Amazon Associates Affiliate Program – Why I Love It
Amazon’s affiliate program, called Amazon Associates, is not one of the most liked affiliate programs in internet marketing. There are some complaints that people have about Amazon Associates. Here are some of those complaints:
1) They only pay between 4% and 8.5% (for most people it’s about 4%-6%.)
2) The tracking cookie is only 24 hours.
These are definitely legitimate complaints. I do wish the tracking cookie was for a longer period of time, but that’s where my complaints of Amazon’s affiliate program stop. There are many things that I love about Amazon Associates.
1) Amazon is a trusted brand.
People know about Amazon, people have heard from Amazon, and best of all, people are already buying off of Amazon. We don’t have to try and convince people that a certain website is trusted, because Amazon has already gained people’s trust. People love Amazon’s free shipping opportunity, they love being able to buy pretty much whatever they want from Amazon… which leads me to my next point.
2) People buy other stuff from Amazon, and I get paid for it.
This is why I don’t complain about a “low affiliate commission” like others do. When someone is buying an item, or an informational product from another website you may be an affiliate for, you only get paid for that one item pretty much. Amazon, on the other hand, has perfected the art of up-selling.
Just take a little browse around one of Amazon’s product pages. They have a “If you buy this with these two other items, you can save X amount of money.” Further down they have “People who looked at this, ended up buying _______.” Then they have, ‘People who bought this, also bought these.” Then for some items they have “related accessories” and “similar products.” That’s a lot of different products that people can see, and possibly buy. Amazon has probably spent thousands and thousands of dollars on consumer behavior analysis, split testing different layouts, etc. They’ve done all of the work to maximize their sales.
So, for another affiliate program, I may make 15%-20% per item sold, but you may only sell one item per sale. Where, on Amazon, people either already had stuff in their cart they forgot to buy last time and choose to buy, or they just find multiple things they realized they needed to buy. So, you may only get 6.5% through Amazon, but that’s 6.5% on 4-6 items in an order. This is ESPECIALLY true during the holiday season when people are doing their Christmas shopping online. That’s how I was able to make $13,000 from October-December. Which leads me to my last point…
3) They pay on time, every month, plus have great payment options. (for US residents)
Amazon pays on a net 60 payment schedule. So, for any sales I make in January, I’ll get paid for them at the end of March. It sucks when you’re first starting out, having to wait 2 months, but once you’re steadily earnings, you’ll have a monthly paycheck. They always pay before the month is over, usually a few days before. Also, for US residents, they offer the ability to be paid by check, Amazon credit, or direct deposit. I have direct deposit, and I receive the money, like clockwork.
Amazon sells almost everything you can think of, they sell because they are a trusted brand, they’ve mastered the art of up-selling, and they pay their affiliates every month, on time.
What isn’t there to like Amazon?
Start thinking of some product niches you may want to tackle… and just enter your e-mail below to subscribe to the Niche Titans feed, for future tips on internet marketing, SEO, link building, etc… including how to maximize Amazon earnings and rank higher for product niches.
New Webmaster Forum – Win Domains Weekly
I want to tell you about NoobPoint.com for two reasons:
1) It’s a new webmaster forum my buddy just started
2) You can win a free domain every week!
Webmaster Forums
There’s definitely no shortage of webmaster forums, one of the most popular being Digital Point. But, NoobPoint attempts to stand out from the crowd by not only incorporating the best part of other webmaster forums, but also having a section that is devoted to website/blog flipping. If you haven’t heard of blog flipping, it’s where you buy or make a site for cheap and sell it for a bit more money to make a profit. The owner of the forums makes thousands of dollars each year doing it and he is an active member of the forum. This is a great way to learn how to flip blogs without spending any money.
There are other benefits to becoming an active member on NoobPoint such as allowing DoFollow links in the signature field. If you include a link to your blog or website in your signature you create a new backlink to your site every time you post. If you’ve noticed a lot of forums use NoFollow links which are used so your signature link doesn’t help your link building efforts . When creating your signature, be sure to keep the principles of anchor text link building in mind.
