How to Make Money with Amazon Affiliate Marketing in 2023
Are you eager to start an online business and think that Amazon affiliate marketing is the way to do it? This article is going to show you how you can earn steady passive income by promoting items from the largest and most well known e-commerce platform in the world, all while having your own home as a workplace.
Let me guide you through everything related to the Amazon Associate’s affiliate program and offer effective tips so that you can build a thriving business with this idea.
Short Summary
What is Amazon Affiliate Marketing, and how can you get started with it?
How to choose a niche, create high quality content, and promote Amazon affiliate links to build a successful business.
Diversify income streams, and scale your efforts for increased profits.
Understanding Amazon Affiliate Marketing
The Amazon Associates Program, Amazon’s affiliate marketing program, is a great way to earn money from various digital marketing channels by promoting products from the online retail giant. Affiliate marketers leverage this popular company to monetize their content with unique links, resulting in commissions when visitors click and buy on Amazon.
Depending on what you promote, commission rates vary between product categories – as an affiliate marketer, it’s important to consider carefully which items you are going to feature.
How the Amazon Associates Program Works
Amazon’s Affiliate Program, officially known as the Amazon Associates Program, can be joined for free. Once you have enrolled in it, you will gain access to tools such as product links and banners that help you earn commissions from purchases made from content like blog posts or YouTube channels, where you’ve posted your unique links and banners.
People who take part in this program make money when visitors coming through these affiliate links purchase something within 24 hours. This type of marketing method benefits both sides: you get revenue while your followers are able to buy high quality products they actually want from Amazon!
Signing up with the program is straightforward. You should have either qualified websites, Social Media Profiles or even YouTube channels filled with interesting content to use as your promotional method when applying.
Once accepted, you have 180 days to earn 3 qualified sales to keep your account open. In some instances, Amazon may approve you for the program only to shut you down shortly thereafter, usually due to not having an established online presence of some sort.
If this happens to you, don’t worry, you can always come back. Just work on building an audience first. You can’t market products to an empty room anyways.
Commission Structure and Rates
Amazon Affiliates can generate revenues by leveraging their unique affiliate links in a variety of product categories. The rate you earn on your sales may range between 1%-20%, depending on the product category.
For example, Luxury Beauty products pay a hefty 10% commission across the site, while health and personal care products only pay 1%. This is something to take into consideration when deciding which products you’ll actually be promoting as an Amazon Associate.
Amazon’s dashboard does provide you with a wide range of analytics and graphs for tracking. Once you start earning commissions it will be easy for you to identify where your best performers are.
Building a Successful Amazon Affiliate Business
Having the right niche and targeting a precise crowd is essential to building a successful business of any kind. To maximize your chances of achieving success, you should pick an area that you are familiar with, some background knowledge and a content marketing strategy will help you market the products better, resulting in more sales.
Creating engaging material which appeals to those focused on your particular theme will also play a large role. Because the commission payouts are smaller for Amazon products than they are for most other affiliate marketing niches and products, you’re going to need a much higher volume of sales.
In order to do this, you’ll want to primarily focus on very broad content that is going to be appealing to your entire target audience. Lets take a closer look on how you can do these things.
Choosing Your Niche
To have a thriving Amazon affiliate business, you can’t just promote anything from the platform that you want to everyone and anyone. This won’t work.
You’ll need to decide on a popular niche that has a very large existing audience you can tap into. For example, the kitchen and cooking niche sounds great as there are a lot of kitchen products you can promote, but you should take it a step further and go into the home niche.
This opens the door for not only kitchen products, but also cleaning products, garden products, décor, you name it.
Now that you have a much larger pipeline of products to choose from, that still applies to one primary audience, you can create content that will always appeal to the entire audience and you will have more top selling trending products to choose from. Resulting in much more revenue because all of the products were selling well before you even showed up.
Creating High-Quality Content
To become successful in Amazon affiliate marketing, you need to develop high-quality content that speaks directly to your audience. This means to go beyond just making reviews for products you have around the house that are on Amazon.
