24-05-2020 by Mirai
There are many ways to earn money online, but the favorite of many is with the Amazon affiliate program. Why do you like it so much? For its ability to generate income with few visitors and for its semi-passive income. It is a system that is implemented and then can (almost) be forgotten. Amazon takes care of everything else.
It is not necessary to have a great technical knowledge. The key to success is making the right decisions. If you do it right, and with a few hours of work per week, it can generate you a monthly income that many employees would envy.
With good planning and constant efforts, the results are sure to surprise you.
What is Amazon membership?
Amazon membership is a way to attract customers to Amazon and get paid by Amazon. The Amazon Partner Program pays you a commission on purchases from these brought customers. In other words: just send the right people to the Amazon site, and if they buy, Amazon pays you a commission. This is how you earn and Amazon too: Amazon gets customers and gives you a percentage of those sales.
Imagine you have a blog where you talk about inflatable mattresses. If you recommend a mattress on one of your items, you can earn an income by sending interested people to buy that product on Amazon. Integrating this link system on a site or blog is very simple. You just need to add special links (also called affiliate links) provided by Amazon for the products you want to recommend.
If you place this link and someone clicks on this link, they will go to the Amazon product page. If you buy, Amazon will know that the sale was made thanks to you and will give you a percentage of the sale. You can recommend everything in the Amazon catalog, such as books, garden tools, video games, kitchen utensils, clothing, decoration accessories ... millions of products!
This system requires very little initial investment and can become almost completely passive: let the Internet work for you while you sleep.
All it takes is for people to visit your site, read your articles, click on your Amazon links, and buy something. And for that there is no need to intervene because it is Amazon who is responsible for the sale, shipping and customer service.
You would need an investment that makes the difference in proportion to the profits. An example of expenses:
Domain name = 13 dollars
Domain accommodation = 46 dollars
WordPress theme (optional) = $ 5
Writing articles (I hired writers) = $ 218
Total cost = $ 282 in a year, which means $ 23 a month
And this can bring you 2,395 dollars during the first 12 months. You make money, but you also bring several thousand dollars in sales to Amazon.
Advantage
The financial investment is very low.
To earn money with Amazon membership, you only need one website. That means spending about $ 13 a year on a domain name, and about $ 60 a year on hosting.
Optionally, you can buy a paid theme for your website (although there are many free), spend money to link other sites to yours and get more visits (although, as you will see below, you can do it for free) and you will even pay people to write the content of the articles for you (although it is not recommended at the beginning and it will be explained why).
Requires little maintenance
Although you'll initially spend many hours writing site content, once you have your articles, you can practically leave them on autopilot. In addition to the updates needed to keep the products you recommend updated, it won't take much longer and you can take advantage of this to start new projects.
Amazon is a machine for sale
This is what makes this affiliate program a true ATM. More and more people are shopping online and on Amazon (you may have already bought from them), and the Amazon site is perfectly optimized so that almost no one can leave without buying something. Recommend products according to your preferences, at a free or very low shipping cost and it is possible to find products at a good price.
Amazon gives you a commission for everything the customer buys
Another great advantage is that you will not only earn money for the product it recommends, but also for all the products purchased (recommended or not) until the cookie expires (it is with cookies that Amazon identifies that a customer comes from your website).
In fact, it is very common to earn commissions for products that have nothing to do with their recommendations, since people often take advantage of being on Amazon to buy other things at the same time.
Disadvantages
The cookie only lasts 24 hours.
Every time someone clicks on one of your affiliate links, Amazon automatically installsEnter a cookie in your browser. In this way, Amazon knows that this person is one of your references.
This is how the vast majority of affiliate programs work, but in the case of Amazon, this cookie expires after 24 hours, so if the user visits Amazon and purchases after 24 hours, the sale will not be counted for you.
Other affiliate programs offer cookies that last for several days or even several months. That way, if the customer doubts and prefers to wait a bit before buying, you will still have the commission.
It's a bit short for a cookie, but I've done a lot of testing with other affiliate programs, and despite that, Amazon is still much more profitable.
Commissions are low
Amazon's commission rates vary between 1.5 and 12%, it is generally below the digital product affiliate programs, but it should not be forgotten that they are physical products, therefore, the margins are lower for everyone because there are a tangible product to manufacture and deliver.
