Amazon Affiliate Marketing is the most popular Affiliate Program in the entire world.
According to Amazon’s latest financial reports, the company’s current revenue is $502.19 Billion.
Some of it is revenue comes from Affiliates who refer people to buy Amazon’s products and earn a commission for every sale.
In this step-by-step guide, I will show you how you can sign up with Amazon Associate and start referring people to buy Amazon’s products and earn commissions.
Therefore if you want to learn how to make money online as an affiliate you will need to read this step-by-step guide until the very end.
Chapter 1. The Basics of Amazon Affiliate Marketing
In this chapter, I will help you get a handle on the basics of Amazon Affiliate Marketing.
So, if you’re new to Amazon Affiliate Marketing, or want to make sure you are on the right track, you will love this chapter.
Then, in later chapters, we will cover how to find your niche, build your website that gets traffic and the pros and cons.
For now, let’s cover the basics.
What is Amazon Affiliate Marketing?
Amazon Affiliate Marketing is a type of Affiliate Marketing whereby a merchant pays you a commission for referring customers to their online store.
The commission is calculated as a percentage of the sale price of the product.
Therefore, you can sign up for Amazon Associate Program also known as Amazon Affiliate Program.
Once you are approved, you will be given a unique affiliate link to share on your blog, website, or social media channels.
When a customer clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase from Amazon, you will earn a commission.
The amount of commission you earn will vary depending on the product category and the sale price.
For example, commission rates for electronics are generally lower than commission rates for fashion items.
Amazon commissions are generally low compared to other Affiliate Programs. Can you still make decent money with Amazon Affiliate Marketing?
Let’s find out…
How does Amazon Affiliate Marketing work
Amazon has a program that allows people to sign up and promote their products through their websites, blogs, or social media.
When someone clicks on that link and makes a purchase on Amazon, the affiliate earns a commission.
The commission rate varies depending on the product that was purchased, but it is typically around 4-20%.
So, if someone clicks on your affiliate link and buys a $100 item from Amazon, you would earn a $4-$20 commission.
It is important to note that you will only earn a commission on items that are purchased within 24 hours of clicking on your affiliate link.
If someone clicks on your link but doesn’t purchase anything until 24 hours later, you will not earn a commission.
You are also legible to earn commissions for everything that person adds to the cart.
For example, if your affiliate link is about games and that person buys Dog Foods or anything you earn commissions on those items too.
How much can you make with Amazon Affiliate Marketing
As an Amazon affiliate or associate, you can earn a commission on every qualifying purchase your website visitors make.
This means that if you have a website with good traffic, you could potentially earn a decent amount of money from Amazon.
However, it is important to remember that you won’t get rich quickly with this method. It takes time and effort to build a successful website.
What you have to know as a newbie in your first 3 months you will not make any money.
It is very important to emphasize that because most people start this business model with the wrong idea.
In the first few months, you are working on your online foundation to generate traffic and traffic is the lifeblood of any online business.
To answer this question as a newbie you can make a few hundred bucks within 6 months or years and with time and experience, you can make 6 figures over the year.
It all depends on your planning and the time you put into this business.
Doung Cunnington from nichesiteproject.com earns $70k from one site after working online for more than 3 years.
He also sold his Amazon Affiliate niche website for $235,000 in 2017.
As you can see making money as an affiliate whether with Amazon Affiliate Marketing or any affiliate program needs initial work.
Therefore, Affiliate Marketing has changed drastically over the years and it become more complex and very competitive.
In 2017 things were a bit easy at the time to succeed now you need a good strategy, planning and picking a less competitive niche.
That is what are going to explain in the next chapter in more detail.
Chapter 2. How to Pick up a successful niche
The first step of any affiliate is to pick up a nice.
In this chapter, I’m going to show you exactly how you can pick a successful niche that will lead you to build a successful business online and earn a lot of Amazon commissions.
So if you have ever struggled of picking a nice this chapter will come in handy.
What is a Niche?
A niche is a distinct segment of a market, in other words, an audience. On amazon.com there are categories and subcategories that you can pick as your niche.
By picking up a niche you are setting a direction for your business.
How to Pick a niche as an affiliate
Most people advise picking something that is ideally an interest, a passion, a hobby or something that you would like to learn about.
