Andrew Chen

The reason you haven't made as much as you should have from Amazon is that they have a 24 hour cookie. Try one of the affiliate programs with a longer cookie, say 30 days, and see the difference.

Your article figure out impressive number for us.
You have done good work.

The key for making a lot of money with Amazon affiliate is to generate a lot of traffic from people who are looking to buy things. That's why some of the largest Amazon affiliates are shopping comparison shops (e.g. shopping.com) and deals and coupon sites -- those sites generate huge amount of traffic, and they have a loyal base of bargain hunters.

On the other hand, your blog is information rich. Readers come to your site to seek your insights. They're not necessarily in the buying mode (although they'll occasionally click the book links to buy something.) I think you don't necessarily have the "buying crowed" knocking at your door.

I'm curious about your ad sense and some source of revenue for this blog. Looking at your Alexa ranking of about 100,000, I think if you want, you can make good revenue from signing private ad deals, although it'll be a lot of work. :-)

cheers,
GeekMBA360 (www.GeekMBA360.com)

From your statistics,i can see you are making some money with amazon. As said by other fellow bloggers, every cent counts. However if you choose a good niche and do some research i am sure you can make much more than what you have so far.

Good stuff as always Andrew. I enjoyed this article and the comments.

Enjoy your break from this blog. You've earned it for sure.

can anyone give me any advise on how to improve my squidoo lenses to generate more traffic and more sales through affiliate sites?

Here's an experiment: The books list is one article and although it is linked from your homepage, once someone has gone through it, they're less likely to return to on a regular basis. No need to. Too much info./distraction on the web.

What if you were to take those same books on that list, but for the next 10 months, each article (or once every few articles), you also mention a book from the list that is relevant to that article? I'll bet that clickthrough and conversion will be higher.

For example, your "Secret History of Silicon Valley" article.

The reader then has only one book to focus on and it's relevant to what s/he is reading about.

On our social network profiles, users display their favorite books, movies, music through amazon thumbnails and not through text. The affiliate revenue from doing that is pretty minimal.

Sorry you didn't have more success with your affiliate sales. I use Amazon Associates as one of my main sources of online income, and I find that if you focus on a niche, branding and some marketing, you can get plenty of Amazon sales. Keep up the hard work, it'll pay off.

same here - this is why i removed ads. if you were a site on botany or something more general and were coming up in google for a hot term in front of the teeming masses, you will sell more because you are in front of a less tech savvy audience that clicks stuff and then buys.

yeah, I actually have the list of books since I've had lots of ppl email me asking for recommendations - so it's an easy way to keep it organized :)

I wouldn't worry about the Amazon earnings too much. Your target audience on this blog is too smart. One more potential business relationship from your readers is worth way more than an Amazon affiliate sale.

On the plus side, your lifetime revenues of $92.44 put you ahead of many companies!

true! every dollar is important in the recession :)