In a previous post I wrote about recently buying some Amazon Affiliate (or Associate, as they call it) stores to play with. Since then I’ve built one more and have been working on PPC campaigns for the sites. And I quickly hit yet another problem – Amazon’s tracking absolutely sucks. Actually, its absolutely non-existent. There is no way to pass subids from your site to Amazon so you can tell which keywords in your Adwords or other PPC campaign are converting, ie generating sales. Driving traffic blind like that you are guaranteed to be wasting money on non-converting keywords, instead of pushing more traffic to the converting ones. Not a situation any self-respecting affiliate marketer would want to be found in.

Well, just as I hit this little hurdle my friend and fellow affiliate marketer Net-Entrepreneur emailed me with a solution. He’s come up with a simple step-by-step method to add subid click tracking for Amazon Affiliates at the keyword level and then laid it all out to help out fellow AM’ers.

So if you’ve found yourself in the above situation, head on over to Niche Fever and grab his report and the other resources it comes with. Without it you’re most certainly leaving money on the table! And don’t worry, there’s really not much more to it then some copy-and-pasting, and you’ll be pretty much walked through the method by the hand.

Last, but not least – reader’s of this blog get a 10% discount, just use coupon code muaffiliate10 and you’re good to go. Enjoy and make some money!

Recently I bought three fully built Amazon affiliate stores. It is often said that the secret to success in Affiliate Marketing is to keep testing and trying new things and when you find what works keep diversifying your income into new areas. Hence I bought the sites to diversify, but even more so to learn from the experience. What I wanted to learn is the following:

- Learn to spot opportunities in this area. My experience running 3 stores should help me better spot and think of ways to make these types of stores or similar work. There are better ways to work with affiliate stores then Amazon or the eBay Partner Network, but Amazon is an easy place to start.
- Whats involved in actually buying an existing site like that? As expected completely unexpected hitches came up. Next time I’ll be much better equipped to make a cost/benefit analysis on a similar purchase. For example, not surprisingly, the process took far longer than I thought it would. Thankfully the seller was very helpful along the way.
- I wanted to take a few of the features of these stores apart, so I can use them on other sites.
- I want to use the sites to learn about the SEO side of things. I’ve been pretty much focused on PPC until now, through affiliate networks and working direct with advertisers.

In this post I just want to go over the second point above – what was actually involved in buying the sites and transferring all its components to my relevant accounts. Here’s the rundown:

1. The domain name registration was transferred to me, which was fairly simply as we both had GoDaddy accounts, so the seller just pushed the domains into my account.
2. Transferring the physical site. FTPing the files across is a no-brainer, but where I hit a slight hitch was transferring the databases. The seller gave me access to his hosting account and I used phpMyAdmin to export all the databases and FTP them to my machine. Then in my hosting account I had to import the tables into my database. The databases were for the Wordpress blogs which each site came with. So at this point I had to modify the Wordpress install to point at the new databases. Thankfully this worked without any surprises. This is were I half expected things to go wrong, so I was pretty relieved.
3. And this was were we hit a hurdle neither of us had foreseen. The sites have Amazon aStore blocks on them. Unfortunately Amazon does not offer any way to export your store or move it to a new account and its certainly not as simple as just changing the Amazon ID to mine, as I had hoped. At first I thought I’d have to regenerate the stores from scratch in my Amazon account. There are a number of ways generate these – for example you can add items one by one or you can add whole categories. And you need to configure it’s features (colours, size, layout etc) to suit your site. These stores had been created item by item… and there were pages and pages of these. This looked like it was going to take a while. The seller had not foreseen this issue either, but fortunately he was able to simply give me his Amazon account with the three aStores in them. I then just changed all the info in the account to mine and voila. Phew. I was damn grateful at this point.
3. The sites have dozens of Adsense blocks on them. The blocks are specific to an account and have to be generated in the account. It was not as simple as just changing the id in each to my own. This was tedious and time consuming. There were also some other affiliate links and ad blocks to change over in the blogs.
4. The sites also had Google Analytics code on every page, which I also had to go through and change to mine, after adding the sites to my account and verifying them.
5. Changing over the contact forms to my email addresses. As I had moved the hosting I had to create new email accounts for each domain (ie support@myamazonsite.com etc).
6. Likewise the Wordpress blogs needed the contact info changed over to mine, including the info in certain plugins.
7. I changed the AWeber email list forms on each site to my own. This included creating the new lists on AWeber, with the subscription confirmation emails etc and generating the form for each. Then I took the form code from my new form and modified the existing form on the site.
8. Last but not least, once I had the sites setup, Chrome and Firefox 3 both flagged exploits in two of the sites. They were flagged as ‘attack sites’, because they had been hacked (XSS exploits most likely or someone had captured the FTP login details from the old owners machine) and malicious code with hidden iFrames had been inserted. The seller had no idea about this problem. Thankfully simply removing the malicious code was enough to fix this. I was more worried that this was an SQL injection and the code was being rendered from the database. The browsers are no longer reporting a problem. I had added the sites to my Google Webmaster Tools, were the problem was also reported. I submitted them for a re-evaluation and its ok now.

So there you go. I certainly got the learning process I was hoping for and then some.

To start things off for the beginners, a simple tip. Facebook charges you for duplicate clicks. You will see that there is a difference between the click numbers that Facebook reports and what you see reported on your affiliate network’s stats screen. Typically the difference is about 10-15%.

To account for this you need to add that 10-15% to your CPC (Cost Per Click) to maintain realistic ROI (Return On Investment) reporting. So for example when bidding 10c on facebook I would put the CPC as 11c into my Prosper202 Tracker. if bidding 20c I would put 22c.