I am not against that at all.
But when it comes to Amazon I will advise looking first at the Amazon Commission Rate first before you pick your niche.
You do not want to promote products that have a very low price and pay 1% in commission.
It will be almost impossible to make even $1,000 per month unless you have huge traffic that comes to your website.
Let’s say you want to promote Health and Personal Care. As you can see below the Health and Personal Care commission rate is only 1%.
As you can see the price of Amazon health and personal care is very low.
Therefore if you are promoting a product that cost $12.99 you can only earn a commission of $0.13.
You will need to make a lot of sales to make a decent commission and to make $1,000 per month seem impossible.
Anything that pays up from 2.5% to 20% in commission with a price that starts from $300 is good.
Again you need to narrow down your niche to a particular audience.
Choosing a niche that is too broad can be too competitive and it will be hard to succeed as an Amazon Associate (Affiliate Marketer).
When choosing your niche for your Amazon Affiliate Marketing do not limit yourself by narrowing your niche too much.
You need to find a balance by not spreading yourself too much by finding a broad niche or limiting yourself by narrowing your niche too down.
Otherwise, it will be very hard for you to find a profitable product to promote.
The best way to find your niche idea is to go to Amazon and browse the categories. Let’s say you are interested in electronics.
That can be a niche.
The problem is that this niche is too broad and might be too competitive and hard to rank your website on Google and other Search Engines.
When you are doing Amazon Affiliate Marketing you are relying on organic traffic which involves writing quality content and ranking your website on Search Engines.
Therefore, you need to narrow your niche a bit down to a special audience. As you can see below on electronics you can find also different subcategories.
Those are also niches.
In this case, let me choose security and surveillance and under that, there are also other subcategories such as:
- Accessories
- Biometrics
- Home Security Systems
- Horns & Sirens
- Motion Detectors
- Radio Scanners
- Surveillance Video Equipment
I will go with “Home Security Systems” and I can even narrow it down to certain feature brands that I can promote.
But I do not want to limit myself that is why I choose Home Security Systems.
The niche is not too broad or too narrow.
You can also see that are too many products that I can promote on Home Security Systems.
When I tried to do some Keyword Searches to get more ideas on my niche using H-Supertools the keyword search tool.
It gives me the data below
- Monthly Search Volume
- Paid Competition
- CPC
- SEO Difficulty
The data tells me that the high search volume, high competition, cost per click and SEO difficulty for Keyword “ Home Security Systems”.
This tells me that there is a huge demand for Home Security Systems and advertisers paying $30.95 per click to drive traffic to their websites for this Keyword.
This looks good and it shows there is money to be made in this niche.
The problem there is too much competition if you target this keyword and SEO difficulty tells that a new website will struggle to rank for this keyword.
That does not mean you have to change the niche.
You can use a keyword search tool to get more ideas and other keywords that are less competitive to place your Home Security Systems products in front of potential buyers.
In this case, I use another keyword search tool called Jaaxy.
This keyword is designed to find low-competitive keywords also called Low Hanging Fruit Keywords.
As you can see below it gives me more keyword ideas with less competition that I can target to place the Home Security Systems Products in front of my target audience.
It shows you also data such as:
- Avg: The average number of searches that the keyword receives per month
- Traffic: Visits to your website if you achieve first-page rankings in the search engines
- QSR: Quoted Search Results. The number of competing websites ranked in Google for this exact keyword
- KQI: Keyword Quality Indicator. Green is great, Yellow is ok and Red is poor
- SEO: A score based on traffic and competition, the higher the score the more likely you will rank for this keyword on the first page.
I recommend Jaaxy if you are starting a new website and if you are a member of Wealthy Affiliate it includes in the membership.
By the way, Wealthy Affiliate is the best platform for beginners to learn how to build a niche website and earn affiliate commissions.
They are also a lot of advanced keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Samrush and Moz that will help you in this journey.
Chapter 3. Choose a domain and build your niche website
In this chapter, I am going to show you how to choose a domain name that google and other search engines love for high traffic.
I am also going to show you how to build your website in less than 60 seconds.
Therefore, if you have been scared of the term building a website. This chapter will be very handy.
Choose a domain name that Search Engines Love
Choosing a friendly domain name will help you to avoid your website being perpetually trapped on page 2 or worse.
