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A comment on I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program. Parent comment

Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by jameslk on Thursday July 06, 2017 @10:43PM (#14715637)
I made $600 with some friends on Amazon's affiliate program with a couple weeks worth of Facebook advertising, but I personally wouldn't recommend it as more than a side business. It doesn't scale very well due to the massive number of conversions you need, it's hard to track performance since you can't cookie the potential buyer, any sales outside of your country is usually lost (you have to sign up for separate affiliate programs for each country to make money abroad) and of course you're at the mercy of Amazon's business decisions.

It's better in the long term to set up your own store and build up lifetime value around your own brand, which is what I'm currently doing. You can start out that way dropshipping from AliExpress or with print on demand products. It's more work, but it's also more stable and of course scales a lot better.

But an even better suggestion is to build SaaS products. It scales even more and not many people know how to do it.

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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by seibelj on Thursday July 06, 2017 @11:28PM (#14715803)
Very experienced people have told me to sell my VPN routers[0] on amazon, and I never, ever will. I own the distribution, I own the content, I own the marketing. I'm probably leaving a good chunk of revenue on the table, but overall I think it's the better longterm solution.

[0] https://easyvpnrouter.com/

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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by r1ch on Friday July 07, 2017 @09:46AM (#14718248)
You may want to consider hosting your CSS locally. For whatever reason, the cdnjs CSS took around 4 seconds to load for me, during which time your site was a white page. The rest of the site loaded fine.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by voltagex_ on Friday July 07, 2017 @12:05AM (#14715953)
Offtopic, but it says you use OpenWRT and LEDE so - is there a link to the source somewhere?
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by seibelj on Friday July 07, 2017 @12:21AM (#14716023)
I say it in the FAQ, but it's just vanilla LEDE, and the mobile app uses the JSON-RPC API to communicate. The mobile app isn't open source, but the everything on the device is in UCI, cron, and /etc/openvpn.

The magic isn't in the device, it's in the flashing and configuring it for non-technical people.

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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by voltagex_ on Friday July 07, 2017 @12:36AM (#14716094)
I'm pretty sure you still need to provide source to the version of LEDE you use, at least to your customers.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by seibelj on Friday July 07, 2017 @12:48AM (#14716143)
opkg can give current release and package info.

But I think you are missing the point here - people who are asking the questions you are asking aren't my typical customers. It's some random guy who has never heard the word "linux".

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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by gjjrfcbugxbhf on Friday July 07, 2017 @02:02AM (#14716399)
No the op's point is that to comply with the licence you need to provide the source to customers that ask for it. She's trying to save you some potential trouble.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by ewanm89 on Friday July 07, 2017 @04:24AM (#14716936)
If his customer asks, he doesn't need to do shit if his customer doesn't ask. My recommendation would be do what the likes of Toshiba do for their TVs include in the product an offer with an email address on some hidden copyright page.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by icebraining on Friday July 07, 2017 @08:31AM (#14717841)
That offer is in fact mandatory, if one doesn't want to include the source.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by seibelj on Friday July 07, 2017 @10:37AM (#14718638)
Ah, yes that's all included in documentation sent with the device. I was confused with the question.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by voltagex_ on Friday July 07, 2017 @02:10AM (#14716425)
He. But yeah.

https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech14.html#...

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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by RonanTheGrey on Friday July 07, 2017 @01:09AM (#14716228)
I've been looking for one of these, thank you.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by softwarelimits on Friday July 07, 2017 @05:37AM (#14717165)
Link to source please, thanks.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by seibelj on Friday July 07, 2017 @10:38AM (#14718645)
https://github.com/lede-project/source
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by paulcole on Friday July 07, 2017 @12:14AM (#14715989)
>You can start out that way dropshipping from AliExpress or with print on demand products.

But aren't you just selling junky products? That seems pretty unsustainable as well.

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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by jameslk on Friday July 07, 2017 @02:31AM (#14716513)
You can find almost every generic product sold on Amazon through AliExpress or DHgate, and these are usually the same products. The difference is that it takes 2-4 weeks to ship but costs a fraction of the price. These products aren't junky anymore than they are on Amazon. They might not be iPhones, but they still fill needs.

Print on demand is just designing your own t-shirts, mugs, shoes, pillows, jewelry, etc through services such as Zazzle, Teespring, Gearbubble. People have passions, such as for animals or hobbies, and love to signal it.

As for sustainability, dropshipping will kill your credibility if you keep doing it. There's plenty of shared warehousing/fulfillment services now like ShipBob where once you've established yourself, you can gradually scale your fulfillment and start wholesaling. I would move away from generic dropshipped products quickly, which are the easiest to start selling, just due to competition. But print on demand and private labeling are solid choices since you own the brand and design.

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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by just4themoney on Friday July 07, 2017 @12:33AM (#14716077)
Its also a saturated market.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by baybal2 on Thursday July 06, 2017 @11:22PM (#14715778)
Yep, Aliexpress rullz. They have an affiliate campaign of their own. As of today, they have no restrictions on getting affiliate cut on your own products
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by sitkack on Friday July 07, 2017 @01:16AM (#14716250)
Why would they? A sale is a sale.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by JoblessWonder on Friday July 07, 2017 @12:51PM (#14719888)
I could see an argument for how it is double-dipping... I'm not sure I agree with it though.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by baybal2 on Friday July 07, 2017 @02:32AM (#14716519)
I have no idea, but some marketplaces do have such restrictions.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by petra on Friday July 07, 2017 @01:29AM (#14716295)
>> your own brand

What is this "brand" that you speak of ? do consumers even care ?

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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by jameslk on Friday July 07, 2017 @02:46AM (#14716566)
Brand matters a lot in the ecommerce world, as we've seen with the acquisitions of Zappos, Chewy, Bonobos and a long list of others over the years. If you aren't optimizing for customer loyalty, which is usually cheaper than customer acquisition, you're leaving money on the table and eliminating any competitive advantage.
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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by petra on Friday July 07, 2017 @03:23AM (#14716709)
I get the impression that Bonobos had a unique product, and Zappos excelled in customer service(and i think they also cracked the formula of their market). Brand was a nice side-effect of that.

But i don't understand what brand does a store that sells similar stuff to what you can find on Amazon can get.

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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by jameslk on Friday July 07, 2017 @03:30AM (#14716732)
Zappos started out dropshipping too. The brand is associated with the curation. You'd be surprised how little others care to comparison shop once they're ready to make a purchase. As long as you seem trustworthy and your prices seem reasonable (or aren't very high in general). Once you've made them a happy customer, they're more likely to buy again if they're on your newsletter or being retargeted. It works for us and it seems to be working well for others like Wish.com[0].

0. https://nytimes.com/2017/05/03/magazine/the-online-marketpla...

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Re:I make $10k per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program by libertine on Friday July 07, 2017 @09:51AM (#14718277)
Brand isn't a side effect.

There's a whole discipline on it.

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