For content creators, Amazon affiliate marketing can be a very profitable passive income stream. But becoming a part of the Amazon Associates Program involves more than just creating an account and dispersing your affiliate link at random.
The purpose of this article is to explain the advantages of becoming an Amazon affiliate and to assist you in comprehending the ins and outs of Amazon Associates. Additionally, you will learn how to create an Amazon affiliate website in order to receive that long-awaited commission.
In this article you will learn
- Affiliate Marketing: What Is It?
- How Does Amazon Associates Works
- Why You Should Sign Up as an Amazon Affiliate?
- Can anyone become an Amazon Affiliate?
- How to Create a Website with Amazon Affiliates
- Amazon Influencer Program vs. Amazon Affiliate
- Ways to Increase Your Income as an Amazon Affiliate
- Conclusions
Affiliate Marketing: What Is It?
A business uses affiliate marketing, a type of online advertising, to pay third parties to send customers back to their websites. These third parties—referred to as affiliates—are typically podcasters, bloggers, or social media influencers who receive a commission each time they successfully refer a customer to the website and that customer completes a purchase.
Affiliates are given unique links, which are tracked for clicks and purchases, as part of the process. Of course, they have to abide by the platforms’ terms and conditions as well as advertising guidelines.
How Does Amazon Associates Operate and What Is It?
Amazon offers an affiliate marketing program called Amazon Associates. By directing visitors to product listings, it enables content producers to make money off of their traffic.
The Amazon Associates Program operates as follows: the affiliate registers, and upon approval of their application, they are able to create links to post on their website. But keep in mind that you only have 180 days from the approval date to successfully refer someone—that is, to get someone to buy something on Amazon using one of your affiliate links. The account will be closed if not.
Keep in mind that Amazon tracks orders pretty well. This implies that you won’t be able to get away with buying goods on your own or by having a friend or family member do it for you.
What would happen if a buyer clicked on your link but chose to purchase a different product instead of the one you recommended? Assume, at 8 a.m. today, that a customer clicks on your affiliate link and is taken to a product listing for dog beds. But he purchases nothing. He orders an external keyboard for that same day at 3 p.m. The good news is that if someone uses your link and makes a purchase within a day, you will still be credited. This is due to the fact that Amazon pays you for directing users to the entire website rather than just a specific listing.
However, be aware that you won’t get paid for the transaction if they click on another affiliate link.
Why You Should Sign Up as an Amazon Affiliate?
The main benefit of being an Amazon affiliate is that you can collaborate with a reputable company that has millions of loyal customers worldwide and a wide range of products. Because they already know that Amazon is a great place to find high-quality products, you don’t need to convince visitors to make a purchase there.
Furthermore, there are no additional costs or hidden fees associated with the Amazon Associates program, and there are no complex prerequisites for acceptance. Simply register, create affiliate product links, distribute products to your website’s audience, and get paid commissions on eligible purchases is all that is involved in joining.
Additionally, you can take advantage of universal cookies by creating an Amazon affiliate site and joining the program. These cookies let you get paid for any product that is purchased on Amazon through your recommendation, not just the one that is linked to your referral link.
For you to be eligible for commissions, visitors to your website must make a purchase within the 24-hour period specified by the Amazon Associates cookie. It is still a profitable and adaptable program to increase income in spite of this condition.
Can anyone become an Amazon Affiliate?
It costs nothing to sign up with Amazon Associates. Anyone who has a social media account or website is eligible as long as they also fulfill the additional requirements:
- Original content is required (at least 10 posts).
- Publicly accessible and recent content (within the last 60 days) is required.
- The website cannot be deemed “unsuitable.”
The following social media networks are currently accepted by Amazon Associates:
- Facebook: only pages for groups and fans
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Watch
- Twitch.tv
To be eligible, you need to have 500 or more organic followers.
How to Create a Website with Amazon Affiliates
You must have a fully functional website, mobile app, or active social media account before you can register for the Amazon affiliate program. Amazon will review your marketing channel before granting you permission to advertise the products and platform.
Thus, effective and reliable ideas for creating an Amazon affiliate website are essential, and these are the topics we will cover next.
1. Choose a successful website niche.
You must locate a niche that aligns with your interests and pays the required commission rates for the Amazon affiliate program in order to successfully market Amazon products. In spite of previous pay reductions, there are profitable niches to choose from because Amazon’s commission income rates vary by product category.
For this reason, promoting baby products, for instance, will bring you far less than promoting high-end cosmetics or music. The standard commission rates for the various product categories are shown in the following table.
Additionally, programs designated as eligible for bounty events receive a special commission income. Customer actions such as signing up for free trials, registering, subscribing to text alerts, buying gifting memberships, and more are connected to this revenue.
