How to Improve Your Amazon Affiliate Conversion & Revenue

Amazon Associates is one of the most popular (if not THE most popular) affiliate programs in existance. While payouts percentage wise aren’t nearly as good as many other options, once you are able to get your site visitor over to Amazon, their internal conversion and up-sell rates are quite good so it definitely can be a decent source of revenue for some people.

If you have any source of affiliate revenue, one of the easiest ways to increase that revenue is to find ways to improve your own conversion ratio – that is to get a larger percentage of your visitors to click on your affiliate links and get over to the affiliate advertisers’ web site. This will set your “cookie” so if that visitor returns to purchase (from the computer which your cookies were set on) in a period of time you will still get credit and commission for the sale. In the case of Amazon, their cookie is currently only 24 hours and once an order is placed any subsequent orders in that 24 hours will not be commissionable to you. This is one of the many reasons the Amazon Associates program has some substantial drawbacks as an affiliate marketer, but we’ll discuss those another time.

Simple Tips To Increase Your Conversion to Amazon

Conversions can be measured at any step in the process and for the purpose of this blog post we are talking about the percentage of people that click from your page through your Amazon affiliate link and end up at Amazon.

We’ll use the Chromebook I recently purchased as an example for all of these so we can have a real life example. These are real Amazon affiliate links so if you buy anything within 24 hours I will get a commission on those purchases and I thank you very much for it!

Our Most Basic Example Text

Here is some site copy about what you might want to write about the product you are trying to promote and hope that people purchase at your affliate. In this case it is an Acer C720 Chromebook that I have recently purchased and use to write a lot of my blog posts. I happen to think it’s quite handy and very much worth the $199 price including the free shipping from Amazon.com

Add Simple Links

If you link just “Amazon.com” at the end, you might get some conversions. I’m not going to show you what that looks like because I believe you have enough imagination to see what that would be. I personally wouldn’t do that and I would just remove the Amazon branding and end up with something like this:

Here is some site copy about what you might want to write about the product you are trying to promote and hope that people purchase at your affliate. In this case it is an Acer C720 Chromebook that I have recently purchased and use to write a lot of my blog posts. I happen to think it’s quite handy and very much worth the $199 price including free shipping for a limited time.

So in the version above I linked both the product name and the price/shipping text at the end. Now you have a couple basic links which could interest people to click on them.

Spice It Up With An Image

Images draw the eye naturally so having one that draws the visitors eye to your links is a good idea. Not only should you add the image, you should also link the image to the affiliate URL so if someone clicks on the image they will land at the affiliate page. Some black-hat or dark-side methods include using words like “click to enlarge” near the image so people think they are enlarging the image and then end at the affiliate site, but I think that’s deceptive. You could use something like “more details” instead and accomplish the same thing without misleading your visitors. Remember, you work hard for your visitors so treat them with respect! Here’s an example:

Here is some site copy about what you might want to write about the product you are trying to promote and hope that people purchase at your affliate. In this case it is an Acer C720 Chromebook that I have recently purchased and use to write a lot of my blog posts. I happen to think it’s quite handy and very much worth the $199 price including free shipping for a limited time.

Leave The Visitor Wanting More Info

One method to really help increase your click throughs is to provide the visitor with some introductory information, but also leave them wanting more. This way they are compelled to click on the link to find out more about the product at your affiliate partner. Here’s a quick example of doing that.

Here is some site copy about what you might want to write about the product you are trying to promote and hope that people purchase at your affliate. In this case it is an Acer C720 Chromebook that I have recently purchased and use to write a lot of my blog posts. I happen to think it’s quite handy and very much worth the $199 price I paid for it including free shipping. Battery life and overall performance has been great and I’m not exactly a light user since I nearly always have 10 or more browser tabs open. For the price, the tech specs are quite amazing.

That Was Easy!

Yes, it was – there really isn’t a whole lot of rocket surgery involved in these examples! Here’s a couple bullet points of what we did to help increase your Amazon Affiliate conversions:

1. Add images – they draw people’s eye
2. Link the images to your affiliate partner, not a larger version of the image
3. Add more than one link in your copy. Some people will click one version, others will click another version.
4. Use a carrot. In this example we used “tech specs are quite amazing” to get an extra link there, and also intrigue people who might want to know about the specs.

How To Implement These Tips

Please don’t just do all of them at once. Pick one and monitor and measure your results.

These methods don’t guarantee any purchases and may not work at all for your site. Things like the quality of your traffic, lead time to purchase and many other factors can affect your conversion rate in the hand-off to your affiliate partners (In this case Amazon) but I hope you understand the concepts that I’ve shared and try one or two to see if they work for you.

So try one – maybe just adding the second link and see if you increase your conversion rates and revenue. Try them one at a time so you know what works and what doesn’t for your particular niche and audience and add new methods when you are confident you aren’t hurting your existing revenue.

Do You Have Tips to Share?

If you have tips that you’d like to share, we’d definitely appreciate if you share what works for you so we can all learn from them. Please tell us about them in the comments.