Zazzle is my Affiliate heaven

I read a very inspiring book recently, one that's hopefully firmly set me on the path to doing something constructive with my free time to build additional revenue streams. The book in question is Geoge Marshalls "Get out While you can" a book about affiliate marketing but more importnatly its message to readers is the basic guide to getting out of the rat race and wage slavery of a 9-5 job by getting into affiliate marketing.
Try as I might most of my initial schemesbefore I read the book haven't quite taken off, I signed up to both Cafe Press and Red Bubble to very little success over the last 18 months and even when I did make $27 from Cafe Press I found out my bank wouldn't process the payment because it was under the $50 minimum which hurts even more when you're unemployed. Granted my uploads to both sites have been rather low and I didn't much go for the limits Cafe Press put on sellers so I left it. Red Bubble is very competitive, there are so many talented people on there its hard to cut through the competition to make something work, artists and professional photographers probably do okay with strong content. My novel on Kindle is in double figures, albeit low double figures and with the royalties I could probably buy a pint but not much else. I got into Clickbank but have stalled despite a good Google page ranking but puzzled as to how I move forward or resolve the zero sales situation. Its frustrating to say the least, My strongest and most successful Affiliate revenue stream has been from Zazzle of all places, a place where I'm competing against 42 Billion other products, that's right, 42 Billion!!, I've devoted lots of time to this and now thats paying off as I'm starting to see a good trickle of results and have become a basic Pro Seller, I'm getting low royalty sales admittedly but a steady flow is slowly adding up. What makes this even more surprising is the sheer range of competing products and product quality, no doubt there are people raking in cash from Zazzle from unique designs but to be making sales against these sellers is a good feeling to be had, especially considering how I'm stumbling to make any real headway with revenue from other affiliate revenue streams. I'll still work on improving my Clickbank and Kindle projects for 2012 but for now Zazzle is where the money is.

Kindle Fire pre-orders are burning down the house

It was only a matter of time before Amazon realized the true untapped potential of a handheld reading device that could go beyond what its original Kindle could provide users. Not that I think Amazon was ever really going to just sit there and be happy with a device that only provided content to be viewed entirely in black and white.
If the screenshot leak over at blog Cult of Android is to be believed then it would appear that Amazon's Kindle Fire will be the fastest selling tablet device in the world. Currently Kindle Fire is racking up pre order sales of 50,000 units a day. In the first five days since its announcement over 250,000 tablets  have been pre ordered with the potential to have 2.5 Million pre orders for the device before it goes on sale on November 15th.

Compare that to the Nook colour which took about two months to sell 1 million units and its clear to see that Nook has a major fight for survival on its hands.
Good news all round for writers and e-book authors because it provides choice, they can either release content in traditional novel text based format or further explore the possibilities of projects with coloured image based content as well such as photo books, essays and illustrative works.
The digital e-reader market is expanding faster than the content is providing even more good news for authors, as each day goes by authors only have to appeal to a smaller percentage of the e-reader population.
What will be interesting to see is how long Kindles current monochrome version continues to sell, will Kindle Fire actually start to kill off traditional Kindle sales far quicker than anticipated or will the price difference mean that it clearly divides the market between those who just want an e-reader for books and those who want to embrace video entertainment?

As for Nook its difficult to say what happens now, too many tech companies have jumped on the tablet bandwagon only to fail miserably because they were not prepared for the market place, in most cases competitors to the iPad have released hardware but never factored into the business plan that the content wasn't there to support it. HP's TouchPad being a perfect example, with no 3G support, lack of content, no support for storage cards and high retail costs it wasn't going to scratch let alone dent what Apple was offering. Apple thrives because the content is there to drive hardware sales. Nook on the other hand needs to evaluate what it's offering its customers that Kindle Fire doesn't, it may need to re-position itself on price or functionality but at what expense to its place within the market is difficult to ascertain.

In the US, Amazon has about three quarters of the e-book market so its audience is already established and at $199 it provides a good halfway point to the iPad 2 which retails in the region of $470. Admittedly with nowhere near the same functionality as the i-Pad the Kindle Fire is still an impressive bit of kit.