First sale via amazon.com

Just after I made my last post, I found I had actually made my first ever sale at amazon.com, through My Favourites (USA) store. This is what it was: first USA sale.
Was this after a Twitter tweet?
Was it driven through a blog or website?
Well actually, I don't know as Amazon don't tell you who the buyer is (data protection and all that). However, I would bet quite a lot of money that this sale came from a personal recommendation I made to an American Facebook friend. So.... I am beginning to realise it is best to start with your friends. They know you. Hopefully they trust your judgement better than a stranger will. It's hard to ask friends to go out of their way to help, but I hope I would do it for them :)
By the way, you can't buy from your own amazon stores, so, if any friends reading this have a store, send me a link and I will return the compliment :)

Being an Associate

There are plenty of Associate / Affiliate schemes on the web, but I spend a lot of money on Amazon so I thought I would try to get some of my investment back by sharing their profits. You can sign up here: Amazon Associates UK or Amazon Associates USA. You get a percentage of the sales made after going to Amazon through your stores or links, whether what is eventually bought was in your store or not, though the comission is higher if a customer purchases the same product that led them into Amazon. You can a list of my stores and some examples of search links on the right of this blog.

I had to have a website already (of which more later) and I had to give them some idea of the market I would be targetting. I said Classical Studies at the time, though I have since widened that to include Leonard Cohen and the Just So Stories, among others, so I don't think they mind much. I started by putting links to individual products in my Classical Latin website, but soon realised it would be much more efficient to make an Amazon store. This is reasonably easy to do but I would recommend turning on the 'associate stripe' option (in your Amazon associate account settings) as this makes it very easy to add things to your stores or sites. This store-building escalated as I targeted different niche markets and now I have the following stores:

My Favourites (UK)

My Favourites (USA)

Classical Studies Favourites

Plato's Symposium

I have the Classical Studies Favourites embedded in my Latin website and I also have a link into my Plato's Symposium Store from my Plato's Symposium Blog.

So far, the Classical Studies Favourites has made one sale to someone who came in via my Latin website reading recommendations. I have also made quite a few sales through my My Favourites (UK) thanks to a couple of good friends who always buy their Amazon purchases there. However, I have no sales at all in the USA yet - you need a separate affiliate agreement to sell there, by the way - and I think I may need to pay them an administration fee if I don't sell something within the year! It is pretty difficult to drive traffic through your stores or links unless you have lots of good friends who don't mind remembering to go in through you, or a steady niche market who want what you recommend. So.... now I am working on building up that stream of willing purchasers, and in later posts I will tell you what I try and what, if anything, succeeds.

Making an online living...

So, I am starting out in trying to make a living online.... I have been selling as an Amazon associate for the last couple of weeks and have made about £26 for about 40 hours work (including setting up a Twitter account and tweeting). This is not a great hourly rate :) so today I started looking at Adsense - Google put relevant ads on your blog or site and you get paid for clicks... we'll see how it goes ....

Meanwhile I am going to post links and articles about things I have found useful to my business ....