In the last chapter, the niche that we found is “Home Security Systems”. Most of the newbies will go with homesecuritysystems.com as a domain name.
The issue is a Keyword phrase for your domain name and it will be an Exact Match Domain (EMD).
What is the Exact Match Domain?
An exact match domain is a domain name that exactly matches a keyword phrase.
For example, “homesecuritysystems.com” would be an EMD for the keyword phrase ” Home Security Systems”.
It used to be a popular way to get higher search engine rankings because they were an easy way to get a keyword in the domain name.
However, Google has changed their algorithm to devalue EMDs, so they are no longer as effective as they once were.
EMDs are also considered spammy websites.
You need to avoid them. It is not like they don’t work anymore.
They certainly still do have an almost unfair advantage in ranking simply for having the keywords in the URL).
However, they have a much higher chance of getting hit with over-optimization problems.
Let’s say you decide to look for another domain name and choose myhomesecurity.com
Simply having one word of the keyword phrase in your domain name automatically puts your domain name in the Partial Match Domain (PMD) category
What is a Partial Match Domain?
A partial match domain is a domain that includes a keyword as part of the domain name.
Although you can get ranked with a partial match domain with good content, you may be at risk with future Google updates.
If your content has a keyword as in your domain name, Google could see the repetition of the word as keyword stuffing and penalize you.
In this case, branded domains are the perfect choice in most situations…
What is a Branded Domain?
Branded domains include none of the target keywords in the domain name.
Most of the major domains that search engines love like WebMD, Forbes, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc.
The best domain name needs to have 1 to 3 words.
You can use namelix.com to get more ideas to get a branded domain. I
In this case, I will choose mysecurine.com as the domain name then I will go to instantdomainsearch.com to find out if the domain name is available.
In my case, it shows green which means that the domain name is available.
Then you have to go to godaddy.com to buy your domain name or bluehost.com to buy the domain name and host your website.
I prefer to do it on Wealthy Affiliate because everything is in one place and you can do it with few clicks.
How to build your website?
Your website is the foundation of your business. It is where all of your traffic is ultimately going to come to, where you are going to build brand and trust within your niche, and where you can promote amazon products and generate commission.
There are many platforms you can use to host your website. As I mention before I use Wealthy Affiliate for my websites with a few clicks you have your website in less than 60 seconds.
You can also try it for free to see everything and better yet you can also get free training and one free website to kick-start your online business.
Once you are inside you will see on top bar website.
Then click on build a website and this option below will show you.
If you are trying things up you can use the free domain.
But if you are serious about starting a real online business you can register your domain name or if you have a domain name already registered you can use it here.
Then you have to enter the title of your website and choose a theme for your website.
Then you have to choose a theme for your website.
The fast and best themes are Neve, GeneratePress and Astra. It is very important to choose a fast theme a slow theme will affect your website speed.
Once you have chosen your theme then you can click build my website.
Then wait for 60 seconds for your WordPress to be installed and other plugins then you get this notification that your website is installed and ready to go.
Then you just need to log in and start walking on your business. Building a website is so easy and you do not need any coding experience.
Chapter 4. Content Creation frameworks
In this chapter, you will learn how to create content that gets you more traffic to your niche websites and make more sales.
If you are struggling to come up with a strategy to create content that gets more traffic and more sales this chapter will be handy.
What is a content creation framework?
A content creation framework is a system or guide that can be used to plan, produce, and manage content more effectively.
A good framework will help you to save time and resources by streamlining the content creation process and making it more efficient.
It can also help you to create better content by providing a structure that ensures all the important elements are included.
This is a big topic and I am not going to explain it in detail. I will just want to give you the basics so you can kick-start start creating content for your niche website.
Most people are scared about the word creating content. Unfortunately, if you want to rely on organic traffic you will need to create content.
You might be asking how to get content ideas. You can do simple research on google or spy on your competitors or use keyword research tools.
This is what I do to get traffic to my websites. I create product reviews, compare products on my website and also create informative content.
Product Reviews
Product Reviews are the best way to get more traffic to your website and increase sales. Most people when they want to buy something online rely on reviews to make the buying decision.
Your job is to write detailed reviews on a certain product in your niche and place your affiliate link throughout the review and when someone buys the product you get a commission.