Crafting reviews is great, but also do some research on your space and make comparisons, how-to guides, lists, organization videos, assembly videos, showcase the problems that the products solve and more as its related to your niche.
A lot of your customers will be looking for different reasons that they need the products you’re showcasing. Failing to have a range of content that will help and serve your audience about these products will ultimately lead them to seek that information elsewhere, which means the sale will likely go to another affiliate.
Promoting Your Affiliate Links
Getting affiliate links to Amazon products is very simple and straightforward. You can get an affiliate link to any product on the site by making use of the “SiteStripe” toolbar.
Once you create you Amazon Associates account just very simply go to Amazon.com, search for the product you want to promote, and then click on “text link” in the toolbar.
This will display your shortened affiliate link that can be clicked by your traffic. You can also get banners from the toolbar as well.
It’s important to read and understand the Amazon Associates Operating Agreement as far as where and how you can share these links. Amazon is very particular in the sense that they don’t want you to promote links in a spammy way.
For example, you can promote mentioned products via link in the description of a Youtube video, but direct linking to an Amazon affiliate link in a Pinterest pin will result in termination of your Amazon Associates account if caught. As well as termination of your Pinterest account.
The safest and most effective ways to promote Amazon links will be through a sales funnel, in emails to an organically grown email list, in blog posts, and in YouTube videos.
All of these traffic methods provide you with a safe way to promote links and abide by the guidelines while also being able to provide a lot of value to your audience in the process.
Growing Your Amazon Affiliate Income
Now that you understand how the Amazon Associates program works, got signed up, and you’ve decided on a niche and target audience, it’s time to start scaling your revenue.
This is done by diversifying your income streams and traffic methods, optimizing for the best conversion rates, and finding the absolute best products to promote to maximize your commissions and still recommend a quality product.
Let’s dive deeper into this part of the process and get you winning.
Diversifying Income Streams and Traffic Methods
In order to decrease risk and boost earnings, it is wise to diversify your income sources. Apart from just Amazon affiliate marketing, look into other ways of monetization, such as promoting products from different affiliate networks, or companies, like Target, Walmart, etc.
You may find that you can earn a higher commission promoting the same product to your audience through the Target affiliate program than you would promoting it on Amazon. After all, you’ll already be sending in your own traffic; there is nothing saying you have any sort of loyalty to the Amazon Associates program.
Leverage other affiliate programs to add more products and opportunities to your pipeline.
Also consider diversifying your traffic methods. Having all of your eggs in one basket is never a good idea.
For example, if you are using Tiktok to draw in your audience and promote Affiliate links on a Linktree, you are taking on a large amount of risk because any day TikTok can decide that you’ve violated their guidelines and shut you down. The second that happens, all of your revenue is gone.
However, if you were also creating a YouTube channel for videos, writing blog posts, and building an email list, if TikTok were to get taken away, you still had the other three methods of getting traffic to your links while you built a new TikTok account.
Learning the different strategies that entrepreneurs are using to accomplish this will be paramount to your success. There are a lot of affiliate marketing courses created by some of these entrepreneurs that will help you lay the foundation of an affiliate marketing empire.
Optimizing Conversion Rates
No successful affiliate marketing move will ever reach its true potential without optimization. Paying close attention to certain metrics like your conversion rate plays a large role in how much money you will ultimately make.
You’re working with percentages, so when you can find ways to improve them, the growth can be massive.
For example, lets say you’re consistently bringing in 1,000 clicks per month to your affiliate links, if your conversion rate is 1% (which is a common conversion rate, a lot of marketers just run their business at numbers this low) that means you’ll be collecting 10 sales for every 1,000 clicks.
So you’ve got 2 options to maximize your revenue, either get more clicks or raise your conversion rate. Now, if you were to increase your conversion rate to 5%, you’re now collecting 50 sales for those same 1,000 clicks. This compounds really quickly.
