An Amazon Associate's success often depends on how easily he or she takes advantage of a new opportunity. If you want to join the crowd and actually move ahead of the others, then it's about time you start focusing on getting the most out of this brilliant platform and build your business out of it.

Niche Market Choice: The most important thing to think about is the selection of your niche market--do this before you start trying to build a website or write articles. Think about it like this, if you don't have a good niche market it won't matter how great your website might be, it isn't going to make money for you. True success as an Amazon Associate is based upon your having a good understanding of your chosen target niche. You can always try out a niche or two with HubPages, Squidoo and similar services, but the testing process requires a lot of patience. The best choice is a niche with lots of products and keywords that relate to it because those are the easiest to rank for and to work within. Amazon Associates who target a single product and build their site around that product have an easier time of making money. Getting people to buy from you when you're using only a random blog and some product links can be very difficult because most blog visitors are only looking for information.

Offer a Product Comparison Table: Most of the people that are buying products through Amazon go through a number of options before choosing one; creating a product comparison table for all the products that you're targeting within your niche is a good way to let your visitors sort them out by going through the features. This is a fantastic way to get more sales because you will truly be helping out your prospects by helping them buy the best things instead of just offering a sales pitch.

If you're using WordPress for your content management, you'll find that there are specific plugins that can easily help you create a comparison table. You can create multiple columns to compare products and fill them with the relevant information, and people that click through your 'Buy Now' link to purchase will end up buying through you, giving you your commission.

Don't Waste Time on the Amazon aStore: In its infancy, the Amazon aStore promised Amazon Associates a simplified selling process and great opportunity for increased profits. The aStore doesn't cost anything and the website integration process is mostly simple. Unfortunately, this feature (that was supposed to be good) turned out to be mostly false promise; it rarely met its hype. Instead of focusing your efforts on the Amazon aStore, work on creating dedicated niche sites that allow you to sell products through reviews and pre-sells. Try to remember that if you are just sending people to Amazon you could be making money here and there, even if they don't buy the product that you have recommended. So focus on giving them traffic, and Amazon will help you make money.