Amazon Affiliate Websites

Two people asked me basically the same thing this week, “What’s the catch?” and “Why so cheap?” They wanted to know what else they would be forced to buy, when the up-sell would come, and how long the deal would last? The answer was quite simple, “No catch! No up-sell! No expiry!”

This website offer is cheap. It’s damn near a give-away! It’s less than the cost of most hosting and it includes the website installation, selected plug-ins, and tech support. So, the real question is, “Why are we doing it?”

And that’s pretty easy to answer too. We’re a small outfit; the proverbial mom and pop opperation. We work hard ourselves and earn our entire living online. We can’t work outside the home and we don’t qualify for any kind of assistance so we do it ourselves. That’s not a call for sympathy. That’s just the way it is. And we’re thankful for the opportunity we have to work for ourselves and succeed.

We know there are lots of other people out there struggling to make a go of it and who can’t figure this website thing out too easily. We’ve been blessed with being in the right place at the right time to have learned about websites and affiliate programs and we want to pass that along to others in the community — the same community that supports us.

We’re too small to afford to do it for free, and we have to recover at least part of our cost. That’s how the price is determined. It’s enough to make it real for both of us — cover most of our raw cost and be affordable for you.

But it also means you pay something for it. I’ve found through experience that people don’t appreciate something for nothing — not for long, anyway. You need a little skin in the game to make it real. If you pay at least something for your site you will tend to appreciate, and make use of, it more. You might actually be more successful.

And besides, it comes with full, unlimited, email tech support. You can get all the help you need.

Yeah, I know. It’s hard to believe. Just 3.99 a month for a multi-page website with real support. It seems there must be a catch. There isn’t!

Tech support is an interesting balance. When people ask for help they know something isn’t working but they usually don’t know what the problem is and why it is causing difficulty. They just know something isn’t right and they want a solution.

Often I find that the person asking for the help has got to a point where they are beyond their own limit of knowledge and the solution may require additional learning on their part. Many times the user has learned a number of things incorrectly and built what amounts to the proverbial house of cards upon that foundation.

Sometimes the fix isn’t just as simple as saying “do this…”.

I find that most people know how to change the image on their desktop and add a nifty screen saver long before they ever learn how to copy and paste. They surf the web and send out “Bill Gates will send you $100″ emails to their entire contact list without even knowing what a “program” is.

I have a friend who teaches piano. She loves inspiring children to find music within themselves but she decidedly hates when adults approach her for lessons. She says they mostly say, “I don’t want to bother with all that timing and scales stuff. Just teach me how to play {insert your favorite contemporary piano piece here} so I can wow my friends at a party!” Apparently when Music Box Dancer was all the rage she was inundated with requests for “teaching” sessions.

Using your computer is a bit like that. You need to learn, and apply, the basics if you are going to be successful with any particular niche. Being an Amazon associate and building an affiliate website requires that you have some basic understanding of the underlying process of using your computer and the web for e-commerce. You don’t have to be an expert — that’s what tech support is for — but you do need to be able to converse fluently with tech support if you ever hope to succeed.

And, hopefully, you will have a techie who has the patience to get you through the task at hand!

Way back in January of 2007, writing for the Online Marketing Blog, Lee Odden, in answer to the question, “Is blog optimization part of search marketing?” gave the resounding answer, “Absolutely!”

For years now it has been known that blogging is a powerful process to add new content to your site and improve your position in the search engine results pages (SERPs). But, although blogging can be easy, the results won’t likely be instantaneous. Like so many other things blogging takes effort over time.

Writing about the SEO Benefits of Blogs on the Evan Charmichael blog, Sean Hacking recently said, “…stay committed and have patience. It could take weeks or even months to see results from your efforts.”

The sooner you start the sooner the results will come. If you haven’t already started blogging you need to take action today. There is no better time.

Austin, the “SEO Guy” wrote, “…yes, blogs do help with search engine visibility! …they have come into their own as business and marketing tools.”

There is so much evidence that blogging is a great way to improve your search engine visibility. You can find it everywhere. A quick Google search turned up over six million entries. If you are not blogging on your affiliate website you need to ask yourself, “Why not?”

WordPress is an open source blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL which can also be used for content management. It has many features including a workflow, a plugin architecture and a templating system. Used by over 2% of the 10,000 biggest websites, WordPress is the most popular blog software in use today.

It was first released in May 2003 by Matt Mullenweg as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of September 2009, it was being used by 202 million websites worldwide.

Source: Wikipedia.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is an American-based multinational electronic commerce company. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it is America’s largest online retailer, with nearly three times the Internet sales revenue of the runner up, Staples, Inc., as of January 2010.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and launched it online in 1995. It started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified to product lines of VHS, DVD, music CDs and MP3s, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and so on. Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and China. It also provides international shipping to certain countries for some of its products.

On January 15, 2009, a survey published by Verdict Research found that Amazon was the UK’s favorite music and video retailer, and came third in overall retail rankings.

Source: Wikipedia.

Blogging is undeniably a powerful tool for keeping your website content fresh. It’s easy to do and, besides being good for SEO, you can develop a following. It’s a good way to expand the impact of your affiliate website.

The WordPress integrated blog post editor is easy to use. The picture manager makes adding images and other media a breeze. WordPress websites and Amazon affiliates were meant for each other.