Day 13 – Amazon UK or Amazon US?

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I seem to have got caught in a 2 day cycle of updates and I don’t really know why this is, but I’m going with the flow at the moment. Maybe I’ll get back up to one a day when I have more results to post about.

I was looking at my adsense earnings for 2 days ago and noticed that although I did get a clickthrough on that day, Amazon decided to pay me precisely zero for it, so I’m guessing that they think that was a dodgy click in some way. Have you seen this happen in your own accounts, I’d be interested to know?

Yesterday was a good day in terms of getting things done. I spent some time researching my other two satellite site subjects and wrote them an article each, more needed, but it’s a good start. The Amazon plugin (WPZonBuilder) is up and running on the sites, so I have the raw information for all the products in place. I’m going to experiment with changing the templates around – maybe to allow me a space to put my own review in. Eventually I hope to have them all personalised, but for now the data is flowing so that’s good.

The title for the post is all about the dilemma of being an Amazon affiliate based in the UK (as I am). We have a load of things in the terms and conditions over here that make Amazon UK a distinctly unappealing place to be an affiliate, unless you get a lot of extra items bought off the back of an item you’ve sent a customer to.

The biggest problem is that they cap every single item payment at £7 (roughly $11) and it doesn’t matter what tier you are on, that cap stays in place. So, say I sell a $4000 TV. At 4% for electronics that would be £160 in most programs and that might be worth having if you could do enough of them, but Amazon UK will give you £7 for all your work!

Now, at anything over about £300 it’s obviously a clear-cut victory for selling on Amazon US (provided there are about the same number of buyers from each region), but in the £175-£300 area it’s not so obvious. It is still true that we have a roughly one-to-one exchange rate where many goods are concerned and so a £200 item in the UK may well be only $200 on Amazon US. It’s not always true, but it happens enough that it raises the following question.

Since a pound is roughly 1.5 dollars a the moment, is it better to get capped at £7 for a £200 pound item rather than to get a full $8 for the equivalent $200 item on Amazon US – of course the answer is yes – for a very thin band of price ranges. This doesn’t even start to take into account the application of higher tiered payouts where it all gets even worse.

My feeling is that unless the thing is selling exclusively in the UK, then it is almost always better to head to Amazon US. Even on smaller priced items where selling more will tend to push your higher-priced goods ever closer to that nasty cap if you were in the UK.

Do you have a strong opinion on this, I’d be interested to hear what you have to say below.

Day 11 – Internet Marketing As Chinese Water Torture

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You know about water torture, right? The idea is that you’re pretty much deprived of all your senses, but in the background is a dripping tap, which is set to a really slow, random drip. In the end it is said that anyone will crack, just from the natural tendency to listen for the next drip – and never know when it is coming!

Well, I’ve decided that internet marketing is a bit like that (at least to start with) since I can look across all of the different streams of income every day in the hope of money coming in and sometimes there is some…..and sometimes there isn’t!

I’m sure this all smooths out over time when you have a load of sites running, but in the early days it is just like torture and the idea of reporting it to everyone is also quite disheartening. It feels like I should be singing for joy every day to encourage everyone reading but it’s a hard act to keep up.

But, I said I’d do it so it is an absolutely true record of what is happening and I’ll stick to that commitment. I might drift to every other day every now and again but hopefully not too often.

I spent yesterday getting a killer article ready for ezinearticles – primarily for the link, not the traffic, but it would be nice to see it syndicated a bit too. As soon as it’s accepted, I’ll be sending it to as many places as UAW will allow.

A second string to yesterday was starting to bookmark the sites that I am working on. I use Incansoft’s SocialBot for this and I have a bunch of accounts already set up in there that get stuff blasted now and again. I’ve sworn to take this fairly easy, so it is set to 2 pages at a time and I’ll get there gradually rather than blast the whole site out in one go.

Today’s endeavours have started out with me re-evaluating some old sites, checking their rankings and having a think about whether or not to juice them all up a bit. Some made me a bit of cash in the past, but as I’ve said before, they tended to be low-ticket items and so the commision didn’t amount to much.

This afternoon will be a chance to write some more entries for my IPK style sites and to try to get to grips with how the central site should get linked in according to the plan Chris Kaye lays out.

Anyway, earnings for the last 2 days: Adsense 6c (yeehar!)