Amazon opened its web store in 1995 selling books online. Since then thay have  expanded into elecrtonics, apparel, furniture, toys etc... 

Amazon has also created an affiliate program that allows you to in bed "widgets" into your blog or website so you can sell just about everything that Amazon sells from your website.

Like all successful companies Amazon is always innovating, expanding the product lines that are available on their website and how they deliver those products to you, Unbox for example.

They even compete with Ebay, you can sell your products, new or used, on Amazon. I have discovered that I have been able to get more money when I sell something on Amazon compared to Ebay.

Itunes was an earth shattering  technology when it was released, it is amazing to think that the big music companies allowed digital downloads of their music. Apple was able to do this because of copy protection that was built into every song it sold.

The next step in the evolution of  digital music sales is non copy protected digital music, in other words, your everyday MP3 and Amazon was the company that did that. You may ask why is that important to me? Well, because several companies, Yahoo being one of them, has shut down their online music store rendering the any music purchased from them unplayable. I know Yahoo has taken steps to resolve the issue with their customers. 

The only way you can be sure that you will always be able to play you music is to buy non copy protected music MP3, flac, ogg.

Amazon MP3 is where you can buy non copy protected music and you can also sell it from your website or blog.  The Amazon widget like the one below, allows me to sell Amazon MP3s directly from my website. You can choose which albums are displayed on the widget, I opted for music that I have bought from Amazon MP3.

I love Amazon Unbox, it is not DRM (digital rights management) free media, but it is a way to take movies and and TV programs with you when you travel without having to lug around (and scratch or lose) DVDs. If you are renting the downloads you have to be careful because you have (check this on Amazon my information may not be exact) 30 days to watch the movie and once you start watching it you have twenty-four hours to finish the movie and you cannot watch the movie on a computer other than the one that you purchased it on.  I am hoping that the sales of movies and DVDs will evolve like MP3s and at some point they will have DRM free downloads. 

Of course you can add an Unbox widget like the one below to your website.

There are many other widgets that you can add to your website like the deals widget below. 

To sign up for an affiliate account go to amazon.com and in the Features and Service frame on the left you will see an option for Affiliate Program, click on it and sign up. 

Once you have signed up select the widgets that you want to add, then copy and paste the html code to your site. I am using Google for this site so I have to click on the "edit  html" link on the bottom right, the code for your web page will open in a new window, paste the widget html into the page code and publish. 

Unless you have a very popular website you will not be able to a living from Amazon widgets but every little bit helps.