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I suppose when selling books, most people think of the Amazon affiliate program. But is that the best option for gaming books?
Thanks alot
THE GOOD :
Amazon have a lot of books on offer.THE BAD :
Amazon’s Url tracking system is actually pretty bad – and you only get credit for a pruchase if people go in and buy books in the same visit that they clicked through from your site.THE UGLY :
If they put books in their cart – and go away – and buy later then you do NOT get credit for it.
Summary :
We ran with Amazon for about 3 years – and despite a lot of clicks only around a small percentage ever turned into purchases – and as you’re only getting 5-7% of purchase price it never really grows to more than pocket change.I do not beleive that Amazon’s affiliate system is a worthwhile monitization system for most affiliates.
Hey MJ,
No – I never found a cash worthy alternative. Unfortunately.
:sarcasm:In the end – we simply stoped focusing on the book sales – it was a waste of website real estate. We have a small books section as a service to players who really want to find good gambling books.
But it’s never paid for the time and effort.
We sold around 300 books, and made about 30-50p a book (5%-7.5% commission) and all up made about GBP 100 total..
If I divide that by the number of hours I spent doing the work over 3 years in reading books – reviewing books – fetching links etc … then I think that my hourly rate was around 75p per hour …
And because the payouts were so small – they only offered vouchers rather than cash – so I spent the bloody profit on some books that we wanted ourselves …
:tongue:Anyone else out there had a better experience ?
I think Gooner’s example must be a freak thing, uncommon. I have an Amazon store on a low traffic (150 a day or so) MMORPG website that I started not too long ago and it’s already generating some revenue. Perhaps a gambling store would have less success, I don’t know, but I kind of doubt it.
People click on your link and then they buy all sorts of crap. One guy bought a Gremlings 2 DVD, another bought a plastic pirate duck, some other guy bought 60$ worth of fantasy books etc, on top of what the website actually promotes (the game, game guide, stuff like that).
So it’s not as lucrative as signups, but it’s another way to monetize traffic.
Hey JackTen
$60 spend pays you about $3 – is that right?
How much have you made on it so far?On Amazon US it goes from 4% to 10%. Need to sell 10 items to move to 6%, so pretty much any affiliate will be getting between 6% and 8,5%.
So 6% of 60% is 3,60$ US.
That one store is on the website xxxhttp://www.potbsmatey.comxxx which as you can see isn’t very developped.
It’s been up for 2 weeks and has sold for about 200$ worth of stuff, so the commission is about 10$. Nothing to write home to my mother about, but setting it up took about 15 minutes.
Given that it’s an adsense website, 3,60$ in commission equals about 40-46 Google clicks.
I’m going to add an Amazon store / ebgames links to another website I have about Final Fantasy, which has more traffic, and see how it does.
I have tried to sell poker books via amazon. I have had almost no success, and in 5 years made about $2-$3. I have put very limited effort into this, and have found no reason to try any harder.
Do you guys have any suggestion as to why it isn’t working? People do buy books, and it works on other websites, so why not poker books?
Perhaps many poker players think that they’re good enough that they don’t need self help books?
But it’s not just poker mate – it’s also sports gamblers who think that they’re better than they are. 90%-95% of sports players lose over the long term too – but listen to them on the forums and you’d think they were all winners.
:sarcasm:I guess it’s just different strokes for different folks – but it seems to be me that online gamblers can get their fix of the REAL thing online – so they’re not as intersted in buying books to read about it.
Almost as if the winning is secondary to playing ?
:sarcasm:I had hoped to get DVD sales off football club season reviews (etc) but even then sales were very slow and I put it down to the quite harsh rules that Amazon have about when affiliates actually get a piece of the pie.
Ah well.. here I was thinking I was going to put some stores on all my websites
Shattered dreams.
If you’ve made a whooping 100$ with the traffic you get (which I still do find kind of odd), I guess it must really not be lucrative.
Anyway, what I said stands : it’s another way to monetize. Setting up the store takes 15 mins, the problem is you wasted a lot of time with reviews.
I have tried this too, not recently though.
As gooner pointed out it’s the tracking.
The customer needs to buy immediately or you get nothing, and they may go back to Amazon and buy thousands of $ worth of items in the next month and you get zilch.
You can make little sites and leave them to fend for themselves and consider what little they bring extra pocket change, or you can add books to your site as customer service. But as a serious source of income it’s useless.
If you have good volume traffic for a big ticket item, such as appliances or furniture, you might make some decent money by affiliating with Amazon.
Thanks for the replies guys – it makes interesting reading.
I remember setting up a fan-site for a film years ago now and affiliated with Amazon when I guess the industry was just getting going. I didn’t really see a whole lot come in then, but put it down to the fact that I wasn’t patient enough.
It sounds like it’s pretty hard to make a steady income from though if there tracking doesn’t take into account orders made at a later date.
Just out of interest though, how hard is it to put an Amazon shop into your site like JackTen has done?
Thanks,
It takes 15 minutes. It’s an aStore. Basically you choose products, you create a page and you include the plug-in. After that all you have to do is drive traffic to it (from your website, or from anywhere).
Ok, maybe 30 minutes. That’s why I said that even though it doesn’t generate a fortune, the little it does generate is good money/time spent. Of course, if you do reviews like Gooner for each product it’s a totally different story.
