Why Amazon Affliate Links Shouldn’t Be a Beginning Blogger's Monetization Strategy
June 20, 2018 / Nicole HustonUpdated Mar 2, 2020
I read all the “get rich quick” articles for blogging starting out. It seemed like a great plan at first, creating quality content and linking to Amazon to make some referral money.
Unfortunately, what most articles fail to mention is how time intensive putting Amazon affiliate links in can be. While struggling to juggle creating new content, there is also the time you spend attempting to monetize.
I set up Google Adsense and ignored it figuring I’d try it out despite reading articles about how horrible of a monetization strategy it is.
I don’t write generic get rich quick articles or writes posts that show increases in my traffic which in reality seem like the most popular types of blogs. I try to write content that I would enjoy reading myself, and maybe at the expense of monetizing my site.
Back to Amazon affiliate links, I created an account after reading that this was the superior way to monetize your website. After trying it out for over 6 months I can tell you that in my opinion it shouldn’t be adopted as an early strategy.
My website traffic is modest and according to random blogs my traffic should have been enough to generate some income. But it didn’t. After 3 months my Amazon affiliate account expired (due to no purchases) and I had to create a new account. Guess what that meant? All the links I had put into old blog posts no longer worked so when I recreated a new account I had to change every single Amazon link I had put in the past to update it to my new account. I also opened Amazon affiliate accounts for other countries so that I could receive commission from multiple countries.
Three more months went by and I had no orders. My Amazon affiliate accounts expired once again.
I haven’t created a new account since. To me it’s not worth it. That’s not to say I won’t try it out again in the future but I probably wouldn’t unless I had an insane amount of traffic. Even then, I’d probably look into other options first. Because if you’re making good money off of selling other products you should probably just have a product of your own.
Back to Google Adsense
This article isn’t meant to be a plug for Google Adsense but rather to outline the silver lining in all of this. Google Adsense was something I set up early on and forgot about. Despite all the time I spent trying to make Amazon affiliate links work for me, Google Adsense had made me some measly dollars so far. But compared to the amount of effort it took me to set up and leave alone I will gladly take it!