My Amazon Affiliate Experiment

Mar 27, 2015

On Mar 8, 2015, inspired by reading about affiliate marketing (mostly on Reddit), I came up with a ~~great~~ idea that it couldn't be so difficult to earn money this way and that I would give it a try.

The Idea

My idea was to build a website similar (but different enough) to This Is Why I'm Broke or Mommy I Want This to help people decide what to buy for their friends, family or themselves when they want something but don't know yet what it should be.

The Implementation

I chose the Amazon affiliate program as I read it was easy to start with (though the commission isn't that great). Also, Amazon sells a lot of products and is widely known so it has some trust among customers.

At first, I planned to handpick some of the best selling products from several categories, but when reading the documentation I found that Amazon provides an API to access their products.

So I signed up for both the affiliate program and the products API and built the website in the evenings and over the weekends. Finally, I made it live on Tuesday.

The Reality Check

To get feedback (and also some traffic while Google indexes the website) I submitted a post on Reddit. The feedback I got was quite useful but one thing bothered me. Several people warned me that my website would be rejected by Amazon after they review it because it lacks any original content. As I couldn't find anything about it in the license agreements I googled for a while and found that they could be right.

The Conclusion

So far I made two sales and decided that I would wait while Amazon reviews the website. In case they reject it I will have to approach the idea differently.

There's a sequel to this post.