Amazon Associates-How to Create Amazon Best Seller Lists with Zero Sales

Amazon Associates Program Conversion Issues

Over the years, I have had very limited success matching successful conversions to content from the Amazon Associates program. I have done very well in other affiliate programs, but always felt like I was missing something with Amazon Associates.

After all, Amazon is a great website
It converts well
It treats its customers very well
It offers almost everything
The interface is easy to navigate and highly optimized

So why can I hardly ever get something to convert through the Amazon Associates program?

Creating Best Seller Amazon Associates Lists

I read through Darren Rowse’s (aka ProBlogger’s) article titled 11 Lessons I learned earning $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program. Its about a year old as I write this article. Its a great article with maybe a little more emphasis on motivation and giving someone ideas about what can be done as opposed to how to actually DO IT. 🙂
One of the ideas that I thought was off the charts for insight was number 6, Social Proof Marketing 1 – Best Seller Lists. The basic concept is that once you do everything else (get enough people of the right type to your site primed to do the right thing) offering up to them a list of the products that the majority of buyers actually choose to buy is one of the best ways to get them to convert.

Show them the hot products.
Show them the products that made the cut in $$$ for other readers
Show them the results of the cloud and crowd after they performed their due diligence and put their money where there mouth is.

But I had a huge problem with the recommendation

The recommendation assumed you already have sales results with Amazon, despite the insinuated premise that most people do not including Darren (in the early days)
It also didn’t really show you how to gather this information together inside Amazon Associates.
🙁

So I tried to figure out a way to get best selling product information on Amazon Associates for areas that might fit my audiences. No luck, there just isn’t a tool there nor information.
Then I tried working into this information via Amazon itself. I figured if I could at least get the product list of best selling items, I could add the Amazon associate links afterward. Then when/ if I actually get more sales data to work with I could customize the listings starting from the set of ALL Best Selling products > in a Category > in a sub category > Filtered by a Keyword search. My later customization could slice that one more time, for the my own audience interacting with those sets or subsets.
So here’s how you can create a list of best selling products on Amazon.com

Go to Amazon.com
Choose a Department, and category in the department, such as Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry>Shoes
Peform a keyword search within that department>category
Filter the default results of ‘relevance’ by Best Selling with the sort box on the right upper hand corner
Make sure you reality check those results! Amazon’s vendors and marketing companies can cook these numbers a bit by buying back product. Amazon probably doesn’t like it, but do consider whether you fully trust the results enough to put something in your best selling list, or at least disclaim it if you do.
Alternately, you can also come up with a list of items that has the highest user reviews on Amazon. Again, this is subject to people cooking up the numbers. If a company or marketing company had an employee or third party buy something, that person that bought could now go in and write up a review on Amazon that may be higher than normal. Similarly, a competitor could buy the product and write up a bad review.
This could happen regardless of your list, so keep it in mind and maybe remind your readers, but at the end of the day, you are simply providing a presorted list anyway, and the whole point of the exercise is to provide them useful information when they need it, and then let the crowd continue to improve upon the list as they too make their own informed buying decision.