However, a few years ago, commission rates were higher, but there was a sales commission ceiling of $ 11. In other words, if you had sold a product for $ 500 and your commission was 10%, instead of earning $ 50 as in 2020, you would only receive $ 10. That is why very few people use the Amazon affiliation and many continue to think that the Amazon affiliation does not pay much. They think it is still limited to 10 dollars and it is not.
Now there is no limit, which means you can take advantage of the opportunity and earn money by recommending high-priced products.
Amazon has its own rules
Amazon can change its terms of association at any time, change commissions or even delete your account due to bad practices (hiding links or encouraging users to click on them). But do not worry. If done correctly, you will have no worries and if your site receives traffic, there will always be other affiliate programs to monetize them in the unlikely event that Amazon decides to end its program.
Amazon Commissions As Amazon becomes increasingly popular, you don't need affiliates to send visitors to certain categories on your site. Commissions may decrease in the coming years. In fact, in the United States, certain categories such as video games already have a 1% commission, since there are affiliates in this field. The opportunity to start is now.
How to create links and banners
Once you have opened your affiliate account, creating a link is simple. Just search Amazon for the product you want to promote on your site and click on the Text option in the bar at the top of the screen. Then you will see a special (affiliate) link that you will need to add to your website on your own.
Adding a link is very simple. In most text editors on the Internet, like WordPress (the most popular and free), you just have to select the text and click on the link to add it.
Amazon also allows you to create text links with images. In this case, it will give you a code that you must copy and paste into the html version of your text editor.
Text + image links provide too much information, and you'll find out why they're not ideal for conversions.
The banners are small drawings, most of the time animated like a GIF, you can also place them on your site by copying the code that Amazon provides you.
They are usually placed in the header or sidebars of blogs, but are not very effective because they "advertise."
How to track conversions
Once the content on your site already has affiliate links and gets traffic, there will be people who will click on your links and end up buying something from Amazon.
Your Amazon affiliate account has a dashboard where you can find statistics on Amazon clicks and sales you've made with the commissions generated.
It also has a graph with your results from the beginning of the month, showing your conversion rate (the number of purchases per 100 clicks).
You can see which products generate the most commissions and select other terms to see their results.
You can also create other tracking IDs, allowing you to better identify where your blog clicks and sales are coming from.
How to make money with Amazon affiliation
Now you know how to enroll in the Amazon Affiliate Program and the basics to understand how it works. But you have the most important thing: the strategy to make it a source of income.
Choose a niche
This first decision will determine the results you will get.
You must choose what you are going to talk about and what type of products you are going to recommend.
Imagine someone needs a vacuum cleaner. Put yourself in their place, there are many websites where you can buy one, like Amazon, Cdiscount or FNAC. PeIf you are not knowledgeable about vacuum cleaners, you should educate yourself before purchasing one.
In this case, you'll probably be looking for a comparison or analysis article before making your decision, right?
Now is your chance as an affiliate.
Online stores generally don't offer this kind of comparison information and content, and you can create a site to fill this gap.
You will receive visits from people looking for information, and if they are satisfied with your recommendations, they will eventually buy from Amazon (and you will receive a commission).
Therefore, you have 3 options:
1. You can create a website focused only on the analysis of this type of product. This is called niche specialization.
2. You can create a general site where you will analyze many types of products, vacuum cleaners, televisions and video games. This is called a general site because it doesn't specialize in anything.
3. Or you can blog about something that really interests you, such as a video game, and among the articles you publish, write one that recommends computers, keyboards, mice, etc. This is called the authority site.
The third strategy is the one that works best and is based on a passion. If you add value to your content and empathize with readers, you will create a loyal audience and it will also be easier to recommend affiliate products because your audience will listen to you.
Also, if you are an avid gamer, you probably prefer to write about your experiences and your latest keyboard instead of vacuums, right?
However, this strategy also requires a lot of time and effort.
The first strategy, creating a site with your opinions on the products of a certain niche is simpler and faster, so it is good to start with.
The second strategy has the greatest potential to generate income, but requires a lot of writing. In addition, specialized niches generally have greater visibility in search results, because Google understands that this site is a reference in this field.
Validate the niche with Amazon
The first step in validating whether a niche has potential is to see how it sells on Amazon and what the average price is. Typically, the more opinion a product has, the more it sells. And if the average price is more than 30 dollars, you face a good opportunity.
