Amazon Associate Program to Monetize a Forum

Forums and online communities cost money and time to run, so forum administrators are always looking for ways to monetize a forum. One way is to sign up for an affiliate program and carry advertisements for products that are relative to the niche of the forum. A popular affiliate program for this is the Amazon Associates program. You simply sign up and then place the code for books and other products that Amazon stock on the forum. The choice of products obviously needs to be relevant to the niche. Some niches seem to do better with Amazon than others.

One advantage of the Amazon Associates program is that there are Amazon companies in the USA, Canada, United Kingdom, France , Germany, Japan and China, so you can sign up for all of these. The advertisements that you carry can be controlled and geotargeted to each region by something like OpenX for forums. It is surprising how many forums (and websites in general) actually sign up for just the Amazon USA affiliate program when, for example, half or more of their visitors are probably from outside the USA! Amazon widgets and advertisements can be placed in sidebars or the header of forums to get maximum exposure. A good example of really pushing this would be when there is a new book published of relevance to the niche.

Another way to promote Amazon on a forum would be to start a thread on individuals books of relevance to the forums niche. In the first post put some information from the publisher and include buy now links to all the different regional Amazon’s. Invite forum members to post reviews and comments about the book.