I’ve been making money from the Amazon affiliate program for about 9 years and used to make a nice amount of Amazon affiliate commission (without having to do much work), but recently (last few years) I’m not making anywhere near as much money as an Amazon affiliate.
Amazon Affiliate Payments Proof
As you can see from the Amazon payments page screenshot below I did quite well in 2005, 5006, but now in 2014 I might as well not bother: click the screenshot below to see my entire Amazon affiliate earnings proof.
The above doesn’t include Amazon earnings from the UK Amazon program and other countries, but in comparison they are no where near as much: I guess if I totaled it all would be 20% more.
I’ve never taken making money from Amazon very seriously, their affiliate revenue share isn’t that fair (need a lot of sales to make serious cash) and I tend to be lazy with affiliate marketing, making money online is meant to be easy, right :-)
Been looking at new ways to make money from Amazon and trying out the EasyAzon Amazon WordPress Plugin and made sense to detail my old and more recent Amazon affiliate revenue, a before and after earnings photos post. Funny thing is I’m not making as much money from Amazon as I used to so it really is a true before and after weight loss (money loss) comparison!
Amazon Affiliate Commissions
Under your Amazon Earnings Report you can go back and look at your affiliate earnings from 2009 onwards, I made most of my Amazon money prior to 2009, so had to get a little inventive since the reports don’t go back beyond 2009 by default.
Let’s look at what money I’ve made from Amazon over the past 5 years.
As you can see from the revenue report screenshot above I’ve only made $1,000 in 5 years, that’s poor, it’s only $200 a year!
Although the Amazon affiliate earnings reports only go back as far as 2009 (5 years of commission data) the affiliate sales data is still available and easy to access: generate a report like the one I made above and edit the URL to cover the years of interest.
The unmodified URL will look like this (this is for the Amazon.com affiliate program):
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/network/reports/report.html?tag=&reportType=earningsReport&program=all&deviceType=all&preSelectedPeriod=yesterday&periodType=exact&startMonth=2&startDay=8&startYear=2009&endMonth=2&endDay=8&endYear=2014&submit.display.x=36&submit.display.y=14
The modified URL where I changed the 2009 year to 2005, just changed 2009 to 2005 in the browser URL form:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/network/reports/report.html?tag=&reportType=earningsReport&program=all&deviceType=all&preSelectedPeriod=yesterday&periodType=exact&startMonth=2&startDay=8&startYear=2005&endMonth=2&endDay=8&endYear=2014&submit.display.x=65&submit.display.y=15
And the affiliate earnings screenshot below is from the above URL.
Amazon Affiliate Stores
As you can see I made over $34,500 in the above period from over $400,000 worth of sales, this was when Google wasn’t very good at finding and downgrading thin affiliate Amazon stores: a thin affiliate site is where the content is just from the affiliate, nothing unique, it’s thin content with as Google puts it no added value.
My Amazon affiliate earnings reduced as Google downgraded my thin Amazon affiliate stores (think it started around 2005, but could have been earlier) and I didn’t replace them, was too busy with better paying SEO clients and developing WordPress SEO themes.
Over the past few years I’ve occasionally tested the WP Robot plugin (see my WP Robot Review), but not really promoted any of my test autoblogs. I have a really bad habit of testing ways to make money online, but not using the information I discover to actually make money online.
The $30,000+ affiliate revenue I made all those years ago could have been significantly higher, but I only built a small number of Amazon affiliate stores, in hindsight I should have made dozens of them and promoted them (only SEO promoted a few of them).
Amazon Affiliate Program Review
I have found that though the WP Robot autoblogs (without promotion) make money from AdSense ads, they aren’t doing anywhere near as well as my old Amazon affiliate stores, though I suppose $200 a year from Amazon for a few autoblog test sites I’m not promoting isn’t too bad.
I guess the online public have moved on and don’t like thin affiliate product content like they used to and don’t click the Amazon buy now buttons as much as they used to. I used to make roughly the same from Amazon as AdSense from Amazon stores, now it’s closer to a 5th: have others noticed this pattern?
I’ll add I run my autoblog tests sites with the Stallion Responsive Theme which is optimized for a high AdSense CTR, so maybe that’s why (loosing Amazon affiliate sales for AdSense clicks).
So there you go, that’s my Amazon affiliate commission history for all my years online.
