Using Amazon Affiliate to Generate Revenue from your Blog

I was chatting with spanking romance author Patty Devlin about the presentation she was giving on using social media to promote one’s brand as an author. I reminded her that she was the one who introduced me to Amazon Affiliate links when I first got started blogging. She snorted and said she made about $.50 a month on it.  This made me think that maybe bloggers don’t realize how lucrative and informative Amazon Affiliate links can be.  I earn $50-100/month with them without any extra effort at all.

Summer Daniels, the BDSM author of the Summer’s Journey series has been operating the Facebook page What to Read After Fifty Shades of Gray for the past two and a half years. The page supports BDSM authors by posting their books and links on her page daily. Before Facebook changed their algorithms, resulting in lower page views from the fans, the page was making multiple thousands of dollars a month from the affiliate links.  It does take Summer a few hours a day to post all the links. so there is work involved, but you can see how lucrative this can be! (Also, you might remember my advice to add your book to her site as part of your new release– see #10 on the New Release Checklist).

How to use Amazon Affiliate links

Income Generation

There are two basic way to get benefit from posting affiliate links. The first is to generate income.  This is easy– basically any time you post a link, whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, as a link to an ad you’ve placed, or on your blog, use the affiliate link. Even if you’re posting a guest post from another author and they send you their links– change them to use your affiliate links. I figure if I’m pimping, I get the affiliate credit.

Use both them for both Amazon U.S. and Amazon UK sites (It’s two different sign ups). Don’t bother with Amazon.ca because apparently Canadians are prudes and Amazon.ca blocks all erotic blogs from participating (grr…censorship).

Summer Daniels advises,

“Use them consistently … and use a link shortening services such as bitly.  Spread the links far and wide.  One of the nice things about the Amazon Affiliate program is that you make money off of anything that a customer buys while they are at Amazon.  So if they click on a 99 cent ebook link, but buy a new dishwasher for $800 … you get paid for both of those things.”

Months when I run a paid ad, the income generated from from using the affiliate links often cuts the cost of the ad by half. For example, if I spend $100 on Facebook advertising for a new book, my Amazon Affiliate income using goes up by $50. I choose to get paid by Amazon gift card and then have no guilt clicking “buy” when my author friends release new books, as it really feels like free money.

Tracking your Marketing Efforts

The second reason to use Amazon Affiliate links is because it provides wonderful tracking information. Let’s say you run a Facebook ad for your new book. Facebook provides you with the information on how many people clicked your link. If you used the Amazon Affiliate link, then you also have the information on how many people bought it once they arrived at Amazon. And for those who didn’t, you’ll find out exactly which book or books they bought instead (or sometimes they buy something fabulous like a ping pong paddle or wooden hairbrush and I know I’ve done my duty in helping the world get spanky one person at a time).
By examining your affiliate links, you can get a solid idea of where you’re getting traffic.  For example, despite the fact that I have fewer page views on the site Spanking Romance Reviews than on my personal blog, most of my affiliate clicks come from there. That makes sense–people are on my blog for a variety of reasons, not all of them being about books, whereas people on Spanking Romance Reviews are looking for exactly that–spanking romances.  This showed me that advertising on Spanking Romance, as well as the “Recommended Reads” are important places to showcase my own books.
Below is an example of how my affiliate order report looks for the past week.
Affiliate results image
You can see it shows how many times readers clicked my link and which one, and how many things they ordered, as well as what was ordered. By looking at the above order report, I can see most of the links clicked came from Spanking Romance Reviews. It makes sense, since I didn’t post much on my own blog last week and I don’t currently have any big ads running.
Don’t think you need to be an author to use this–I have also set up a page of recommended toys and implements using Amazon links. Sex bloggers can take full advantage of Amazon Affiliate links, posting links on product reviews, etc.
If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email. Also, let me know in the comments if you’re using Amazon Affiliate links and how much income you generate, just so we can get an idea of the range it provides.
Thanks and happy linking!

 

Comment List

  • pooky120 15 / 08 / 2014 Reply

    This article is fantastic! I am getting all over this. I can’t believe how lame I”ve been. I promote so many authors I could be rich already. How silly. Thanks for writing this Renee. It totally helps.

  • I’m confused by this. I signed up a few months ago and Amazon told me they could not approve an affiliation with me because my blog contains content of a pornographic nature. And that was to link to their sex toy shop. 😐

    • Renee Rose 14 / 09 / 2014 Reply

      Gah– I hate censorship. Was it Amazon.ca? They turned me down. You might just try to run it through again. Sometimes the trick with Amazon is just getting the right person to approve you. If it was amazon.com there’s a theory to do things during U.S. business hours, when you get an American checking things in vs. someone from a more conservative country during the off hours. Let me know if you have any luck…

      • it was amazon.co.uk…

        • reneeroseauthor 29 / 09 / 2014 Reply

          Try submitting again– maybe a different pair of eyes will approve you? I managed to get mine through amazon.co.uk…

  • Lotte Larsen 18 / 06 / 2015 Reply

    I’m a Canadian who just started selling erotica on Kindle and Smashwords last month. Your comments about Amazon.ca and Canadians being prudes make me laugh. Clearly I have to count on you Brits and the Americans to buy my smut. I’m on Author Central US and UK. Haven’t tried the affiliate program yet but thanks for your advice on other posts about Kindle Unlimited and pre-orders.

  • Christina Mandara 29 / 03 / 2016 Reply

    I’ve tried this recently with Amazon.com and they wouldn’t accept my blog as it was ‘naughty.’ More censorship. Drives me wild as I want to advertise their ‘naughty’ products and don’t see what possible harm it could do them. If they sell naughty things… how can then be prudish about their advertisement? Beats me 😉

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