First go to the best-selling products on Amazon
Then click a category on the left to see the 100 best-selling products in the last hour. Imagine that in position 20, we found a toy with more than 400 comments and a price of 70 dollars.
Before continuing, you should make sure that you are not the only product with potential in your category, so see if there are similar products in your category.
If we see that several references have more than 100 comments and an average price of more than 50 dollars, it seems a good niche, but we still need to do two more verifications.
Validate Google search volume
To automate the generation of passive income, the idea is that the site receives visits thanks to its free natural positioning in search engines (Google).
What you want is that when someone searches for your keyword in Google, they find your site and visit it. But if it turns out that nobody is looking for this product, you will receive few visits and little income. So it is essential to know how many people search for this keyword on Google. And the good news is that there is a free tool that can help you get an idea.
The Google Keyword Planner
In fact, it is a service for companies that want to advertise on Google. Google reports on the number of people searching for a specific keyword, so they can allocate a budget for their advertising campaigns. And you can use this information to validate the potential of your niche without spending money.
If you don't have a Google Ads account, you must create one. It will ask you to enter the URL of your website and send it to the administration panel.
Leave a niche aside if there are less than 1000 searches per month, unless the price of the products is very high.
Another tip is to also validate word combinations with the intention of buying, for example, "buy a child's toy" or "compare children's toys."
People doing this kind of research are probably ready to buy, so this is a very good sign. For these searches with intention to buy, any result between 100 and 1000 per month is already good.
Evaluate your competitors
Once you have validated that the products in this niche are sold on Amazon, that they have a good price and that people are looking for them on the Internet, it is time to do the last check:
To sell, your site must appear on the first page of Google, because this is how you will receive traffic. Because, as they say in this sector, the second page of Google is the best place to hide something.
To find out if it will be easy, sayeasy or impossible, you must do an analysis.
Typically, you'll find stores like Amazon in search results. In certain cases, you can pass in front of them if their content is better.
You will also often find other sites that are affiliated with Amazon and this is a good sign as it shows that there is an opportunity to rank, so now you must judge your content and see if you can do better.
If your content is poor and you can give more useful information, perfect! And if the articles are good, you will have to work harder to overcome them.
When you can't find Amazon affiliate sites, it can mean two things:
You just found an untapped niche, which is interesting but rare.
Or that Google does not allow affiliates to position themselves in this niche or this keyword.
You can try to see on page 2 of Google. If you can't find affiliate sites, maybe no one has tried it yet. Go for it! (if only it's worth it).
Create your content
If you want to be visible in Google searches, to begin with, you must create better and more useful content than what already exists.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who wants to buy a product with little knowledge. What would I like to know? What characteristics would you like to know and compare?
Usually, you should write a guide about your niche so that users know what to consider before buying a product.
Then, using the keyword planning tool, look for terms related to your niche where you can write articles, such as "Compare [your niche]" or "Best value for money."
In any case, it is always a good idea to write an article on how to choose the best product or the best products in this niche. The word "best" is very striking because people want to be sure that they are buying something of quality.
Then you should write a comprehensive review of the most popular products in this niche, as they generally contain a lot of research. To find out which products are the most wanted, use the keyword planning tool again.
There is only one rule when writing your content: provide user utility. Take a look at the pages of your competitors and think of ways to improve.
Do not make the classic mistake of describing only the technical characteristics: find out and explain what advantages it will bring to the user, how it is used, what advantages it has compared to another and for which buyer profile we recommend.
And while you may be tempted at some point to pay someone to write content for you, be careful! Usually you will spend more time correcting and improving paid articles than writing them yourself, let's be clear, 90% of writers write generic content that applies to all products in general.
If you want to hire a copywriter, make sure they are a copywriting expert and have the will and ability to research the details of each product. For starters, you better get the job done and you'll also learn more about the niche.
In summary
Amazon membership is an amazing system for making money online, even for people without technical knowledge (you can learn it).
Simply create a website in a niche with potential, create content that adds value to the user, recommend products, and let Amazon take care of the rest.
More and more people make money from Amazon, but that doesn't mean it's too late. Rather: There is generally too much scatter and too much mediocre content, so there are plenty of places to take if you create a quality site.
work, internet, amazon, online, affiliates, sales, money, earnings, income, salary, liabilities