You have heard that Amazon is one of the world’s most successful companies, right?
Amazon is making over 20 billion dollars in profit per month as you can easily understand you only need a piece of that cake to become rich.
Amazon sells tons of products, nearly everything. This is an amazing advantage especially when it comes to Amazon Affiliate Marketing.
In this detailed guide, you will everything you need to know about Amazon Associates( Amazon Affiliate Platform) so you can start making money as a complete beginner.
This will be a step by step tutorial but also a general guide with tips about Amazon Affiliate Program.
Amazon is the world’s best e-commerce store. It has built trust with its customers and they buy from Amazon multiple times.
There are many ways to make money with Amazon as for example with Amazon FBA, Amazon Kindle Publishing, etc but in this article, we will focus on affiliate marketing with Amazon.
Before, we start with Amazon Affiliate Program I ‘ll give you a short definition of Affiliate Marketing in case some of you do not know.
Affiliate Marketing is the process of promoting other people’s products or services for a commission.
In Amazon Affiliate, you will need to promote other people’s products to earn a commission(percentage of the profit).
Contents
Amazon Affiliate Platform Review
Amazon’s affiliate system or network is called Amazon Associates. This is where you must sign up and create an account so that you can have access to your affiliate links.
As you have to do in any other company when you want to become an affiliate, you sign up and make an application to become an affiliate.
It is not very difficult to become accepted and it is free to join Amazon Associates.
The general process is that you sign up, you pick a product, and then you make some sort of content to promote it.
Each time someone buys through your link you earn a commission.
How To Sign Up For Amazon Associates
It is not very difficult to sign up for Amazon Associates but many people ask me this question so I will make a quick reference.
First of all, with Amazon you have the option to become an affiliate not only for Amazon.com but also for Amazon.ca, Amazon.in, Amazon.co.uk, etc. You can apply for multiple Amazon affiliate platforms.
Requirements To Become An Amazon Affiliate
To become an Amazon Affiliate you should belong to 1 or more of these 3 categories.
- You have a website. (Learn how to create a WordPress website here)
- You have a Youtube Channel
- You are an influencer
But, don’t mess with these too much. You already know that you will need a website or something to promote the products, don’t you? Amazon accepts affiliates relatively easily.
To sign up, you just need to type for example Amazon.com Associates on Google, get there and then just click the Join For Free button.
Then, you will be redirected to a page in which you create a simple account that you need to do generally in affiliate marketing.
Then, you will be logged in to Amazon Associates. There will be a lot of useless stuff. Don’t mess with it.
You can place banners etc but you don’t want to do it especially when you start.
The important thing is for you to understand how to grab the Amazon affiliate link.
There are 3 ways.
The first way you open a new tab when logged in Amazon Associates and go to Amazon.com for example (depends on which region you choose).
Then you type a product you want to promote. There will be a bar on the top where in its left side writes Get Link and you grab the link. It’s as simple as that.
But, learn all the ways to be sure. The second way, you click on your product and scroll down until you find its ASIN number.
Then, simply copy and paste this number into the search bar of Amazon Associates. It will give the link again. You better grab the short link cause it gives you 2 options.
The third way, you don’t even need to open another tab. You click browse products, it shows you all the categories, you search your product and grab your link.
But, this is very time-consuming because there are millions of products on Amazon. I never do that.
That’s it with your account and how to grab your link. Make sure you make this properly before you start promoting.
How Much Can You Earn With Amazon Affiliate Marketing?
There are people that make millions with Amazon. However, I will admit that it is not easy. I prefer doing affiliate marketing differently.
But, Amazon is the best place for beginners. It is trusted by everyone, you know you will get paid, your customers know that they are safe, there is the 1-click buy button when someone is already an Amazon customer.
Amazon has tons of products. You can literally promote anything you want and like. That’s huge.
Amazon has fixed standard program fee rates for specific product categories from 1%-10%. As you can easily understand the percentages are really low.
UPDATE: The Amazon Associates program has cut down the commision rates to max. 3% on all products.
But, I will tell you the best ways to promote Amazon products because it is obvious that if you try to use paid advertising promoting Amazon products, it will be extremely difficult to be profitable.
Amazon has an excellent advertising system. When someone searches for stuff, he can also find recommended stuff, advertisements and add them to their shopping. This is the cool thing with Amazon.
It has a 24h cookie. This means that if someone clicks your link to buy a yoga mat for 25$ but he finally adds more stuff to his shopping cart and pays 1000$, guess what, you will commission for all those 1000$.
For whatever he buys in 24h you will get a commission.
Secondly, if he puts stuff in the shopping cart but doesn’t buy immediately and then after 2 weeks he comes back and he uses the same shopping cart to buy you again make a commission.
This cookie is for 90 days but only if he has products in the shopping cart.