In the beginning, I choose my niche as Home Security Systems I will have to review most of the products in this niche to get traffic and sales.
For example, I want to review Arlo Pro 4 Spotlight Camera.
What do you think when someone who wants to buy this product wants to know about the Arlo Pro 4 Spotlight Camera?
Maybe:
What is Arlo Pro 4 Spotlight Camera? How to use the Pro 4 Spotlight Camera? The Feature of the products, How to install the Arlo Pro 4 Spotlight Camera? Pros and Cons and the conclusion.
My review will be like this:
- What is Arlo Pro 4 Spotlight Camera?
- How to use the Pro 4 Spotlight Camera?
- The Arlo Pro 4 Spotlight Camera Feature
- How to install the Arlo Pro 4 Spotlight Camera?
- Pros and Cons
- Conclusion
This can be a template for all your reviews. It is very important to make a template for your reviews.
It will help you a lot to know what you can write in advance.
As you can see I have 6 subtitles in each subtitle if I can write only 250 words then I will have 1,500 words review and this make it a perfect review for your audience.
Write Product Comparisons
Product comparisons are the best way to get more traffic to your niche website and make more sales. The good news is product comparisons do not have a lot of competition.
Product Comparison posts are like this:
“Arlo Pro 4 Spotlight Camera vs. Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight Camera”
“SimpliSafe Wireless Outdoor Security Camera vs. SimpliSafe 8 Piece Wireless Home Security System”
People who search for “X vs. Y” products tend to be pretty advanced they already know about the product and they are just looking for the best one.
Therefore, if you give a good product comparison they will probably buy from your affiliate link and make more commissions.
Publish information content
Information posts are the best way to increase your website authority. You will need to publish informative content to get links to your website.
The more website owners link your website to their websites you will have some authority in your niche
Google and other Search Engines will see your website as an authoritative website and rank your niche website high in the search engine and get more traffic.
You can publish:
- The Go-To Guidebook (Eg; Products Guides)
- Expanded List Post (eg; 17 ways to improve your home security)
- The Industry Study
- The Detailed Checklist
Those posts are “Power Pages” the intention of writing them is to build links to your website to be an authority in your niche.
Google and other Search Engine rank well a website that has a lot of backlinks.
Chapter 5. Easy way to sign up with Amazon Associates
In this chapter, you will learn the steps to sign up with Amazon Associates. Therefore, if you are a newbie to Amazon Affiliate Marketing and you do not how to sign up this chapter will be very useful.
Create your Amazon Associates Account
The first step to creating your Amazon Associates Account is to complete the signup form by providing your name (First and Surname), and your email address and then you need to create your password.
You will also need to read and agreed to the terms and conditions. It is very important the understand those terms and conditions and avoid violating them.
Once you click Create Amazon Account. Amazon will send you an email with OPT to verify your email address. It is very important you put the correct email.
The second step is to complete your account information as it is shown in the screenshot below. Just follow the instruction.
The third step is to list all the top-level websites and/or mobile apps on which you plan to display banners, widgets, Special Links, or other ads from Amazon Associates.
The fourth and last step is to complete your Amazon Affiliate Profile. You just need to follow all the instructions as shown in the screenshot.
After completing your profile and click finish. You will receive a congratulatory message as shown in the screenshot below
Therefore, you will have 180 days to make qualified sales otherwise your application and access to your Amazon Associate account will be withdrawn.
Chapter 6. Amazon Affiliate Marketing Pros and cons
In this chapter, you will know some pros and cons that will help you to decide if you can start your Amazon Affiliate Marketing or change to other affiliate programs
Pros
Beginner Friendly
The Amazon Affiliate Program is a great way for anyone to start earning money online and they accept everyone.
However, you must drive at least three qualified sales within 180 days to avoid the termination of your account.
The good news is that you can still apply again with Amazon Affiliate Program even if your account is terminated within 180 days.
Reputed eCommerce
Amazon is a giant eCommerce which it earned popularity all over the world. Promoting Amazon products as Amazon Affiliate Marketing will be a no-brainer everyone knows the platform.
You will get a high conversion rate if you practice everything that you have learned in this guide.
Product Variety
Amazon has every product that you can think of. From toys, gym equipment, electronics, books, clothes, food supplements and a lot more.
