Amazon

Amazon is where the whole concept of affiliate marketing started. This internet giant was the first online business to utilize affiliate marketers and needless to say it has been a huge success. Amazon started the concept of affiliate marketing but I think others have done a better job enhancing it.

Amazon, as you well know, sells just about everything you can think of and that whole list of products is offered to their affiliates. Now Amazon is well established and provides a great deal of support to their affiliates. They have a tremendous amount of marketing materials and promotional items. When you analyze Amazon as a potential affiliate partner they have the bases covered when it comes to those items.

Where Amazon falls short in my opinion is in two areas. The first is they only pay every 90 days. Now, I do not know about you but it is hard to wait 3 months for a paycheck. Especially, when you are starting out because you have some expenses laid out there for advertising and web hosting for 90 days before you see your first income. The second thing I do not like is their commission percentage is to low. You start out at 5% then you can move up to a whopping 5.25% with added referrals. Really, what makes this worse is that most of what you are selling is low cost items like books and CD's so it does not add up to much per sale.

The way to make Amazon work for an affiliate is you need to position yourself to move either lots of products or if you have a site that is geared around high ticket items like electronics.

Amazon is a good choice when you have more than one affiliate program on your site and you can use some of the Amazon products that will fit into the theme and content of your site. In my opinion Amazon is not one of your best choices for your primary affiliate partner because of the reasons stated above.

Go ahead and use them if want to sell a few books or CD's from your site but just do not depend on them to be your main income producer. With commission pay outs of only 5-7% you have to sell a ton of stuff to make money. I would rather have a product that I can sell on a 35-50% commission and sell less of it to make the same amount of money.

Let's see how Amazon stacks up.

Criteria for Good Affiliate Programs:

• Years in Business - (Prefer a minimum of 3) the oldest on the web
• Commission Structure: 1
• 2 Tier Program: Y
• Quality & Useful Products: 4.5
• Frequency of Payments: 90 days
• Affiliate Support: 5
• Affiliate Marketing Resources: 5
• Overall Score: 3.75 out of a possible 5