Let’s take a look at some simple ways to improve the conversion rate.
Method #1: Choose better products
Taking a close look at the products you’re recommending and determining the absolute best fit for the audience, best quality out of the options available, and market trends to see which variations of a product are selling the best will undoubtedly increase your conversion rate
Method #2: Always follow up
Making sure you are capturing leads in a way that you can reach back out to your customers and potential customers is key. Most people aren’t going to buy on the first touchpoint. Building an email list or an engaged Facebook community are both great ways to get more sales for the number of eyes you are bringing in.
Method #3: Look at your analytics
Undoubtedly, some of your campaigns are going to be duds. By looking at your analytics and determining which campaigns are your best performers, you can quickly knock out the low performers and put all of your time and energy into the campaigns that are producing the best results.
A Step Above Amazon Affiliate Marketing: The Amazon Influencer Program
The Amazon Associates program is where a lot of affiliates get their start in the Affiliate Marketing industry. But there is an elephant in the room that can allow you to scale your revenue WAY up, and with a lot less work. I’m talking about the Amazon Influencer Program.
This isn’t exactly affiliate marketing because with this opportunity, you won’t be sharing any actual affiliate links, you’ll be posting your content directly on Amazon and earning commissions from customers that are already on the product listings.
See Related Article: How To Become An Amazon Influencer And Earn $100+ Per Day
Getting into Amazon’s affiliate program is open to pretty much anyone, but the Amazon Influencer program is quite a bit more difficult. They will require you to have a large following and they will be checking that those followers were acquired organically.
Put simply, as an Amazon Influencer, you will be creating product reviews and demo videos that live right on the product listings next to the pictures uploaded by the seller. If someone views that video and then makes a purchase you will earn a commission on that sale.
This means you didn’t have to do any lead generation or send any of your own traffic to the site, unlike if you were to send them in via an affiliate link. It also means that as long as your video lives on the listing, you will be earning passive commissions from Amazon. If you manage to get a video on a trending product listing, you can see dozens or even hundreds of sales per day.
Scaling your income to $100+ per day with the Amazon Influencer program really isn’t a difficult feat. In my first month as an influencer I uploaded 18 video reviews of products around my house and earned over $300 in commissions.
My Take
In my personal opinion, whether you are a brand new affiliate marketer looking to supplement your income or a full time affiliate looking for additional streams of revenue, Amazon’s affiliate program is definitely one to consider adding to your business strategy.
Taking into consideration just the level of trust that consumers have in this retail giant, will make it much easier for you to convert sales that it will be for a product from a company that no one has ever heard of.
This doesn’t mean it is going to be easy, but with enough patience and consistency, you can generate a full time income from Amazon that allows you to have the type of lifestyle you’ve been dreaming of without the stress of most other forms of entrepreneurship.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much do Amazon affiliates make?
On average, Amazon affiliates can make between 1% and 20% commission on qualified sales. So if you are promoting a $100 product that pays a 5% commission, you will earn $5 for that sale.
How to become an affiliate Amazon marketer?
To become an Amazon Affiliate, navigate to the homepage of their Associates program and sign up with your account details including website address, store ID and explanation as to how you’ll create affiliate links to drive traffic. Then choose a payment method before creating affiliate links for sharing.
How much does it cost to be an affiliate marketer on Amazon?
It does not cost you anything to be an affiliate marketer on Amazon. All you have to do is have a valid traffic source to promote your links to and fill out the application. As long as you can continuously send in traffic and qualified sales, you can continue to be an affiliate marketer for Amazon.
How do I choose the right niche for my Amazon affiliate business?
Choose a topic that you’re passionate about, has high demand and low competition, something which can be uncovered by using search engines and conducting keyword research while looking at search volume and assessing your rivals.
By making content related to this field of interest both for yourself and the target audience, it could help differentiate you from other competitors in the market ultimately increasing success opportunities.
