Amazon Switches to Monthly Affiliate Payments

It's like the Eagles reunion all over again. Amazon's affiliate program, Amazon Associates, one of the longest-running affiliate programs around, is finally moving to a monthly payment cycle beginning in 2007. This is a big change, because up until now Amazon's program has paid on a quarterly basis, which has always seemed very backwards to me, especially when compared to ClickBank's semimonthly payment cycle. (Unlike AdSense, though, Amazon affiliate commissions earned during a month will be paid 60 dyas after the end of the month.)

Now, I've not really talked much about Amazon Associates here before, although I've been a longtime member of the program, having joined back in 1999 when my first book was coming out. I've never made a lot of money referring people to Amazon for books, though, so it's not been a priority for me. However, Amazon's range of goods is so widespread now that there's definitely serious money to be made if you can refer enough people to the higher-end products. Take The HDTV Shoppe, the site I created in October purely to demonstrate how to integrate AdSense with embedded content like Amazon's aStore. So far, though, visitors to the site have bought 5 television sets through the store. Imagine my surprise… So if you can refer enough people to buy digital cameras, televisions, and other kinds of electronics — things that cost more than books — then you can certainly make a decent income stream from the program. In fact, consumer product sites would do well to combine AdSense, Chitika and Amazon Associates on their pages to see which revenue stream works best for them.

So this is good news for Amazon affiliates and brings their program more into line with how other affiliate programs operate.

Sponsored Link: And what about eBay's affiliate program? You could also use Build A Niche Store to add eBay listings to your site.

Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. His goal is to get his AdSense blog into Matt Cutts' blogroll.

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