How to Make Money — Become an Amazon.com Affiliate

One of the char­ac­ter­is­tics I have noticed in all of my surf­ing on the Inter­net is that many peo­ple assume what they know are com­mon knowl­edge and should be per­fectly obvi­ous to the rest of us.

This is espe­cially true with tech­nol­ogy sub­jects.  It is often hard to under­stand the con­text of what peo­ple are say­ing because they assume you are already on “the same page”, so to speak.  I would like to do my part to elim­i­nate this frustration.

My objec­tive on this web­site is to explain how to make money in easy to under­stand lan­guage.  It’s sec­ondary goal is to explain how to use the tech­nol­ogy that makes it pos­si­ble to real­ize new ways of mak­ing money.

I don’t want to present myself as know­ing all the answers, just as some­one who wants to share the infor­ma­tion that I have dis­cov­ered, and per­haps make some money doing it.

I am always open to learn­ing new ways of doing things.   This is an atti­tude you have to have on the Inter­net since it changes so frequently.

One of the tech­nolo­gies I would like to share with you is how to become an Amazon.com affil­i­ate.  (Please also see the video to the right).  As I explained in a pre­vi­ous arti­cle, become an affil­i­ate can be a good way to gen­er­ate an addi­tional income stream, even if it only starts as a trickle.

Amazon.com was one of the first to adopt an affil­i­ate pro­gram, and may be one of the eas­i­est to use.  You can join for free at this link.   You can make up to 15% in refer­rals when peo­ple click on your spe­cial link.

Once you have signed up for the affil­i­ate pro­gram, you have the option of dis­play­ing the “Ama­zon Asso­ciates Help Stripe” which is sim­ply an added menu you see when you are logged in as an asso­ciate while you are on the Amazon.com site.

You have sev­eral options for cre­at­ing spe­cial links with your refer­ral ID.  A refer­ral ID is the way Amazon.com keeps track that you were to one that “referred” the per­son who clicked on your spe­cial link to get to their site.

There are many ways of cre­at­ing spe­cial links with your refer­ral ID embed­ded in them:

1. Text links — a stan­dard text link that points a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct or page on the Amazon.com site.  Here is an exam­ple of a text link with my refer­ral ID embed­ded in it: buy Scott Fox’s e-Riches 2.0 book.  I cre­ated this link by search­ing for Scott Fox’s book on Amazon.com and then click­ing the “Link to this page” option on the “help stripe” described ear­lier.  Once you click on “Link to this page” you see a vari­ety of options of how to cre­ate the link with your spe­cial refer­ral ID already set up.  Sim­ply select “Text Only” and copy/paste the option you choose as a link on your web site.
2. 

   Image-based Affil­i­ate Link

   Image Only Links — fol­low the same pro­ce­dures as described in the first item above with one addi­tional step.  As explained in their pre­view win­dow, you need to save the image to your server for it to work cor­rectly.  How do you do that?  Right click on the image in the pre­view win­dow and select “Save Image As” (using Fire­fox) or “Save tar­get as” (using Inter­net Explorer) to save it to your hard drive).   Then use a file trans­fer pro­to­col (also called FTP).  It is a way to move files from your local com­puter to your web­site server.  I rec­om­mend a con­ve­nient pro­gram called FileZilla to trans­fer the image to your web­site.   Copy/paste the link pro­vided by Ama­zon and mod­ify the link so that the “<img src=” por­tion of the link points to the loca­tion of the image on your server.

3. Text and Image Links – these are spe­cial text and image links cre­ated by Amazon.com.  Since the image is hosted by Ama­zon, all you need to do is paste the code they pro­vide in your posted arti­cle or on one of your side­bars.  When past­ing the HTML code, be sure and click the HTML tab option prior to past­ing the code so that it will work correctly.
4. Ban­ners and Wid­gets – Ama­zon pro­vides a vari­ety of other ban­ners and wid­gets that you can host on your site by sim­ply copy­ing and past­ing the HTML code.  Within these “gad­gets”, You can either let Ama­zon dis­play the prod­ucts of their, or you can con­fig­ure them to show prod­ucts more in keep­ing with the theme of your site.  Some of these wid­gets are very sophis­ti­cated and spur read­ers to click on them.

Here are some of the good rea­sons to join the Amazon.com affil­i­ate pro­gram (and why I joined):

1. Amazon.com is a well known brand and has a lot of credibility
2. Hav­ing them as an “adver­tiser” adds cred­i­bil­ity to your site, espe­cially while you are get­ting started and don’t yet have a name for yourself
3. You can trust them to “deliver the goods” once you have referred your readers
4. You can trust them to pay you accord­ing to their affil­i­ate pay­ment rules
5. Cre­at­ing sophis­ti­cated look­ing links, ban­ners, and wid­gets is easy to set up
6. It is easy to dis­play prod­ucts rel­e­vant to your site con­tent since the sell so many dif­fer­ent products

The way I look at it, there is really noth­ing to lose and money to gain by team­ing up with Amazon.com as an affi­late.  Join Today!  You will be glad you did.