Eliminate any niche ideas that are in the 0% or $0 range from your list since you won’t be paid for them.
Additionally, use a specialized SERP Analyzer tool to examine competitors who are already ranking for the keywords you wish to target when choosing the right niche. You can find competitors for specific keywords with the feature-rich SERP rank tracker from SE Ranking, which offers a list of niche rivals with the best online performance.
Important SEO elements for the top search results are also included in the software. You can use the data to assess whether you have enough resources to outperform competitors or whether it would be wiser to move to a different niche.
2. Obtain Ideas for Products and Keywords
After selecting the appropriate niche, concentrate on the keywords that will enable you to create insightful blog posts, product roundups, and reviews—all of which are crucial content kinds that are ideal for showcasing on an Amazon affiliate website.
When you’re first starting out with keyword research, Google is a free resource. To obtain information on the search intent and keyword overview, simply go to Google and enter keywords related to your niche. By doing this, you can also better understand seed keywords and determine which products to highlight.
Let’s look for some product and keyword ideas, for example, in the outdoor power tools niche, particularly pressure washers.
The retrieved search results offer a variety of Amazon products to look into for future reviews along with product keywords to utilize in the content when summarizing the advantages and disadvantages of the product. As a result, we can utilize the following keywords when creating content:
- Electric pressure washer,
- Cold water pressure washer,
- Portable pressure washer,
- Cordless pressure washer.
If you’re just starting out, Google Trends is a great resource for finding keywords for your Amazon affiliate site. The platform pays attention to specific timeframes and geolocation to help you find topics and keywords for product content and blog posts.
When choosing products for reviews and roundups, you should definitely take into account the related top and rising search queries that the tool offers.
3. Build the Structure of Your Amazon Affiliate Website
Now that you have determined your niche, target keywords, and products, it is appropriate to begin developing your website. A short but memorable domain name, responsive and user-friendly website design, and strong and dependable web hosting are the three cornerstones of any well-planned website.
A good website hosting company is necessary to guarantee both the accessibility and steady, fast loading times of your website. To choose the most appropriate hosting plan, therefore, try to comprehend the function and purpose of your website.
Keep in mind that an eCommerce website requires more sophisticated hosting features than a blog, and consider the web host’s support, options for customization, setup time, and cost. To make decisions and determine which hosting components you require, try using the website hosting calculator.
The address of your Amazon affiliate website is also very important because it affects the credibility of your site and how visitors identify it. To ensure that the top-level domain you select accurately represents the concept of your website or blog, steer clear of long domain names and pay attention to domain extensions. Examples of such extensions are.com and.org. Check out Google Domains to get started if you need to learn how to create an Amazon affiliate website with the appropriate domain name.
Actually, some hosting providers include a free domain with a specific package. Such a feature can help speed up the procedure and save you from needing to register on a separate platform.
Keep in mind that design influences the user experience (UX), site speed, and initial impression when selecting the look and feel of your website. Thus, think about the top content management systems (CMSs) or website builders and select a tool that will make the process of creating your website easy.
Certain well-known website-building tools come with pre-made themes and templates that let you create a polished website design even if you don’t have any experience with web design. Check out Weblium, Simvoly, or Elementor for WordPress, for instance. With the help of these tools, you can create visually appealing website pages without knowing any code by modifying the settings and content blocks.
4. Make Very Interesting Content
Once everything related to creating an Amazon affiliate website has been covered, focus on the content of your website. You should highlight niche-specific products on your website as an Amazon Associate, and the only way to create a compelling fake is with the aid of a plan.
Thus, group your content into three main categories:
- extensive evaluations of specific products,
- thorough roundups of products,
- extreme blog posts.
Go through Amazon’s catalog to get some ideas about what to choose. Every category has a variety of products, so look for the ones with the highest ratings and read customer reviews.
Research can inform the content of your reviews. Analyze customer testimonials, list the benefits and drawbacks of the product, and record any questions or issues that users have.
Testing the products out for yourself is an additional option. This gives you a more original approach to entice readers and increase revenue. Nevertheless, purchasing items for testing necessitates a separate budget.
There are a ton of products you can feature on your website, whether you search the Amazon catalog or Google Search Results. Finding content ideas isn’t the hardest part, though.
Your method of creating content and the inspiration behind your regular blogging can be difficult to pin down. Don’t be afraid to make your reviews funny, and think about adding pictures or videos that demonstrate how the product is used to improve the text content. Here, being genuine with your audience is crucial.
5. Aim for Organic Traffic with SEO’s Assistance
In fact, when creating your Amazon affiliate website, it is imperative that you follow SEO best practices. But the fundamentals of SEO are wide and comprise many elements that call for knowledge based. Here, we want to highlight two SEO components—internal links and backlinks—that require careful consideration when building your website.