EasyAzon Amazon WordPress Plugin
What I’m think about doing is using the EasyAzon Amazon WordPress Plugin to make it easier to monetize some of my sites: not Amazon autoblogs or thin affiliate Amazon stores.
I should have been doing what EasyAzon can achieve, but manually for years, however I’m lazy and when creating an article I never log into Amazon and search for relevant products to promote.
Other than my test WP Robot autoblogs (the Amazon promotion is automated) and a small number of Amazon banners I added to the sidebar of a few sites many years ago (not checked them in years), I pretty much have no Amazon affiliate links!
I’ve been leaving a lot of potential Amazon affiliate sales on the table, the plugin will make it MUCH easier to add affiliate links directly from WordPress without having to log into Amazon and find products to promote etc… that is assuming I don’t stay lazy and forget to install the EasyAzon plugin :-)
David Law
Website - SEO Gold
How to Promote Amazon Products
I want to place more products on Amazon.
How can I do with this product?
Your first reply seems fix my problem but I have to edit more on my widget.
Thank
Adding Amazon Ads to a WordPress Theme via Text Widgets
For a while I’ve been thinking about adding Amazon ads to Stallion as another ad network, so far not started on the code (sure I will one day).
It is easy to add Amazon ads to Stallion via WordPress Text Widgets, this works for most themes for their sidebar widget areas so anyone can use this technique, with Stallion theme users there’s widget areas located throughout the theme in almost identical locations to where you can add the built in AdSense/Chitika and Clickbank ads so you can replicate the AdSense ad setup using Amazon is you create enough text widgets.
To add an Amazon ad do the following.
Create an Amazon ad with the sizes etc… you want at the Amazon site.
Under your sites Dashboard : “Appearance >> Widgets” Drag and Drop a new Text Widget into the widget area you want the ad to load. If you want it on the left sidebar for example drop it on the left sidebar widget area.
In the form that opens paste the Amazon ad code into the larger box, if you want to title the ad give it a title, if not leave blank. Save the Text Widget.
Check your home page and you’ll find the Amazon ad on the sidebar you added it to. The ad will have no styling like centered etc… depending on which widget area you added the ad to and the size of the ad it might work fine with no styling, if not you can add styling as follows.
Example: centering an ad, add this to a text widget and add your Amazon code over the “Amazon ad code” text.
Save the widget and you’ll find the ad is now centered.
There’s some more formatting options described at Clickbank Affiliate Program (I’ve used the same concept on the Stallion Clickbank banners). Basically adding some CSS styling to make the ad do what you want it to do.
David
Adding Amazon Ads to a WordPress Theme via Text Widgets
Wrong Clickbank Affiliate ID!
I just pretend to buy a product through my link on clickbank because I want to see my affiliate id.
Then I checked that it is my name and your theme name (ratanakou.stallion).
So is it acceptable to get my commission or that commission has to share with you?
Thank
Clickbank Affiliate Username and Tracking ID
No part of the Stallion theme involves commission sharing. If you don’t set your ad network IDs I’d theoretically** get all your earnings (via the default settings) and you’d get nothing. If you set your ad network IDs you earn 100% of the revenue I earn nothing.
** Theoretically because my AdSense account is set to not earn from sites that I don’t approve (had a problem with domains not owned by me breaking the AdSense TOS, almost lost my AdSense account, was banned for a week!!!), Chitika you have to submit a domain to Chitika to earn from it, same with Kontera, Infolinks and Linkwords. Clickbank doesn’t require submitting a domain to earn from it, so if you left my morearning Clickbank username in place I’d get your Clickbank earnings (no one has done that so far :-().
Anyway, the Clickbank username.stallion part is the tracking ID which by default is set to Stallion so you know it’s a sale from a Stallion theme running site, can be changed under the Stallion Clickbank Options page under Tracking to anything you like.
That has no commission value, just for tracking. When you get a Clickbank order it will have the tracking ID (Stallion) attached to it so you know where it came from. If you own multiple domains you can set each one differently so you know where the orders are coming from.
As a side note I have two Clickbank accounts, “morearning” and “stallionad”. The morearning one I use for promoting Clickbank products that aren’t mine, stallionad I use for selling Stallion via Clickbank. I don’t own the stallion Clickbank account so if that did somehow share the commission (which it doesn’t) I wouldn’t get it anyway.
But thanks for accusing me of stealing your ad revenue!
David
Clickbank Affiliate Username and Tracking ID