I am an Amazon affiliate and I promote their products quite heavily. The payout out for me is usually 7.5-8% and considering that the conversion rate is high I can get past that. Well, except for maybe at years end when I see that I directed over $24,000 in sales to them and I compare that with my cut.
I made some big boo-boos in regards to properly tracking where my sales come from though. Until very recently I never really took advantage of their tracking codes so that I can see which sites, Squidoo pages, blogs, etc are pulling in the sales. Depending on the product I can pretty much guess some of the time but not all. The need to use these tracking codes became really apparent after I received several offers to buy one of my sites. I am not ready to sell for personal reasons but I realize that since all offers were nice 5 figure sums I would need to demonstrate the site’s ability to turn a profit and it is kind of hard to do that when all of your sales from your large network of sites all get pooled together. So I have started using Amazon tracking codes and will begin the tedious task of replacing existing links very soon.
It is actually pretty easy to do. When you log into your Amazon affiliate control panel you will see a blue box at the top that shows you are logged in under your affiliate ID. Beneath that it says Tracking ID and hyperlinked next to that it says “Manage”. Click on that and you will see a listing of all your tracking codes. You should have at least one. Then click on Add Tracking ID and you will get to add a custom tag that describes whatever site, page, blog, etc you will be creating links for. I just created one recently for my Squidoo pages so it had the word Squidoo in the tag.
Once you have your new tracking code you use the drop down box (inside the blue box) and you select you select the tracking ID of your choice and start building links with it. Easy as pie….if only I had done this from the beginning.
Technorati Tags: Squidoo, Amazon, affiliate marketing, tracking IDs
