Sixteen sales is not what some would consider making money with Amazon. The big boys would chuckle and gently quip – as if to a child – “small potatoes”. You are the little guy and have to start somewhere. Small potatoes is better than no potatoes at all. Right? You still eat (so to speak), it’s just a can of tuna instead of a Porterhouse steak. This number of sales is also enough to keep 6.00% of all your Amazon Associates sales.
Read on for the tips on how we did it and how you can as well.
Deal Post + Sidebar Profits
I have already written posts on Making Money with Amazon Associates on a Movie Website The Deal Post and How to Setup a Movie Website Sidebar for Profit. Those two posts were an ingredient that helped us generate the 16 sales, I would say 30% of them.
Pageviews
Focus on SEO and driving traffic to your site. The more traffic your site receives, the more clicks your ads will. Grab all the opportunities to drive traffic to your site, even the unconventional ones. Pageviews generated 50% of our sales but none of the sales would have been possible without pageviews. No traffic, no ad clicks. Its that simple. By “traffic” I mean nearly 100K a month or more. The first step to getting traffic is getting indexed. I spoke about that in these posts: 5 Steps to Get Your Movie Website Indexed by Search Engines and Starting a Movie Website: Get Indexed.
The Number of Ads
On our film website, we advertise eight, 125×125 Amazon product ad per post. We make our own ads with image editors / manipulators such as Abode Photoshop. So for every pageview, the viewer is seeing eight Amazon Associates products links back to Amazon. Chances are one of those links will be of enough interest to them that they will click on it for more information. Once there, conversion is out of our hands. Its in Amazon’s and Amazon has very capable hands. This amounted for about 5% of our film website’s sales.
The Ads’ Titles
Billboards. Most of our custom Amazon ads that get the greatest amounts of clicks have the title of the product – in these cases movies – clearly visible. No ambiguity. People knew exactly what they are clicking. This amounted for about 2.5% of our film website’s sales.
If it Bleeds it Leads
Horror movies clearly labeled with title, the Unrated stamp, and/or blood in the ad image get clicks by the curious or the morbid-minded. This amounted for about 2.5% of our film website’s sales.
You’re so hot…
that I’m going to pimp you on my website. Like I said in the post: Making Money with Amazon Associates on a Movie Website The Deal Post, we use Amazon’s best selling lists to determine some of the films and products we advertise. This amounted for about 10% of our film website’s sales.
Sex sells
Salacious cover art/ads always brings in the clicks, especially if part of your audience is male. Do not overdue it though. You’re not running a sex site, you’re running a film website.
The Buy Pattern
None of the 16 sales were for items people clicked on our site to get to Amazon. They were everything from books, kitchenware, MP3s, etc. If you don’t believe me, check it out below. How many of those sales do you see for DVDs, Blu-rays, or playback equipment?
Track your Progress
Every month I look at the ads clicks – specifically products with no orders – in my Amazon Associates account. The ads that have not gotten any clicks get deleted. Obviously our audience isn’t interested in that product. Then I look at the low performing ads and evaluate how long they have been in the rotation. If I have too many ads in the rotation I will delete the low performing ones to give the ones bringing in more clicks more “screen time” and exposure. Regardless if the medium to high volume click ads convert to sales per click – there is no way to track that – you know the ads are bringing people to Amazon. That completes one of their two purposes. The other is to convert but that – as I said earlier – is out of your hands.
In Conclusion, Remember
Get them there then let Amazon do the rest. Attractive ads, eye-catching, intriguing ads will do the trick. Do not put all of your eggs in one basket. Use multiple ads of the pedigree just described, not dopey, Amazon non-specific banner ads. Your margins – as ours are – will be higher if you make your own attractive ads.