with 50% or buy one get one free and then can sell the items on the site as an affiliate. Some people buy something for a $1 and sell it on for about $20 and especially if they’re the only seller of that product they can sell them for a nice profit. The author recommends $1 stores where everything is the same price and the right product can be sold online afterwards. He also recommends clearance displays and uses a credit card with 18 months 0% credit to buy a load of the same item and then resell them. You can also use the Fulfilled By Amazon option where you post the items to Amazon and they fulfill the orders. They can get a good deal on delivery charges and can pass some of the savings onto you. You may also if you have sent them a huge amount of the product get storage charges from them. It’s worth also Amazon are very customer-centric perhaps more so than companies and if there is any problems tend to side with the customer. This can leave you having to refund money to problem customers where it isn’t justified. If you use Fulfilled By Amazon get you to print out stick on barcodes that help identify your products. You will need a printer and maybe a scanner for this. I did thoroughly enjoy this and  it is certainly eye opening.  I definitely recommend it and am very much tempted to start a business doing this.

Affiliate Marketing

The book I read to research this post was The Ultimate Guide To Affiliate Marketing by Gordon Sharp which is a very good book that I downloaded from kindle. This book was free and is around 100 pages so is a decent length. Affiliate marketing sites that have no actual product or claim there is little work involved are best avoided. There is a lot of work involved especially in marketing your products and answering customers queries and you will be working long hours but the rewards are worth it. You will probably need a computer and telephone and preferably a little home office to work from. You also need various social media accounts, IM, email and a blog. Most of these are probably free. A lot of people use sites like Amazon and Ebay and if you have a bit of cash get your own website and domain name. One of the practices in this book is to use squeeze sites which are lots of micro sites that send traffic to your main site. Companies like Webnode and Weebly let you construct a basic web site for free where you just pay for a domain name. It is worth looking into sites like Commission Junction, 7 Search and Google Adsense for PPC marketing for selling your product. Ideally your product should be a bit novel and exclusive that can’t be got elsewhere and sadly there are no product links in the book.  You also need some form of IM like Yahoo Messenger, Google Voice or Windows Live. There are sites that you can use to interact with these and sell to people. You also should look at E-Zine Sites where it should be unique content but these can drive a lot of traffic to your site. I think this is quite an interesting book and would recommend it and I will be doing more on this subject in the near future. I finally did see on Yahoo something related to this, which was a story about a 22 year old ex teaching assistant who made a 6 figure income from doing blogs and comments on social media with product placement. She did have photos of herself displayed which obviously attract an audience but basically companies pay her to mention their products. I am sure other people could do something similar.