Don’t mess with the commissions right now, I will tell you how to choose a profitable product in detail.
How To Choose The Ideal Product To Promote With Amazon
Pay attention here. This may determine success or failure.
I will show you the 6 factors that you absolutely need to choose your product. Amazon has really low commissions on some products, so you have to choose wisely.
- Price of the product. The price of the product you promote must be from 50-100$ at least. In my opinion, it should more than 100$ especially, at the beginning.
- Reviews. The product you should promote is crucial to have many positive reviews. Reviews help people buy. This is simple.
- Product Variations. Your product should have many variations. I will also talk about this later. For example, chef knife, bread knife, cleaver knife.
- Your product should many buyer intent keywords. For example, best chef knives 2020, best cheap chef knives 2020, top 3 chef knives 2020 etc. Keywords that people type when they want to buy.
- High Volume Keywords. Your product keywords should have high volume because you need much traffic to make a lot of money with Amazon.
- Product with high price AND relatively high commission. For me over 5%. Except maybe a TV or so which may cost 1000+
The price of the product should be high because the commissions are low. If you choose an 8$ product your commission will be from 0,08$ to 0,80$. It is more difficult to sell something more expensive but it is the only way.
You may need to sell 1-2 low price products like 20$ later to get more traffic to your website. With those products, you won’t make much money but you will bring customers to your website and they probably buy other things.
Also, when your traffic goes up with these lower price products, more people will eventually visit your site from Google and you will make more money from the expensive products you promote.
Having many reviews is self-explanatory. Products with many reviews sell more.
Product variations are crucial because you will need to make a niche website(I will you also another way if you don’t want to create a website).
Buyer intent keyword. This is probably the most important after pricing. You need much traffic to your website to be profitable with Amazon. Keyword Research is absolutely essential. Learn how to do it for free here.
But, also you need people who are ready to buy not people who want to search and search and learn and never buy.
That’s why you need these buyer intent keywords like best, top, review, products vs product, etc. Very crucial.
High search volume. There are tools that show you the search volume for a specific keyword. Two nice tools are Ubersuggest and Google Keyword Planner which are free.
If you want to learn more about how to do keyword research for free you can read this article.
Finally, don’t find a product with a 1-2% commission. This won’t be worth it most of the time. Find something really specific with 7-8-9-10% commission and go for it. That’s my opinion from my experience.
Before we move on, I have to tell you one more thing. It is always good to have already purchased the products you promote and use em.
This way is much easier to write about them and you will find it more interesting to write about something you are passionate about. This helps a lot.
Types Of Blogpost You Should Write
I already told you some things about it.
You should create an article for every keyword variation.
The best words that you should use are best(best 5-best 10-best 25 etc ), top, cheap, cheapest. Also, you should compare product vs product, for example, this chef knife A vs chef knife B.
Also, a very good way to make money online with Amazon is to write reviews for your products.
Think of it, in a very specific niche website with only knives I can think easily of 50-80 blog posts I can write right now with zero knowledge of them.
This is what you are going to do.
Niche vs Authority Website
Now, we will talk about something really important which is the Amazon Affiliate website.
A Niche website is a website that focuses on a small part of a larger market; meaning a relatively small group of people.
Authority website is a very high-quality website which is doesn’t focus on a subtopic.
For Amazon, a niche website is recommended because you can rank it more easily. When you write relative content for a specific topic Google ranks you faster.
For example, Google will rank you for knives if you have 30-40 articles specifically on knives.
But if you try to build an authority site with only 30-40 articles about every kitchen item it is far more difficult to rank it.
So, start with a niche website and when you make it over 60-70 articles you can then turn it into an authority site, writing for other stuff.
How to structure your Amazon Niche Website?
Google likes Amazon Niche Review Sites with a good structure.
This is a fact.
To begin with, your website should have a nice menu. In this menu, there should be 4-5 categories and under them their subcategories, for example:
Category 1 Chef knives
- Best Chef Knives
- Chef Knives Reviews
- Chef Knives 1-1
Category 2 Bread Knives
- Best Bread Knives
- Bread Knives Reviews
- Bread Knives 1-1
Category 3 Butter Knives
- Best Butter Knives
- Butter Knives Reviews
- Butter Knives 1-1
(Painting isn’t my thing!)
In these categories also the articles should link to one another as you do generally in affiliate marketing which is called internal linking.
Related post: 5 Best Search Engine Optimization tips
So, when Google crawls your page, your pages will be linked and they will have relevancy which is crucial for Google rankings.
How can you use Amazon Associates without a website/blog
So, the most common question. Do I need a website to start affiliate marketing with Amazon?
There are 3 ways.
- Website
- Youtube
- Social Media Marketing.
Social Media marketing with Amazon is tough. Facebook and Instagram do not allow any affiliate links. So, the only way you can do it there is having a bridge page before your Amazon sales page. This makes it very difficult up to impossible to use.
