Individualized Amazon Store

The Amazon affiliate program is probably one of the best out there and if you haven't joined yet I suggest you go to Amazon UK's Affiliate site or Amazon.com's affiliate site (or your local Amazon's affiliate site to sign up. This process will take a few days as amazon will check your website for content and to make sure that it doesn't contravene any of their policies. Once you have been accepted, however, you will be entered into the program and you will receive your affiliate ID.

Once you have this then you can start generating your own Amazon store (you will be paid a commission on every sale you make which will range from 4.5% to 8% (though there is a cap). The system is also organized so that after you've sold 51 items the earnings increase to 5.25% per item (and this increases is retrospective for the items already sold as well). There are also bonuses for sales through a remote cart and direct links, so that by the time you reach 101 sales you should be earning an average of about 7.5% commission.

One way to start an Amazon store is to write your own reviews and add amazon links to them, or to use amazon links if you have book references in your text (which is how I started). This is not a very efficient approach and obviously takes time to set up. So, is there any way of setting-up your own Amazon affiliate store? In fact there is. Amazon (including various of the major localized variants) produce an XML stream of their products. This can be parsed and incorporated into your own website to generate a personalized/individualized Amazon store for your own website.

A number of scripts and/or systems for incorporating an Amazon store into your own website exists. These range from the entirely free basic scripts where you have to do some programming of your own to fully automated systems. If you're into hacking your own code then the amazon products feeds site. This is a free script that you can install and modify how you wish. If you want something a little more 'polished' then I'd go for the free ASM2 script which you can install and configure for your own use (though you'd probably need to do some manipulation and configuration).

If you want/need something a little more automated then two products to be recommended are associate-o-matic's Associate-o-matic and ghostscripter.com/amazon_shop.php's Amazon Shop. Associate-o-matic costs $99 for a full license, though there is a lite version that is delivered free (though 10% of your comissions go to the authors of the script. Amazon Shop costs $110 for a full license (though if you're not interested in poking around within the source code it's $49).

All these systems will alow you to build your Amazon-based sales pages/sites and almost all the systems above will also allow you to target multiple amazon sites (usually US, UK, Canada, Germany [and generally France and Japan as well]). With these systems you can also target the amazon results you return so they fit with the contents of your site. As a result if you have a minisite or a microsite (for an explanation of this see the Celtnet minisites information page) which is directed to a given topic and which also has a potentially lucrative amazon store associated with it. Alternatively, if you have a recipe section of your site (as I do) you can deliver information about recipe books and cooking utensils or gadgets to associate with them.

How much money you make is then entirely dependent on how much traffic you drive to your website, though even 250 or so visitors each day is enough for you to make a profit of at least $40 dollars a month (and this is after paying for your domain name, web hosting and DSL connnection charges). Once you've set it up the system looks after itself, and if you can make a profit from each site you place the system on then you will soon be making a steady additional monthly income.