How Does Amazon Affiliate Work: Start Making Money Now

Recently updated on February 26th, 2023 at 11:05 am

With Amazon, affiliate marketing becomes a beginner-friendly way to make money online. It allows us to build online businesses without having to create a product or offer customer service. We find the affiliate product, grab our links, and start doing business.

Amazon opened big opportunities to monetize our blogs in every niche you can think of. It perfectly works for those who are trying to squeeze into the most uncompetitive and narrow niches, and willing to generate a high volume of sales.

However, for some bloggers and marketers, Amazon may not seem the best way to monetize their blogs due to certain reasons. In this article, we will discuss how this program generally works, and if it’s worth trying to make money with it.

How Amazon Affiliate Program Works?

Most people who have access to the internet know that Amazon is the biggest online marketplace in the world. There are millions of products with over 100 million buyers only from the USA. This creates a lot of opportunities for bloggers and other entrepreneurs.

One of these opportunities is Amazon Associates, which is the affiliate program of the company. It allows you to promote any product from the marketplace without owning it or asking permission from the original seller, and you earn a commission from each referred sale.

You refer to those sales via your unique affiliate link. Amazon’s toolbar called SiteStripe, will allow you to generate these links for any product in a form of text, or a button.

With Amazon Associates, you can promote almost everything that comes to your head – from socks to exercise machines. However, choosing low ticket products that don’t cost even 20 bucks may not be a good idea.

It’s because Amazon’s commissions vary only from 1% to 10%, depending on the product category. Here are a few popular categories, and here’s what they offer:

Health & Personal Care – 4,5%

Home Goods – 8%

Luxury Beauty – 10%

Outdoor equipment – 5,50%

Pets Products – 8%

Fashion – 4%

Every category offers a wide range of product pricings, so you want to promote something at the price that pays off your marketing efforts.

This commission range may seem a little low compared to other affiliate platforms that pay a higher percentage of commissions. For example, digital product marketplaces, like Clickbank offers 50-75% of commission rates, and sometimes you can earn over $500 from each generated sale with certain digital products.

There are two reasons why Amazon’s payouts may seem low compared to other affiliate platforms. Firstly, it mainly sells physical goods, that means its production and shipping involves some costs already, while vendors who sell digital products almost don’t encounter any duplication or shipping costs at all.

Another reason why Amazon only pays out up to 10% of commissions is that the reputation it has. This massive, highly trustable brand already has tons of its own returning customers. Therefore, it makes the most of its profits without having to give massive commissions away, as the new brands do.

What Is Good About Amazon Associate (Top Benefits)?

Besides low commission rates, there are benefits that you can’t find elsewhere, and for this reason, this affiliate program is one of the most popular in the industry.

TRUST = CONVERSIONS

Affiliate marketing is a business model based on the ability of the marketer to convince other people to buy certain products, and it all comes from building trust. First, you don’t have to build so much trust with your audience to recommend Amazon products.

Millions of people worldwide use Amazon since 1994, and they are aware of their service quality. People know that Amazon has a little risk because of its flexible refund policy and effective shipping system.

So, on Amazon referred customers tend to convert a way better compared to the other marketplaces. That means low commissions may not seem to be that scary knowing Amazon can generate a great volume of sales.

IT HELPS YOU EARN MORE

Second, you earn money not only for the suggested product but also for every sale that your referrals make. This is a huge one because people often add to their carts and buy multiple things at the same time. It’s also exciting because you never know how much the buyer’s cart can accumulate.

When they click your link and visit Amazon, its 24-hour cookie will make sure you get credit for anything visitors to buy within a day.

On top of that, if the referred customer adds yours or any other product to his shopping cart, cookie will stay there for 90 days. That means that the referred customer has another 89 days to come back and finalize his purchase, and you will still get a commission for that.

Amazon makes sure to remind its customers about any incomplete purchases left by email or notifications. So, the chances of customers coming back to his abandoned shopping cart and completing a purchase are high.

WORKS ALMOST FOR EVERY NICHE

A lot of times people focus on creating their blogs based on the affiliate products they can promote in the future. This is not the approach we teach, and you should focus on creating your blog before even looking at the available affiliate offers.

The ultimate key to successful blogging is to come up with a niche you are passionate about, and you should start your long-term blogging business from the discovery of your favorite niche. The good thing about Amazon is that you can find a product to promote no matter how unique or popular your niche is.

If you are in a health and fitness niche, you can promote everything from dietary supplements to exercise machines. Or in case you are in a rabbit niche, there are opportunities to make money by promoting things like rabbit cages or rabbit nutrition.

Such product diversity gives Amazon affiliates huge diversion to monetize their blogs. With Amazon, you should never run out of product ideas, and you can take advantage of the most specific and unique world’s niches.

How To Make Money With Amazon Affiliate Program?

Amazon Affiliate has an approval process that takes a few days. You will need a basic website that follows the rules of the program. It must be functional and have an affiliate disclaimer. If your website isn’t full of spam and has a bit of quality content, it will get easily approved most of the time.

Amazon affiliates have a website, and their strategy focused on getting organic traffic from Google. It is targeted and quality traffic that converts best as people are always searching for different queries that are related to Amazon products. Here are some steps that you should consider to follow to become a successful Amazon affiliate:

1. Choose A Niche

A niche is a category of products that you want to promote. There are many types of websites that promote Amazon products. Some of them focus on a specific niche, while others are broader and include multiple niches.