We will not talk about any paid advertisement at all. Don’t try it. I have done it. It does not work. Commissions are too low to pay for ads. Plain and simple.
The second viable way to go for Affiliate Marketing with Amazon is Youtube. Youtube is the second-best search engine on the planet and for some people, it is even better than Google itself. However, Google owns YouTube.
With YouTube it is exactly the same as far as the content. You again have to do content content content with search engine optimization. Youtube has 3 major advantages.
First, it has the recommended videos so they promote people’s stuff for free.
Secondly, videos from YouTube show up sometimes even on Google search(3 of them).
Thirdly, videos are better than text.
With Youtube either you just write your description which will be keyword rich and place your affiliate links there or you drive traffic to your blog.
Obviously, is better for you to have Youtube and a website. There is a way to transform your videos into text and make of course some changes to make it a real blog post.
But, I won’t tell you more about this in this specific article.
It is already a long article.
If you don’t wanna make a website, Youtube is the alternative.
However, I highly recommend to start a website because a website is your total asset that includes all your articles, you can capture email addresses pretty easily, and much more.
However, Youtube is good. Don’t get me wrong.
So, to sum up you can start affiliate marketing without a website using Youtube. Starting Amazon Affiliate Marketing with Facebook I don’t believe is a good choice.
Facebook does not allow affiliate links and Facebook and any other social media platform is not a safe pillar for your business.
Can you use Pinterest For Amazon Affiliate Marketing?
Yes, you can. It is not actually a bad way. But, I would only do it to bring more traffic to my website and for some extra sales. Especially, in some niches, Pinterest is very good. You can test it out.
But again, Google SEO and Youtube is the evergreen way of making money online. Focus long term. This is a real business. This is your job.
Don’t expect to make money in one month or two. Which business will make you 5-10k+ per month in 1 month? If you find it, let me know!
Amazon Associates Rules
- You can’t buy your own product through your link.
- You can’t violate Amazon’s trademark policy
- You can’t link from websites with sexual content
- You can’t use Amazon user reviews as yours.
- You can’t have multiple accounts.
- You can’t link to Amazon affiliate links through your emails. Be Careful Here. Send them to your website that includes affiliate links.
- You can’t use link shortening for their affiliate links. They have their own short link.
Read extremely carefully Amazon Associates Rules from their official website before you start.
Don’t let your efforts and your website to be banned. Please.
Is Amazon Associates Worth It?
I will tell you the truth here. Amazon Affiliate Marketing is an excellent way to make money online. This is the truth. It works. It absolutely works.
Amazon has built trust with customers, it has an exceptional recommendation system that helps you a ton and works perfectly with this 24h cookie which makes your commissions to stack.
It provides you with a variety of products. You can find absolutely anything you want on Amazon.
However, its commissions are low. That’s why you need to pay attention to the tips that I gave you in this article. You must do it the right way otherwise it won’t work.
Is it the best way to make money online with affiliate marketing?
In my opinion, it is the best platform to start with for beginners because it’s beginners’ friendly and easy to use and understand.
However, if you ask me if this is the most profitable way to make money online I will tell you that it is not.
It is not the best way to do it neither the most profitable but Amazon has its fans, doesn’t it?
Don’t Quit
Before I finish this article, I want to remind you of something really critical to your success. Your road won’t be a walk in the park.
You will have struggles, you won’t know everything, in the beginning, you won’t have traffic either sales.
But it’s ok.
Because guess what! No one, knew before he made the mistake. No one succeeded with the push of a button.
Imagine what your life will be after this slow beginning. Imagine the financial freedom, the time freedom for you and your family.
When you are close to quitting, think about why you started.
What’s your goal? What drives you? Don’t quit. It works.
Trust me.
Final Words
Amazon Affiliate Marketing or Amazon Associates is an excellent place for a beginner to start with affiliate marketing.
It can make you a lot of money if done properly.
Amazon has many advantages such as enormous product variety, blind trust, an excellent recommendation system and a 24h cookie.
Its drawbacks are the low commissions and probably this is it.
That’s why you need a great niche and product selection and a great amount of traffic and patience to make it work.
I explained everything you need in detail.
Amazon affiliate marketing can be started with a website or Youtube or both. These are the main ways that work 100%. Pinterest works in some specific niches.
In my own opinion, Amazon is the best way for beginners but not the best in general, to make money online.
My #1 recommendation to make money online is this program which costs 7$ a one time-fee (Starbucks coffee). This can change your level of knowledge and your life significantly.
However, Don’t buy the training from there. If you take the Affiliate Insiders Ebook(2$) or the Copywriting Playbook (1$) they give the training as a bonus. It is a no brainer in my opinion for 1-2$.
