How much money is it earning?
So it’s now been one month since I setup affiliate links with Amazon and active traffic steering with Genus Link. In case you have missed the previous two blog posts, you can see how I’m using these links on The Gear I use page. The good news its that they are working as planned and have resulted in a little bit of commission off of the back of a few sales for Amazon. The bonus to this is that my Amazon UK affiliate account has now been confirmed. However I’ve not made enough affiliate sales for Amazon.com (US) for that account to be confirmed yet.
As you will see from the figures in the image above your not going to get rich quick with this strategy unless you have tons of traffic pouring through your website on a daily basis. But its been a great exercise to see how the figures play out from clicks to sales to commission. So hopefully this will grow as I grow my website audience. But at this rate its going to take 18 months to even get the first pay out ha ha (Minimum £50). This doesn’t worry me. As my main objective it to get new real world clients from my website traffic and this is just a added bonus.
How has Genius Link performed?
Seeing as I took the time to manually setup the links with Genius Link rather than using the WordPress App, I’m benefiting from seeing the full data of what’s happing with the click traffic. Below is some examples of different stats I can see on my Genius Link dash board.
For me, I think this is exactly the type of info I’m after. Bottom right you can see all the links which have been clicked on and which ones are the most popular. This helps you relate the clicks to how and you have used those links and so in turn enables you to better understand how to drive more traffic which works. Bottom left shows the destinations the link click has sent your viewer to. You can clearly see the majority of my traffic is getting steered to Amazon.co.uk and only a small faction to Amazon.com, the US site. So I can feel a bit better for not making much in the way of commission from the US site, as I can see there as hardly been any traffic sent there. The other international destinations are also interesting to see. But its worth noting that in this case, even if the viewer made a purchase, I would receive nothing. As I have only setup affiliate accounts with UK and US Amazon sites. But it does help account for all the clicks and will highlight any future opportunities which arise and where I might benefit from setting up a new affiliate account. So all in all I think the information gathered by Genius Link is very useful.
Conclusion
The affiliate links are up and working and a small ( a trickle) of money is being generated. Did I ever plan for this to be an important income stream, no. But every little helps and learning about the whole affiliate link scheme has been fascinating. Would I recommend you follow suit and setup your own links? Only if you already have plenty of followers and traffic flowing through your website/social media or where ever you plan to use the links. As it does take time to set the links up and if you don’t have the traffic/followers yet I don’t think its worth it. I think your time would be better spent crafting amazing posts and creating buzz and followers, focusing on real worlds sales and clients.
If however you are some amazing world wide influencer with millions of followers making a tidy penny from affiliate links. I’d love to hear from you and more about your experiences in the comments below or by dropping me an e-mail to info@davidpriddis.com