In both cases, you CAN’T write about broad or multiple things in the beginning and expect great results.

A website needs a certain topic, and then it must include relevant content. This is how you can create an audience and repetitive visitors.

The easiest way to find a niche for an Amazon Affiliate website is to visit Amazon and check the categories. Each category has many subcategories and products. Any of these categories or subcategories can be your first niche.

Usually, the more specifically you go with your niche at the start, the better the results are. So it’s often a good idea to base your website on a certain subcategory in your niche as long as there are people who buy these products and leave reviews. Many buyers will search on Google for these products before buying and your blog has a chance of showing up in front of them.

A good option would be to start with something that you have some basic knowledge in, or you are interested in learning it. While you can do research and learn every topic, you can minimize that research time in the beginning as you write what you know about already. Also, if you really like to talk about your niche, creating content can become a fun activity.

2. Create A Blog

This is the easiest part of the whole process and you can get this task done within a few hours if you follow the right guide. Today all you need to invest to have your website is something around 50 bucks/year, and that’s so little compared to what you can earn from it.

Once you know the topic for your blog, head over to one of the domain & hosting providers, choose your website’s name, install WordPress, and you are ready to go.

Here’s a great step-by-step guide on how you can have your website up and running in under 1 hour.

3. Publish Content

Your success with the Amazon affiliate program depends on the quality and quantity of the content. As mentioned before, every successful Amazon affiliate focuses on organic traffic from Google.

Nowadays, Google requires a lot of high-quality content to rank it. That means you shouldn’t expect to show up on search engines without having 25-35 relevant articles on your blog. Your content must be original, informational and helpful. It should include images or videos, and it shouldn’t be shorter than 1800-3000 words.

There are three types of websites that work well for affiliate sites:

Review websites: Most users who buy things on the internet do research before taking their final decision. They type on Google product keywords like “product + review“.

By creating content that targets such buyer intend keywords, you can get buyer traffic to your website. If they read your content, you can add your affiliate links and send them to the relevant product pages. A percentage of them will buy these products, and you will earn commissions.

List websites: With these sites, you target people who already know what type of product they need and do research for the best options. You can create pages with the best products in a category. You may include 10-20 products on one page with descriptions, images, pros and cons of each product, and your affiliate links. Usually, these lists have a top recommendation and useful tips.

How-to websites: How-to sites are informational guides to do different things. Your focus is on helping people to create or learn something. Many of these guides include products that do specific things. When you mention a product in the article, you can add your affiliate links for the relevant product pages on Amazon, and earn commissions when someone buys.

Other websites: If you have already a website or a blog that is not created with the focus on the Amazon Affiliate program, you can add some native shopping ads from Amazon. They are ads on the sidebar or between your content. If a visitor clicks on them and makes a purchase, you still earn your commission.

4. Optimize Your Website For SEO

You will get most of your traffic from search engines, so it’s essential to optimize your website for SEO. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to get some good rankings on Google, but your website and your articles need to follow some rules.

The good news is that there are some free WordPress plugins that can help you with your on-page SEO. For example, you can use Yoast SEO plugin and check the suggestions of the tool in each article. Again, the quality and the quantity of the content are important ranking factors, and you need to add your keywords on the title, first paragraph, some subheadings, meta title, and meta description.

Another part of your performance is the off-page SEO. This is actually about the backlinks of your website. The more other high-quality websites will link to yours, the higher you are going to rank. You may consider writing a few guest posts, share your articles on social media, or hire someone to help you with that part.

If you want to get the maximum from search engines, you need a combination of quality content, great user experience, and backlinks. You don’t want to focus only on the rankings factors because it can affect the quality of your content and conversions. Keeping a balance is a good strategy.

5. Use A Link Localizer

Amazon sells products to many countries around the world. When you create an article, it will get traffic from multiple countries and not only from the USA. However, if you use your affiliate link from Amazon.com, you can monetize only the traffic from the USA.

For those who don’t want to waste any traffic, there is only one option. You need to create accounts on Amazon Associates for every available country. For example, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, etc.

Next, you can add a link localizer that identifies the country of each visitor and send him to the product page of his country. There are many WordPress plugins that work as link localizers. You download one of these plugins, add your affiliate links, and it will do the rest.

How Much Do Amazon Affiliates Make?

There are many niches and sub-niches packed with products that you can promote. So, the sky is the limit on how much you can earn with it. If you are wondering whether it’s possible to make a full-time income from Amazon – it is possible to make 100x of that.

You can start with one website in one specific niche, promote as many products as possible, and check the results. Then, you can expand in your niche or create a new website in another niche.

I can’t estimate how much you can make from each website. It all depends on the competition, the price of the products, and the commissions. However, there are many part-time and full-time affiliate marketers from the Amazon affiliate program alone. Also, there are success stories from affiliates with multiple websites that make over $100k per month.

Some marketers create Amazon affiliate sites and sell them on online marketplaces. These niche websites can be worth 12 or even 36 times their monthly income. If you can reach the $500 per month, which is realistically achievable for a starter, you can easily sell it for $6,000+ and use that money to create new ones.

Final Words:

Becoming an Amazon affiliate has many benefits and advantages compared to other affiliate business models. You have the best conversion rates, they always pay you on time, and there are multiple opportunities to promote new products and create new websites.

It has a learning curve like any other legit business and it takes time to master, but it can generate amazing results in the long run. The only negative is the low commissions but with the right volume of targeted traffic, you will overcome that.