That's pretty much the basic premise of affiliate marketing- you're good to go. Good luck!

wow, so that's legal?

Even if there is a separate section on the site called "Store" at the top of the page, I can put all the artists and sell stuff using the Amazon/iTunes and eBay Ads? So thats legal!?

Thanks for your answer! just tell me if that is legal or not, and of someone else has a different point of view on this, let me know.

It's affiliate marketing and it's a perfectly legal and proper (and popular) business model. But you should really read up on the best placement of affiliate links, sometimes a separate section with just banners doesn't give the best results.

You need to read and understand the affiliate agreements for each program. Each one has different terms.

Some will permit you to label a part of your site a "store", some will not. Some will permit you to mix products on the same page with products from other stores, some will not.

Amazon is particularly liberal about this, to the point of allowing you to essentially re-create the entire Amazon store on your site, using the same typography, etc.

One thing that Amazon *is* picky about is accuracy of data. They specify how long you can cache data, for example. I think the time is shorter on prices than anything else. They don't want affiliate stores quoting incorrect prices! Again, read up on all of the provisions of each agreement.

There are several third-party software packages (free and commercial) that will allow you to easily create an Amazon "store" without writing any software. Ditto for other popular affiliate programs.

Note that such "stores" won't likely garner you much in the way of search engine traffic, as they see this as duplicate content. It might even be best to set your robots.txt to not index the store.

you should really read up on the best placement of affiliate links, sometimes a separate section with just banners doesn't give the best results

My experience is that a page with nothing but banners will get approximately zero clicks/month. Month after month. Ditto for so-called product 'ads' offered by affiliate programs.

Editorial mentions are supposed to do the best. A "store", formatted as such (i.e. very much like the affiliate's own store) can work especially for hobby sites where users are likely to patronize the store in order to help support the site. You have to be careful how you word any appeal to your users, though, as it's easy to go afoul of the affiliate agreements.

If you can't work in editorial mentions, then a store formatted much like the affiliate program's own store will do better than banners and ads.

One of my sites is basically a fan site - movie related rather than music, but the concept is pretty much the same. Instead of putting all the affiliate links in a "store", it's almost always better to put them where they're going to get the best-targeted audience. If people search for info on a particular band, they're the people you want to target, so put the links for a band's music on its "bio" page (at least). Don't make people go looking for something if you can put it right in front of them. If you can post your own comments about the music as a short review, so much the better.

When advertising to fans, you want to be fast or they'll buy it somewhere else. If a band has a new album being released be ready to post the links immediately. One thing I like about amazon is that they often put up pages for "pre-ordering" things. If a DVD I know my visitors will want to buy goes up for pre-ordering, I post the link as soon as I see it. It's not immediate money because you don't get paid until the item ships, but on things like DVDs most pre-orders will end up being real orders when the item is released. About half of my amazon sales come through pre-orders. Over half of my amazon sales come from one page: the "What's New" page, where I post items that have just become available for pre-order or order.

You do realize, I hope, that you run these ads/links through the site's affilate program (amazon calls theirs "associates"). When you sign up for the program, they'll give you instructions on posting ads that will give you a commission when someone buys something through one of them. As you said, you're not selling anything - You're simply sending the site a customer they might not have gotten otherwise, and they give you a commission if that customer buys something.

[edited by: Beagle at 11:21 pm (utc) on Nov. 14, 2007]