Thought I'd do a post on Amazon Associates as I seem to be getting some traction with it.
I've embedded a shop into my website madaxeman.com and there are several links on the front page to the embedded site which is madaxeman.com/UK_shop.htm, as well as links sprinkled through the pages where they are relevant (ie links to specific books next to battle reports featuring those armies). I also put a banner in the footer of each page. I'd been doing this for some time, but the store was just ticking over with 1 or 2 orders per month.
However with the new Ancients ruleset Field of Glory coming out in feb, I spotted that it is being offered for sale via Amazon (this is quite unusual, as lets face it, wargames rules are usually far more niche publications with specialist distribution). So, I re-worked my Amazon Affiliate page to tie in with the new ruleset developing a separate a-store organised in the same way as the game to sell the rules and associated "army list" books the page is madaxeman.com/FoGshop.htm – and hopefully a lot more general history books as well that will be relevant to the subject matter of the rules.
I've also been regularly posting to several online communities about the store (this one included) and even posting specific notices about the special price offers Amazon has been promoting – this has been OK, and I haven't had any kickback with people seeing this as spam, probably as there has been a lot of advance interest in the rules but relatively little advance information published, so the store – and the details it has on the rules and associated books – actually serves as an information source for people wanting to know more. You can definately track days when I have posted links, as there are orders that follow directly.
The upshot is that my site has now take pre-orders for over £1,500.00 GBP in value of rules and army list books. I do know the authors of these books and they tell me that this represents over 5% of Amazon.co.uk's total advance sales for this publication (there are other sales channels too) – which of course I'm fairly chuffed with. I also have a US site, which isn't quite so well populated or developed, but which is still into a dozen or more sales.
The interesting thing I'm hoping is that the rest of the a-store site will be somewhere people come back to to buy follow-up books as they research individual historical armies or characters referred to in the rules. I'm already seeing a little of this, but its early days yet.
The other bonus is that Amazon pays tiered volume-related commission based on despatch date, so with the FoG rules not published until Feb I will get all my advance orders in one month – which means I get a good commission rate!
Hope this is of value to someone.
Tim