Amazon Associates Target Multiple Regional Markets

Converting your site visitors into paying customers in your strategic marketing sales funnel is a huge feat. After all, most sites convert less than 3% of all traffic. It is therefore a shame when your would-be referral customers abandon their shopping carts because suppliers will not ship to their area and or (international) shipping rates are prohibitive. In the later case, the chance that customers will abandoned shopping carts is even greater when those customers are already used to the growing phenomenon of free domestic shipping.

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In a previous article, I not only suggested signing up for multiple regional Amazon affiliate programs but also provided a list of the links by countries with some information related to spoken languages. This article will focus on selling to different regions at the same time, without cluttering your page with advertisements.

Before I begin the illustration, I must first mention a few noteworthy points. Like many other Amazon associates, I have found that Native advertising converts better than other links or widgets. However, this Native feature usually uses a lot of your webpage real estate with 2 rows, each with 4 large image advertisements. I decided it will degrade the website if I placed multiple of these large ads for each region on a single page.

I therefore chose to maintain one Native advertisement for my largest market which, in my case, is the US. In order to target my second largest market, Spain, I place a clickable Spanish flag directly above the Native advertisement in the top right corner. When Spanish customers click their flag, they will be directed to their regional Amazon store in Spain from which products will surely be shipped and at reasonable shipping costs, ie if costs even apply. 

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Unfortunately though, it is not possible to replicate the Native advertisements precisely from other regional stores because of different ranges of products available in different regions. I therefore decided to use either colourful text or images to link to a listing of products using that region's version Amazon's site stripe feature. Here is how I do it.

1. After creating the account on https://www.amazon.es/, ie the Spanish branch of Amazon, I logged in and visited the site as any customer of that region would. In my case, I used https://www.amazon.es/ as would my target market in Spain.

2. Note that regional sites have different names for Amazon's site strip feature. For instance, Amazon's Spanish version is called 'Barra Web'. If you have trouble with different language's nickname, note that Amazon uses the same format for its regional stores. Consequently, the foreign version will appear in the same location on the webpage. 

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3. I used the site stripe ('Barra Web') search window to search for the same keywords I used to create the Native advertisements in the original region. Naturally, you will need to consider the best keywords to use for a second language. Read how to use Google Trends for this purpose.

4. When the results appear, I select the automatically generated hyperlink as shown below.

5. I then attached that hyperlink to clickable text or a customized button image. Below are some of my first attempts. FYI, I created the button in MS Word using shapes and then adding the text to the shape. 

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On a different note, avoid using more Amazon accounts than your market really needs. Specifically, since each regional account will be treated independently of each other (and not have a faster combined record of sales), it may involve waiting longer than your norm for any single regional sales volumes to reach a sufficiently high level to warrant a payment. This is due to the fact that your only payment options as an associate for an Amazon store outside your home region involve physically mailed checks and or gift certificates,