Monetize a Blogged Book with Amazon Affiliate Products

The majority of bloggers think about making money from their blog at some point. Those who blog books are no different, especially since most authors don’t earn enough from their book sales to pay the rent or mortgage. There are many ways to turn your blog into a cash machine either for extra pocket money or for full-time income.

One of the most-used blog monetization methods is affiliate marketing. This strategy allows you to promote multiple products without worry about creating or supporting the product, such as with customer and technical support.

There are many affiliate networks that offer a range of products. But if you are blogging a book, I recommend that you choose Amazon affiliate network.

Promoting books on Amazon works well with book-related blogs, because the posts are content oriented. This makes it easy to find a book you can recommend for any chapter or post you publish on your blog.

Setup your Amazon Affiliate Account

To become an affiliate for any Amazon product, you first need to create an affiliate account. Head over to Amazon and hit the sign up button to start your registration process.

It only takes couple of minutes to create your Amazon affiliate account. It’s free, and they will accept your application if you have a high-quality blog with good content. (Of course, you have that since you are blogging a book.) Those who have affiliate account application rejected have low-quality blogs.

This is a sample email that Amazon sends to low quality blogs:

In general, your Amazon application might get rejected if has a:

1. Lack of content
2. Duplicate content
3. Many advertisements

Lack of Content can mean you have published too many video posts without any content or you created a site that is primarily flash and image based rather than actual textual content.

Duplicate Content becoms a problem for bloggers too lazy to write original content. (You, on the other hand, are blogging a book, so every post is filled with original content.) These bloggers just copy and paste other people’s work or curate content on their blog. It also can also be a problem for bloggers who cite too much text from other posts in their own.

Don’t get me wrong. Citing other people’s work is a great way to give credit to others, and it is highly ethical.

But some bloggers fill their blogs with product reviews and quote many paragraphs from the product’s sales copy without voicing their opinion of the product. Not only this is bad practice that won’t generate sales, it also gets the blog flagged as duplicate by search engines and Amazon alike.

Many advertisements on your blog can be a problem, too. Amazon doesn’t like sites that have an overabundance of banner and other image ads and provide little text.

Maybe Amazon see the ads as low-value. Or perhaps they think too many ads will compete with their products and, in turn, see low profits potential from the site.

A blog that houses a book in progress, by nature, doesn’t have these problems. But consider these points before applying for Amazon’s affiliate program.

Picking the Right Affiliate Product

When you pick a product to promote, choose a relevant product but not just a niche-relevant product. You can get more specific and choose a product related to a particular chapter in your blogged book.

For example, if your blogged book is about weight loss, but you are writing a chapter about losing love handles, then you should find books (or products) on Amazon that are related to that topic.

Finding products on Amazon is simple. If you want to promote books only, then set that in your search:

Some products or books on Amazon have better reputations than others. They own a large market share in terms of sales. Promoting those products can yield high sales-conversion rates on your blog.

To find established products, look for the number of reviews. Pick a product or book with a large number of reviews.

Usually products with over 500 reviews are considered established, but if you can’t find any relevant books with that many reviews, pick one with lower review numbers.

You also need to read the reviews and judge the quality of the product yourself. If the product is high quality and receives praise, then you could put your weight behind it and promote it on your blog.

You might also look at whether or not specific books are bestsellers. These are good choices for promotion on your site as well.

Getting Paid by Amazon

Amazon’s affiliate commissions are low; they start at 4% and up to 8% per sale. While you might think that promoting a $50 book and getting two bucks on it (as a commission) is not worth your while, you should know first how Amazon compensate affiliate marketers.

If one of your blog readers buys the product you recommended and, once on Amazon, finds another product and buys it, Amazon pays you for all the products purchased and not just the one you promoted.

This means if someone buys a $50 book on photography from a link on your blog and goes on to buy a $2,000 lighting kit, you will get paid a commission on both. I this way, you earn more money with Amazon than with any other affiliate network. In this example, your commission would be a total of $82 just from one reader.

Keep in mind, however, that Amazon pays you commission on other products from the same buyer only during a 24-hour time frame; after that you won’t get paid.

Try this technique: Write about different products other than your main affiliate product. This prepares your readers psychologically to buy other items quickly before your 24-hour window closes down.

Create Your Affiliate Link

Affiliate links are an important part of affiliate marketing. These links are special ones that tell the product owner to grant you commission on the sales for which you are responsible. They allow a site like Amazon to track any purchases back to you and your affiliate account.

Affiliate links are unique for each product and affiliate network, and they are easy to create.

To create Amazon affiliate links, you need two things:

1. Your Amazon affiliate ID
2. The product ASIN code

You can find your Amazon affiliate id (known also as Associates ID) by logging into your Amazon account and looking at the “Tracking ID” on the top left corner of the screen.

You could have multiple affiliate ids, but as a new affiliate on Amazon you will have just one by default.

The next thing you need is the product’s ASIN. Each product on Amazon has a unique code (ASIN). To find it, just go to the product’s page and scroll down to until you see the “Product Details” section.

At this point you could create your Amazon affiliate link for the product by combining both your affiliate ID and ASIN code this way:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016ARVXRK/?tag=myaffiliateid-20

For other products, add the appropriate ASIN code and leave your affiliate id (tracking id) intact.

In the long run, your blog can earn a nice little income. Add affiliate products in each chapter or the posts that comprise that chapter. By the time you finish blogging the book, you’ll have steady sales. But this doesn’t mean you can’t make money while you blog.

Affiliate marketing, especially Amazon affiliate marketing, are one of the ways to monetize your content and your site.

Learn more about affiliate marketing from other blogs or from a course or training (like affset.com). With a little experience and knowledge, though, you you’ll soon find affiliate marketing offers an easy way to build a business around your blog and blogged book.

About the Author

Ibrahim Dahy is an internet marketer and programmer. He has worked with top internet marketing gurus throughout his career and learned the best success techniques from them. He shares his knowledge and expertise in effort to make other people more successful online. Find him on Twitter @IbrahimDahy.