The number of Amazon affiliates - people who make money from referring customers to Amazon - is fast approaching the million mark.

Which is obviously good news for Amazon.

Suppose each affiliate sold on average just one item each day from the vast emporium of goods that is Amazon. That’s close to a million extra sales each and every day for the daddy of internet retailing.

I’m one of those affiliates and rank it as one of my favourite money making revenue streams. Amazon’s affiliate program does come in for criticism from some quarters (not least because of its one day cookie length which means that if your referred customer doesn’t buy within 24 hours of the referral you earn nothing), but I personally love it. Not only is Amazon one of the internet’s most trusted brands, but its range of products extends far beyond books these days to everything from condoms to bicycles (in the States they even sell food!).

Last August Amazon launched its aStore - a professional looking online shop full of your chosen Amazon products that can be embedded within or linked to from your website. I wasn’t overly impressed to begin with, not least because you could only have one aStore per affiliate account and that was of limited use to someone with multiple websites.

All that has now changed though and you can now have up to 100 aStores per affiliate account. What’s more, since launching the aStore, Amazon have made a series of big improvements, including a range of “widgets” announced earlier this month that allow you even more scope to develop your aStore.

The best news of all is that it takes minutes to be up and running with an aStore. I’ve been building a few since late last week and you can have a fully stocked aStore up and running in an hour. They can be integrated into an existing website or can be stand alone - ideal if you’ve an undeveloped domain name that gets traffic, but has nothing to offer visitors at present.

My plan is to get 100 niche aStores up and running ASAP. If each one can earn me on average £10 a month in commissions, that’ll add an extra £1,000 a month to my bottom line.

Now get this. 80% of all books are sold between the start of October and the end of December each year. That’s why now is the time to get your aStores up and running too.

PS it took me just 14 minutes to add the Entrepreneur Bookshop to this website. I’ll leave it as it is for a few days just so you can see what can be achieved in minutes, but will be fully loading it shortly so that you can drop in and stock up in time for Christmas