Another benefit of creating new threads on NoobPoint now is the good chance that you’ll get stickied for a quality post. That means, everyone in weeks, months, years to come will see your post at the top and it will have your signature in the bottom of the thread, linking to your site and generating free traffic.
How To Win The Free Domains Every Week
As of today, NoobPoint.com gives out 1 domain every week. To enter the drawing, all you have to do is 3 posts on the forum in a week. Then, one person will be randomly drawn to win the domain. You’ll receive a $7.69 gift card from GoDaddy. (.com’s are $9.99, but with freely available GoDaddy codes [just search Google] you can get .com’s for $7.69). He even shows a video of the randomizer program he uses to pick the winners!
So, go check out NoobPoint …make just 3 posts a week, and you can win some free domains, and get 3 dofollow backlinks!
Anchor Text Link Building for SEO and Building Backlinks
In this article I’ll discuss Anchor Text, Internal Links, Link Building for SEO. and Building Backlinks.
So when I first started in link building for seo I made plenty of mistakes. At the time I thought that commenting on a blog or forum with just a plain link to my site, ie: http://www.domain.com/, is all that I needed to do to build backlinks for my site. So I created about 100 backlinks by commenting on blogs and using the signature field on community forums expecting that within days my site would begin to rank better and start receiving traffic from Google.
A few days passed, then a week, then two weeks and still no traffic from Google. I was frustrated that I spent nearly 2 days building links and I had nothing to show for it. So I read some articles on link building for seo and how to build good backlinks before I realized what I had been doing wrong. Now obviously I know this now but I didn’t then. when I started to build backlinks for my site I didn’t use any anchor text… duh!
Bad Link Building:
http://www.domain.com/
Example: http://nichetitans.com/anchor-text-link-building-for-seo-and-building-good-backlinks
Good Link Building:
Target Keyword or Name of Site
Anchor Text Link Building for SEO and Building Good Backlinks
Building Backlinks with Anchor Text:
Now when building backlinks using anchor text is extremely important. Once I began using anchor text during link building within a week I was receiving a few hits a day from Google. Now this isn’t always going to be the case and it really depends on how competitive the keyword is you’re trying to target. In this case I was lucky being a rookie having targeted a keyword with little competition. Regardless what keyword you’re targetting it’s going to be difficult to rank for it unless you learn how to build good backlinks.
Internal Links with Anchor Text:
It’s very important that pages within your site use anchor text to point to other pages on your site or the page itself. Internal linking using anchor text is part of what search engines use to determine your position in search engine rankings. Anchor text or hyperlink text should be a very brief title or description of the content on that page. Here is an example of using anchor text to target another page here on Niche Titans, which helps with SEO:
Answer this question… what are backlinks? If you don’t already know what backlinks are then you probably aren’t quite ready to read this article and should read that article first.
Also make sure that you’ve read and understand Targeted Content, Keyword Density, Backlink Anchor Text, Link Building for SEO, and Anchor Text for Internal Links. I’ve followed these same basic principles to get to page1 spot1 on both Google and Yahoo. Also many seo gurus discount building links using different keywords as anchor text that point to the same page. I’ve listed an example of internal linking that looks like keyword spam working well.
NW ATV Rentals
http://www.nwatvrentals.com/
If you Google, “portland atv rentals“, they come up in the #2 spot on page1. Take a look at the internal link structure and look at it closely. This guy has managed to capture the #2 spot in Google for a low competition keyword with only 88 backlinks, good keyword density and using his target keywords as anchor text for his internal links.
Example:
Internal Links with Anchor Text:
Link Building For SEO
Build Backlinks For My Site
How To Build Good Backlinks
Building Backlinks
If you notice these are also some of the tags create for this article. 