You need a unique content hierarchy that creates a strong ecosystem for internal linking if you want to increase traffic. Developing engaging and educational content hubs and directories with product roundups and links to individual product reviews is your winning approach.
An evergreen blog with lots of useful product evaluation pages can feature hub pages and top articles, or cornerstone content, which gives you more room for higher search engine rankings.
Furthermore, a report published by Statista lists the websites with the highest quantity of backlinks based on the global Majestic Million ranking. Apple and Microsoft make it into the top ten, followed by Google, Facebook, and YouTube in the top three.
This information demonstrates how backlinks directly affect a brand’s recognition and authority. You should absolutely aim for backlinks if industry leaders are doing so. Therefore, you should think about contacting blogs on niche-related subjects to request that links mentioning your product roundup or hub be included, if applicable.
In order to market outdoor power tools, for instance, look for gardening and lawn care blogs that offer advice on how to use items on your list. This will assist you in obtaining worthwhile backlinks.
The following subjects should be taken into account when looking for websites about pressure washing:
- How to use a pressure washer to clean your outdoor furniture
- How to use a pressure washer to clean your patio
- The right and wrong ways to pressure wash
- Tips and maintenance for pressure washers
6.Get People to Click on Your Affiliate Links
Although Amazon makes it very easy to generate affiliate links, it is your responsibility to ensure that they are clickable and visible. A highly trafficked location that consistently generates commissions is the perfect location for a referral link. But how would one go about doing that?
First, make the most of your website’s design to draw attention to the Amazon links on your pages. This can be achieved by adding eye-catching buttons, accurate color schemes, and other design elements to make your links stand out.
Then, to make it easier for readers to check information while they’re on the go, add tables that showcase the products you strongly recommend to the body content at the top of the page. Product roundups from Outdoor Gear Lab are an excellent illustration of this approach.
Furthermore, go above and beyond to earn people’s trust by writing sincere and truthful product reviews.
Amazon Influencer Program vs. Amazon Affiliate
The Amazon Influencer Program and Amazon Affiliate both use the same advertising model, whereby participants are paid to direct traffic to product listings. But the Amazon Influencer Program is exclusive to those who are invited.
Participants in these programs are typically referred to as affiliates, per the common usage of the term. However, in actuality, people who are enrolled in the Amazon Associates program are referred to as affiliates, and people who participate in the Amazon Influencer Program are known as—you guessed it—influencers.
“Anyone who has a meaningful social media following” is what Amazon defines as an influencer, but it doesn’t say what meaningful means.
There are more advertising tools available to influencers. They could, for instance, have their own physical storefront on Amazon, where they could post shoppable images, idea lists, and quick films (some lasting less than a minute). In order to communicate with their followers, they can even go live.
Ways to Increase Your Income as an Amazon Affiliate
Select a topic or a niche. The product category has an impact on the commission rates for Amazon affiliates, as was previously mentioned. You have the option to review and advertise products in a specific niche, ideally one with a respectable search volume and a higher rate. It wouldn’t make sense to advertise gardening tools on a website that sells beauty products, for instance.
Thankfully, you are not limited to selecting a single niche for your website. Like Wirecutter, you can review more than one product on your website as long as you designate it as a review site.
Utilize roundups. Adapting Wirecutter’s strategy, content that lists the top or finest items in a category makes excellent affiliate links for two main reasons. First off, the majority of users searching for terms like “top 5 best laptops for students in 2022” are most likely doing so in anticipation of making a purchase soon. Second, you have the opportunity to advertise several products—that is, several affiliate links—in a single post or video.
Take a look at the YouTube channel Top 5 Picks. They create videos where they evaluate and compile the top 5 products across a range of categories.
The affiliate links are in the description box of the videos, so when you click on one and like a product they reviewed, you don’t have to go through Amazon to find the products yourself. They even feature various links to various Amazon marketplaces.
Continually produce original content. Once upon a time, it was acceptable to simply copy and paste reviews from other websites. However, since there are more affiliate marketers out there, you need to differentiate yourself by creating unique content. It does help to use the products before writing about them.
Employ several platforms. There are numerous social media sites available, and joining up is typically free. Have an account on YouTube? Add links to your content in the description field. Or you could use My Day on Instagram to share them. Since affiliate commissions are based on results, spreading the word will increase your chances of generating more income.
Conclusions
It’s not difficult to create an Amazon affiliate website and sign up as an Amazon Associate. Some people think the Amazon affiliate program is out of date and useless, but others still use it to generate income. It thus all depends on how hard you work and how far you are willing to go. But keep in mind that boundaries are only imaginary.