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.

My very first affiliate program that I joined was back in 2002 or so. And it was Amazon.com. I put up some books from Amazon.com onto my website (they even provide the code that you simply cut and paste onto your site) and I made like $30 my first paycheck.

A light bulb went off in my head. I realized that if I could get more traffic to my site and offered more products then I could make more money. And so began the quest, which eventually led to my current self employed life style.

I have since expanded beyond affiliate marketing (I still use it for passive income) and gone into ecommerce stores, and carrying and promoting my own products, but I still make thousands each year from affiliate marketing from various sites. It’s easy, and it’s pretty much passive income, which you gotta love.

What is a bit more complicated is how to make money with affiliate marketing. Most people these days selling “How to make money online” are usually selling the exact same recipe. Which is:

• 1. Find affiliate products to sell and make a webpage for it
• 2. Take out ads in Google Adwords and send to your affiliate page
• 3. Rinse and repeat

Now, there are several variations to this process, for example, some people send them first to a squeeze pages (to capture email addresses) and so on, but in general that is gist of the “How to make money” methods on the web.

For most people, that whole process doesn’t really work too well. I have seen people lost serious $$ because they tried this and if a product fails to convert (meaning people don’t buy that product) you can lost a lot of money fast. Because you are buying traffic from Google and will owe Google for that traffic even if no one is buying that product. And depending on your budget, Google can send you tons of traffic in just a few short hours and if you’re not careful you can lose a lot $$ quick.

So there’s got to be a better way…and of course there is. Budgeting your money, rigid testing and experience in general will help. But more than that there are different techniques out there that can help minimize risk and improve profit margins.

This video from Internet Marketing guru John Reese is a free glimpse into one of those techniques. I highly recommend you watch it. It’s free and contains some very good info on affiliate marketing.

John even helped me on one of my sites a few years ago and helped me increase my profit margin about 30%. He’s an internet millionaire, drives a Lamborghini, but all in all is still a pretty good guy. I can’t blame him for being rich! At least he knows what he’s talking about

So check out this internet marketing video when you get a chance, it’s worth every penny!