Amazon stops affiliate program from paid search traffic
As of May 1, 2009, Amazon.com has stopped paying affiliates who send traffic to Amazon from PAID TRAFFIC search engine marketing. These are also called sponsored ads. If it’s from Google, it’s called Adwords, Yahoo has Yahoo Marketing, etc.
This was a major strategy of some affiliates. Although Amazon commissions weren’t the best to begin with, now, you’ll have to have a ton of traffic to your site naturally to make any money through Amazon. Although I wonder if you could buy the traffic, send it to your site first and then an affiliate link to Amazon.com.
What some people were doing were buying ads and sending them directly to Amazon.com for those products.
I never did the paid traffic approach for Amazon’s affiliate program, so it doesn’t affect me. But 99% of the marketing info out there promotes the use of paid traffic to the affiliate site directly to generate commissions.
For those of you unfamiliar with affililiate programs, they are a way to make money by sending traffic to a company with an affiliate program (like Amazon) and you’d get 4 – 5% of the sale if they buy something from that site. So you could recommend a product, assign an affiliate link to it, and if someone bought that product, then you’d get part of the sale.
In fact, the first money I ever made was from Amzon back in the early 2000’s. It was because I had suggested some books on one of my websites and about a month later I got a check from Amazon for like $30. That kinda got me hooked on marketing online, as I recall.
Still though, if you got enough traffic/visitors to your site, then Amazon should still be an ok way to go with the higher priced items. Just don’t expect to make a living from it unless you had millions of people to your site each month.