Supplement your Online Product Sales With Amazon Affiliates Income

The Amazon Associates program is Amazon.com's affiliate program. You sign up for the free program, then include links to Amazon.com books on your own website. Any time a visitor to your site clicks on a link and purchases the linked book, you get a commission from Amazon.com.

Most people who have experience with affiliate programs know about the Amazon Associates program - a person who has a website set up such that the site's primary purpose is to make money from a variety of affiliate programs is glad to add Amazon's free program to the perhaps multitude of affiliate programs listed on his or her site.

If you don't have a website dedicated to affiliate programs but instead have (or are considering starting) a website that exist primarily to sell products, you probably haven't considered joining the Amazon Associates program. Instead, your focus is solely on selling products. That's understandable - but you're missing out on the potential for easy, extra income.

No matter what you choose to sell online, there are undoubtedly many books about that line of products. If you're selling pet products, customers may be interested in pet books. If you're selling crafts, customers may be interested in buying craft books. If someone is interested enough to spend money at your website for the product, they may very well also be interested enough to spend money on a book or two. Such customers can of course visit Amazon.com at any later time, but why not encourage them to consider buying some books right now, while they're in the mood to spend money at your website?

There are a few different ways you can incorporate an Amazon Affiliates program into your website:

Skilled website developers who want to add book-selling to a website should use Amazon's own Amazon Web Services API. This is a set of programming code that a developer can use with existing HTML to develop a web page that displays book covers, titles, and other book information. Developers interested in this API should check out the 'Amazon Web Services' link at Amazon.com.

People with more modest website development skills should consider making use of Amazon's free aStore product. With aStore you can, without programming skills, embed a book-selling online store into your product-selling website. You can search the Amazon.com website for 'aStore' to find more details about the aStore product.

Finally, people who are considering setting up a small online business using an 'all-in-one' website builder should investigate the various website builders that web hosts offer to find one that includes a pre-built 'Book Buying' page. Such a website builder allows you to easily include a page that lists any number of Amazon.com books. By 'easily' I mean the website builder should allow you to simply enter a topic and the number of books to display, and the website builder does all the work. A good website builder will even give you the option of making the page interactive for your customers by including a text box in which a visitor types a subject of interest and the web page returns Amazon.com-supplied information about any number of books on that subject.

Amazon's Associates program won't provide enough of an income to be your primary source of earning money from a website. But if you already have a website that sells products, or are about to start such a website, it may well be worth a few minutes of your time to add a book selling page and use it to supplement the money you make from selling your primary products.