How Many Types Of Amazon Affiliate Websites Are There?

There are two key dimensions along which an Amazon Affiliate website can be measured against. The content vs the code.

Content Sites Some websites are very rich in content, offering content related to a specific topic. The primary goal of these websites, while profit-focused, is mostly not related to Amazon Affiliate program. They can as well make money out of other money making schemes including Google AdSense and other contextual advertising. Infact, some of the content oriented websites that also use Amazon Affiilate program actually make a lot more money from contextual advertising.

Code Sites Some websites are very rich in their functionality and also their purpose is mostly to serve as an Amazon affiliate site. This type of sites cannot usually make good money out of contextual advertising. Their content is mostly created using Amazon Affiliae Web Services (A2S, formerly ECS).

While there are only two dimensions, in reality, the websites vary in what they try to do and some try to blend a bit of both. The Magic Quadrant explains the types of Amazon Affiliate websites. Without indicating the name of the website, below are the list of these various types of websites and their characteristics.

• Content Focused These websites are mostly managed by people who are good writers, who lack or don't care about the web technologies. It is because of their content, that they attract a good number of visitors to their websites. Further, due to their original and rich content, they tend to get high in search engines and hence have no difficulty in getting web traffic. Also, due to their content and authority in their chosen field, they may even gather a lot of loyal visitors. This helps them to be very successful in making a good money through out the year. Their visitors tolerate the lack of good web design due to the rich content they offer.

  Many bloggers fall in this category. There are also a few websites, one of which is for DVD reviews that has an Alexa rank of about 60K and does very decent with Amazon Affiliate Program.

• Code Focused These guys are mostly coders and programmers who know how to hack the code and get something up and running, but really lack original content. They just want to pull content from the Amazon Web Services and try to use SEO (search engine optimization) techniques by trying to build websites with lots and lots of pages that are accessed using simple urls. They are neither focused on any one particular specific topic nor do they have the authority in any. So, they try to offset the original content short-coming by writing blogs and articles some of which related to their website's overall theme.

  Websites based on Amazon Web Services fall in this category. One website with a Google PageRank of 5 does decently making close to $1,000.00 a month. Another website makes about half that money during a peak season. Both these sites have thousands of pages indexed by Google. A third website, with fewer than 50 web pages makes from $100.00 to $300.00 a month, but it is because of it's innovative use of the Amazon Web Services.

• aStore sites There are websites created with little content or code but just plugin an aStore. These websites can be considered to contain very little content because the aStore is filled only with Amazon product information. These websites can seldom make any money.

• Mostly Content Some websites contain a lot of original content. They also use code, but not to gather content from Amazon Web Services, but to provide more functionality to their website so that their visitors can navigate and interact better. While the owners of these websites are mainly content focuseed, they recognize the importance of a good website and try to pay attention to their overall web design as much as possible.

  One website owner of this type of a website makes more money from contextual advertising than Amazon Affiliate program, but the money from the amazon affiliate program also tends to be about a $1000.00 a month.

• Mostly Code Some websites, while make use of Amazon Web Services, instead of building thousands and thousands of pages, try to blend original content well with the web service content. There are not many web sites of this nature. Examples of this type of websites are at present unavailable.

• Balanced Code & Content This is a good combination when a writer is also a reasonable programmer or a programmer is also a reasonable writer. Examples of this type of websites are at present unavailable.

• The Goal site This is a site which can be mostly built by more than one person. This type of website not only makes use of Amazon Affiliate Web Services content, but also potentially content from other sources. In addition, there would be a lot of original content written by people who manage the relationship with the webssite visitors and also build their loyalty and brand for their website. While no example is available, a site such as cnet.com can qualify to be this type of a website.

  Even though this is the ideal website, as it involves several people, for many individual affiliates, a better choice is to move a bit towards the dimension that they are less good at. For example, a professional writer with a good content site can choose to pay some money and get a face lift to his/her website from a web designer/programmer. Similarly, a web designer/programmer can choose to involve a professional writer to be a partner to his/her affiliate website to get additional and original content that can be augmented to the content from Amazon Web Services.