Using Affliate Marketing

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Here’s a tip I’ve known about for over 10 years but could never make work for me until just recently.  It’s called affiliate marketing, and it goes like this:

You sign up as an affiliate (let’s say on Amazon).  You list Amazon products (books, treadmills, telescopes, whatever) on your site.  Anyone who clicks through and buys that product, you get 4% of that sale.

Amazon now gives you the opportunity to create your own “aStore” in which you list products and encourage people to buy them.  If they do (or if they buy anything on Amazon after that initial click-through), you get 4% of the sale.  So now you can sell other people’s books and ebooks and make money on every sale YOU make.

This does not affect the royalty the author gets.  It is classified as advertising costs by Amazon.

Even better, you can set up an aStore (or just do simple affiliate links) and sell your own books–and make 4% commission on every sale!

To employ this strategy, go to https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/  Join for free.

Then create links to your own work by clicking on the little Twitter icon in the upper “ribbon” that appears at the top of every Amazon page.  Copy just the URL from the Twitter post it generates.  Then paste that into Hootsuite to shrink it and use THAT URL in all of your direct-to-Amazon postings on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

You can also see on the ribbon at the top how to create an aStore, link to the page for your website or blog, create widgets for your website or blog, etc.  Lots of possibilities with this one, and you can do far more than just your own books as well.

I now have several aStores.

One for my work:  http://astore.amazon.com/stacistallings-20

One for Grace & Faith:  http://astore.amazon.com/gracenfaith-20

One for my publishing company, Spirit Light:  http://astore.amazon.com/spiritlightbooks-20

One for my new site Christian Kndle (not a typo, that’s the name of it, Christian Kindle was already taken!):  http://astore.amazon.com/christiankndle-20

I promote and cross promote from my blog/websites to these and through these to earn more commissions on everything I sell.

Barnes and Noble has an affiliate program as well, and I believe it pays 6%.  I just haven’t had time to look into that, but believe me, I WILL…