Amazon Affiliates: Set Up Your Own Amazon Online Store

...Is as easy as signing up for a free affiliate program.

What follows is an overview building up your astore Amazon online store, and why you should be targeting specific areas of interest or shopping items.

First is to sign up with amazon, usually you need to create a username and password, like mosts sites, then you need to set up how you will be paid, either by check or direct deposit straight into your bank account, or you could opt to be paid in amazon gift certificates.

The next thing is, you need to be thinking about targeted id's for your astores, but remember that most of the obvious names will be taken, so try and come up with some unique and targeted keywords if possible as this will help you in the long term success of your amazon store.

Colours and fonts and header graphic titles

With the associate program at Amazon you have the opportunity of customizing your storefront how you would want it to look and match the colours of an existing site somewhere else, plus you can add one link per astore to an extrenal source (preferrably a related site!) and also an about page, describing what's on offer and what the special deals are, such as gift certificates and here is a good opportunity to highlight these.

100 stores for one amazon affiliate

As you may be aware you get 100 id's to create 100 astores with, so each one is a chance to promote something specific, so maybe you are a book fanatic, so you could list each store on your favourite authors or pick by genre which is usually the best and most searched option, but recommended authors are the second best, so I'd use both these popular searches and incorporate them into your affiliate marketing plan.

Organizing your store into categories

When you have seperate categories for items it's best to list them in sub lists under the main category, so that you are placing related items in the right place, this may sound too obvious, but so many people get caught up in listing things that they may just list things all over the place and it loses it's focus.

Creating categories is easy and it's one of the first steps you do when creating each astore.

Adding your own product descriptions

There would have been a time when I would have just used amazons product descriptions, but now I do not, mainly because of duplicate content and secondly it's more personal to recommend a roduct if you can describe the best points about the product, So to start off I would get to know the products well so you can provide added value by contributing your own words to the descriptive passage that accompanies all amazon product items.

Tip: If you really have trouble writing your own product reviews then read amazons descriptions and just put it into your own words, trust me this is a better way of making your astores fresh, just think of all the others who lazily copy and paste the default descriptions, they probably don't get much traffic from that way alone as this triggers the duplicate content filters anyway.

Perhaps one of the best things about the amazon associate program is the amount of promotional tools you can use to build up your online stores presence, there are product preview links that add actual products to your website, or there are context links, which are my favourite, because if you have a decent website or blog you can add the context link code into your sites code and this will highlight specific keywords related to your blogs content and make these into actual links that go back to the amazon product database, this is all with your affiliate id embedded in the script.

Adding banners and search boxes are good too, especially if you have a shopping site, as people can either click on the banner or do a search from their website, but generally speaking text links do far better than banners, so adding great content or product reviews with keyword text links within the content will have far better results.

Use the reports

A useful tool is the reports as you can track which of your astores are doing well, which ones are getting clicks and what sales are being generated, the report also details the exact dates and days that sales were made and link types were clicked, so make use of this feature often to see what is working well and what isn't working so well.

A final note of this overview, the Amazon associate program assumes that you are getting a decent amount of traffic as this is a key factor in an amazon affiliates success, to gain an understanding of building traffic to your websites, why not have a look here on hubpages, just use the search function and see what comes up.

So set up your own Amazon store and drive some qualified traffic to it and just see what happens or read my review of the Super Affiliate Handbook By Rosalind Gardner as that book will show you how to become a super affiliate.

Update: Amazon have now added integration with Blogger, Googles popular blogging platform and you can now promote amazon affiliate products from within the blog post editing module, so it is worth taking advantage of this tool to add products to your reviews and try and earn some affiliate commissions from highly relevant products.

Amazon is the original affiliate program one of the first and one of the best and easiest to earn from now with more great ways of promoting and quicker product link building through the use of the recent addition of Site Stripe which enables the affiliate to link to products from the main Amazon database, so whilst you are yoursel on an online shop or just searching through, you could potentially while you're at it save promotional affiliate links in a notepad file for later.

The Site Stripe feature is a neat tool that makes it really easier now to build affiliate product links from any page on Amazon, I urge you to try out this tool if you aren't already using it.

Update: - Amazon have just integrated a new feature called share on twitter, where you can post a tweet with your amazon ID, which will be shortened, so that anyone who purchases something by reading your tweets and actually clicking through your affiliate ID, you make a referral commission. neat huh!? - Although the danger here is not to spam the heck out of it!!

The use of widgets are also worth a try too, although widgets and banners don't convert into sales that well, you may need to drive up the relevancy of your widget placements, take a look at the hub page format, amazon and ebay capsules are in fact widgets and they could be placed directly next to the text for really relevant recommendations.

Video reviews of products you may have bought through Amazon yourself, these types of recommendations are really what sets you apart from the lazy marketers out there who just use already established copy and reviews to try and gain an audience, these types of reviews make a more personalized recommendation to your customer base, remember you get an additional link back to your main website, so make it a review site or blog about the specific products you are promoting on your astore.

 The amazon shopping basket really helps when you are ordering or directing other online shoppers to order, it saves the items you choose so that it feels like a real physical shopping experience and it adds all the items up for you and subtracts any gift certificates you have applied to your order.

All online shopping portals should have an online shopping basket like the one at Amazon or else there is no point ever thinking about doing business on the net, your amazon affiliate store has the ability to add items you choose or your customers choose to buy later on on their online shopping spree.

Over on squidoo there is an amazon search module that you can add to your lenses if you have an account over there, this search module targets specific keyword phrases and can display the target products to entice people to search. The trick is working with what you already have and use some proven marketing methods to push your promotions ahead of the crowd.

So the key element here is see what you can do to get people adding items into their shopping basket through Amazon.

Gift certificates you can promote all year round with the emphasis on the holidays, like Christmas time and birthdays upcoming year round and all times really. The thing about vouchers and coupons to save someone spending their own money is like a special deal and a gift that really is quite unique, all the reciever of the gift certificate has to worry about is choosing something to buy online with it and that's it.

Try and promote these where ever possible usually before people buy is a good bet, but again prominent on the page so no one misses it, above the fold as they say. I myself like to include the link in an email to some of my close family and friends as this is an effective hint, but also by giving the benefit of a gift certificate they might be more inclined to buy a couple of gift vouchers or cards for themselves or (sob) someone else.

The main thing with any online store has to be optimized pages, product titles and descriptions, to be found there has to be effective keywords at work, organic search terms that interested Googlers would be actively searching for, people most often search for specifics, model, make, author, issue number. Things like that area easily able to draw the more specific searchers into your website, but of course being aware of the fact of the huge online companies that have the advertising budgets to spend.

Typically the more imaginative you are as an affiliate with Amazon the better your chances of creating an income through the associates program.

Going deep with your amazon links in an article or any content for that matter really helps with relevant links that target a certain customer online who may read a review on a specific type of subject matter, in text relevancy works on many levels and can provide much better conversion rates than banner ads alone. People are looking for certain things, further information, relevant content that helps them make a decision in the process of actually buying or considering an online purchase.

Just remember that properly optimized products and their descriptions are only one of the optimization methods you employ, there are countless others that go towards any promotional campaign, affiliate or in a business sense.