It is very easy to find products in your niche and promote them
Cons
Low commission rate
The biggest con of Amazon Affiliate Marketing is that the commission rates are relatively low.
The standard commission rate is 1 to 20%, so you’ll need to sell a lot of products to make a decent income.
Unlike other affiliate programs that pay up to 75% in commission.
24-hour Affiliate Cookie
The reality is that with the Amazon Associates Program you can only earn on sales made within 24 hours of someone clicking on your amazon affiliate.
Most decent affiliate programs will allow you to earn within 30 days to 90 days and some have lifetime cookies where you will earn any time after someone has clicked on your affiliate link.
But with Amazon, a day is enough time for you to hopefully earn a commission which is a big drawback. Some buyers take several days to make a buying decision
No Paypal Payment Method
Paypal is the most popular online payment method that is available in most countries and an easy way to withdraw your money from any bank.
Unfortunately, Amazon Associates does not pay it is affiliates via PayPal.
They will either send you a cheque, send you an Amazon Gift Certificate or deposit your commissions directly into your bank account
Chapter 7. How to Get High Traffic and Increase Commission
In this chapter, you will learn a strategy that will help you increase your website traffic and make more sales.
Therefore, if you are wondering how to increase traffic to your niche website this chapter will be very handy.
What is Website Traffic
Website traffic is the number of visitors to a website. There are many ways to increase traffic to a website, including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media marketing, and content marketing.
The best way to increase your traffic to your Amazon niche website is to create high-quality content that is interesting and relevant to your target audience.
Once you have built up a good amount of content, you can start promoting it through social media channels and other online platforms.
If you can get your content in front of a large audience, you are more likely to see an increase in website traffic and make more sales
How to get Traffic from 5 Free Websites
Copy and Paste your content
After creating your content (article or post) on your website you will need to copy the same content and paste it into the different online platforms to get traffic to your website.
You can copy your content and paste it on LinkedIn, Quora and Medium
LinkedIn is the best Social Media platform to get traffic to your website. According to statista.com close to 1.5 billion unique global visitors had visited LinkedIn.com.
You can leverage this platform to increase your website traffic by copying and pasting your content here.
Instead of copying and pasting your link on your feed, you will go where it is written to write an article.
Then you can paste your entire article here. You may be asking how can I get traffic by pasting my content on LinkedIn.
The answer is by creating links that are pointing to your website.
People who are reading your content will find those links and when they click them they will be redirected to your website
Quora
Quora is a question-and-answer platform that receives more than 620 Million visits every month.
People from around the world visit Quore to ask different questions and other people answer these questions.
You are not here to ask questions or answer them.
You are here to copy and paste your content by creating your space on quora.com
After creating your space you can paste contents that you have created on your website. Contents that are posted on quora rank very high on search engines.
You will get traffic to your website through links that are pointing to your website.
Medium
Medium.com is another platform where you can copy and paste your content and get traffic to your website. This platform gets over 250 Million unique visitors per month.
You can utilise this platform to get more traffic to your niche website and make more sales.
The benefit of posting on those platforms is when someone is searching for similar content they may find your article.
Those platforms are authority websites and rank very well on search engines.
Copy and Paste your Links
Mix.com
Mix.com is a free social website that connects people of the same interest to come together and share ideas and thoughts.
Once you are registered with this platform you can copy and paste your links and get traffic to your website and increase sales as Amazon Affiliate Marketing.
Pinterest is not only a Social Media platform it is also a search engine where people search for different things.
You can copy and paste your link and also rank in it and receive more traffic.
You can not just paste your link on Pinterest
You need to create a pin by designing an attractive image. You can use canva.com to crease all your pin
This is a beginner-friendly platform that will help you to create all your design for your website and Pinterest Pin.
Amazon Affiliate Marketing – Conclusion
So that is my step-by-step Amazon Affiliate Marketing Guide. If you follow this guide and implement what you have learned here.
You will build a strong foundation for your online business and earn passive affiliate commissions.
Therefore if you want a step by step training you can also check My Top Recommendation Platform and get all the tools to build your niche.
You can also check out Legendary Marketer to learn how to sell High Ticket Products.
Now I want to turn it over to you: what did you think about this guide? Or maybe there’s
something I missed.
Let me know by leaving a comment below