Amazon Associates Delicious Tracking Cookie

I have a sweet tooth, and a sweet tooth loves a soft juicy delicious cookie. The cookie under discussion today comes courtesy of Amazon, via the Amazon Associates affiliate marketing program. This isn’t going to be a post talking about the affiliate program as a whole, we will just focus on the somewhat “hidden” bonus of the tracking cookie that some people may not be aware of which can deliver you with some sweet profits, as that is what Profit Pants is all about.

First lets quickly break the program down into the most simple steps for anyone who has not read about Amazon Associates in the past.

It goes like this, you:

1. Register and then log in to your Amazon Associates account.
2. Find a product on Amazon that you believe your audience would be interested in.
3. Create a custom link, or code, directing to the product identified in step #1.
4. Place the link or code on your website.
5. When someone follows your link and purchases the product you will receive a commission, somewhere in the realm of 2-10%, depending on the type of product.

I have been a member of Amazon Associates for 8 years now, targeting a wide range of products depending on which website I am working on at the time. Amazon has never been a game-changer for me, it has only ever delivered pocket money, although some claim to be making ten thousand dollars or more per month, which is entirely possible with the right site. Tens of dollars, occasionally hundreds, is usually what I see. The Amazon profit stream isn’t going to be paying for a La Ferrari, but it might buy me a nice framed photo of one. To put my relatively poor profits from Amazon into perspective, the Google Adsense program has been my primary source of ad-based revenue from the beginning, and by a long, long, long shot. In general I enjoy creating content, but I don’t enjoy digging around for products as much as other people. I like the set-and-forget aspect of Google ads which can be used on any website, an easy way to monetise a side hustle website. I focus on what I enjoy doing, the writing, doing as much of that as I can and then choose the easiest options for the monetisation.

I’m probably leaving money on the table. I am lazy in this space.

But on top of my rather solid Google Adsense base it is then easy to scatter Amazon products, wherever they may easily fit. If I mention the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki it is easy enough to quickly throw a link in (see what I did there), but this doesn’t happen for every article that I create. What if it were my article about the Faceless Giant YouTube, I may be able to force a few ads out, but it isn’t like I am mentioning products throughout, as there would be no real reason to mention cat ear underwear, at least without it seeming bizarre. Anyway, that is enough drivel around why I don’t use Amazon product linking too frequently, now back to our regular broadcast.

So when one of my lucky audience members click on a link to a product they will be displayed with either a single product landing page on Amazon, or shown the search results of keywords that I have set. Both of the examples in the paragraph above are going to targeted search result pages.

Now for the technological wizardry portion of the equation. When you click on one of my links Amazon provides your computer with a tracking cookie. There is nothing malicious about this, it happens for almost every eCommerce website out there. This tells Amazon that you were referred to them by my website and is the way that they then know to send me a juicy commission if you purchase the product that I have linked to. Do you think anyone has stopped reading this article already to purchase the cat ear underwear? This tracking cookie is going to remain valid for 24 hours, so even if you close your browser window and decide in a few hours that maybe the cat ear underwear is what you need to take your bedroom game to the next level and make a purchase, I am going to be rewarded handsomely, probably to the tune of less than 50 cents.

And for the REAL magic, and the key to this article. Enter the delicious cookie. Amazon don’t really care if you purchase the cat ear underwear. They just want you to purchase something, anything, from their website. They may be a juggernaut, but they are still competing against millions of other online stores for consumer dollars. And if my website sends them a customer, they are going to pay me a commission on ANYTHING and EVERYTHING that the customer purchases for the next 24 hours.

With most affiliate marketing programs you are sending users over to a target to purchase a single specific product. My self-proclaimed areas of expertise are content creation, frozen concentrated orange juice and obscure Eddie Murphy references. In that list you don’t see psychology or consumer behaviour …which are kind of the same thing in many ways. When I am sending someone over to Amazon I am taking a guess at the product that I think that they want, but I never know for sure exactly what they are craving on that particular day, it could be someone on a deep search for gear for hunting pythons, or an impulse bargain shopper who happens to see a half price deck of cards. This is where my buddy Amazon helps me out, gives me a second chance. If I get it wrong then maybe something else will take their fancy in the storefront, and Amazon still pays me for being a good guy.

Let me give an example. I have created a link to the cat ear underwear and a lucky audience member of Profit Pants has a bit of a click on the link. However, they decide after much deliberation that they aren’t ready for the supreme amounts of attraction that cat ear underwear will bring them from the opposite sex. The cat ear underwear is purely too much pussy for them *terrible pun most definitely intended*. After removing the underwear from their Amazon cart they see something, out of the corner of their eye, it is a zombie onesie for a baby. They don’t want to miss this opportunity for hilarity and quickly purchase the classy item. And that’s right folks, good ol’ Profit Pants is going to get a sweet profit from our original tracking cookie.

Now let us go one step further with another scenario. Just like the last example our Dear Reader of Profit Pants has clicked on the link to the cat eat underwear. They don’t go ahead with the sale and shut down their computer, as it is bed time. The very next morning before heading to work they remember that they need to do their weekly Amazon Prime shopping and log onto the website. They fill their cart with hundreds of dollars of products. Folks, that is when the gold and silver coins come raining down on Profit Pants. The shopper probably can’t even remember being directed to Amazon by the Profit Pants website yesterday.

The above examples are exactly the sorts of results that I have seen over the years with my own account. Amazon provides a snapshot of all of the items that have been purchased using your tracking codes. I’m almost exclusively referring people to books, as they best fit in with the types of content that I generally provide, but have a look at the items that brought in the most revenue for me in a recent month:

The first item is a wall mounted air-conditioner. The second an automatic garage door opener. The third a stroller. The fourth a coat stand. And the fifth a joint supplement …for dogs. Now how is that for an eclectic mix for you? These are people who first clicked on my book links.

This is where I find the Amazon Associates program really exciting, you never know exactly which items your buyers are going to purchase. One of the most unusual, and amusing, items that has earned me a commission is a portable urine funnel for women. When you gotta go, you gotta go. There has also been the occasional laptop computer pass through my account too, although the commissions for computers have been capped in recent times to a maximum of around $25 from memory, don’t shoot me if I have that figure wrong. Even still, a little bump of $25 to your account every now and then is a bit of fun, enough to buy a silver spoon, but not ever going to see you hit one billion dollars. Also fun is picturing who it may have been who purchased the portable urine funnel.

And that is what I find the Amazon Associates program to be overall for my particular situation, a bit of fun. Because of the types of content I create, and my laziness that I have mentioned above, this has never been a primary source of online profits for me, but it has always been easy. Amazon are one of the largest marketplaces around, or maybe even the largest, so finding some kind of item that you can link to shouldn’t be much of a problem. As they are generally recognised as a respectable company I have never had any concerns regarding payments either over my 8 years with them.

The program is sure worth having a play around with, as something extra to add to your other streams of revenue. If you put in a bit of effort I am sure that your could see results far better than what I have achieved. Is there any referral bonus for referring someone to Amazon Affiliates? I don’t think so, well at least not as far as a 10 second single search could tell me, so here is a standard-plain-old-boring-non-affiliate link to the program, I hope that you can drive positive results out of it https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/.

Start baking and enjoy the cookies.

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