Ultimate Amazon Affiliate Marketing Guide: How to Make Money

There are several reasons why Amazon is the go-to marketplace for most affiliate marketers.

For one, Amazon has an immense inventory composed of more than twelve million products and services.
Two, the program offers its affiliates various tools and resources that they can use to attract more customers and sell more goods.
And last but not the least, Amazon offers a reliable commission system for its affiliates.

Amazon doesn’t implement a single commission rate in all its products. The rates depend on the selling prices of the products and the categories they belong to.

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How the Amazon Affiliate Marketing Program Works

The first thing you should do is sign up with Amazon. It will only take just a few minutes of your time.

However, it’s worth mentioning here that Amazon now has an application review process. They will check your application once you’ve driven at least three qualified sales within 180 days.

The reviewers will look into the website, blog, mobile app, or social networking page that you have provided during the sign-up process.

If you meet all of Amazon’s requirements, you will be given the go signal to keep on promoting their affiliate products.

To increase your chances of getting approved, you should build a website first and make sure that it receives a good number of daily visitors before you sign up with the program.

If you do not meet the company’s standards, your application will be denied. Furthermore, they don’t reassess your application once it has been rejected.

So make sure that your site is up to standards before you sign up.

Making Money on Amazon Begins in Choosing a Niche

Picking a niche is the first step in building a successful Amazon affiliate marketing business.

You need to look for a niche that meets the following attributes: it’s profitable and it’s low competition. In short, there should be online demand for the product and the supply shouldn’t be that saturated.

But how do you find these profitable and low-competition niches?

This is where your research skills come into play. You need to spend a lot of time on Google and Amazon trying to gauge the profitability of a particular niche.

There are tools and resources that you can use to help you find a good niche.

There is Google’s keyword suggestion tool. This tool allows you to determine how much organic searches a product is getting.

The tool also provides you with an estimate of the competition surrounding the keywords. This helps you decide if it’s worth it pursuing a niche or not.

You should also take time to look into what your potential competitors are doing.

Do you see holes or flaws in the way they are doing business?

Do you think you can offer better products and services than them?

Then the niche you have in mind could be worth exploring.

How to Make Your Affiliate Website Rank Higher in Search Engines

Organic traffic from search engines is the best type of traffic especially for sales-oriented websites like affiliate marketing sites and niche sites.

With that said, a good chunk of your marketing strategies should be geared towards attracting traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.

The higher you rank in the search results, the more targeted customers you can drive to your website. To make this happen, you need to learn how to implement SEO (search engine optimization).

SEO is not rocket science.

It sounds complicated but it’s actually easy to learn and implement once you know the basics. The most important aspects of SEO revolve around keyword research, content creation using the keywords, and link building.

For keyword research, all you need is Google’s keyword suggestion tool.

It’s free to use as long as you have a Google account. When creating content for your affiliate website, make sure to use the keywords and phrases you’ve picked during your keyword research.

Last but not the least, link building is about creating links in other websites that point to your website.

Google takes into account these backlinks when deciding how your site should rank in the search results.

How to Increase Your Affiliate Website’s Conversion Rate

The conversion rate refers to the percentage of your site’s visitors who actually purchase a product through your affiliate referral links.

You should be regularly working towards increasing your conversion rate. Fortunately, there are numerous practical methods that you can use to drive up your conversion rate.

One, you should only promote products that are relevant to the interests of your core audience. As much as possible, only recommend products that you think will add value for your readers.

And be very honest when recommending products.

Nothing turns off potential customers quicker than fake and dishonest product reviews and recommendations.

When writing articles about products, don’t just copy product descriptions. You should make the effort of writing unique content that describes the product and all its features.

You should also make use of a combination of textual affiliate links and image-based referral links. Countless experiments have shown that site visitors tend to click more on text links within the body of an article.

So you should create more content and sprinkle them with your affiliate links. Use images to complement your textual content.

And last but not the least, don’t forget your call-to-action text and buttons. It’s powerful to always have a clear call-to-action in your affiliate marketing website.

For example, after writing a long review article about a product, you place a call-to-action at the end of the article that says “But This Now” or “Check out This Product Here”. Most of the time, people who find your review valuable will click on the call-to-action.

Driving Traffic to Your Affiliate Marketing Website

To maximize the earnings you generate from your affiliate marketing website, you must be adept in driving traffic towards it.

Truth be told, traffic generation is the most time-consuming aspect of running an affiliate marketing business. You have to do it almost every day if you want a consistent flow of customers to your website.

Below is a quick overview of the most effective strategies in driving traffic to an affiliate marketing website.

Optimize your website for the search engines. We have touched on SEO earlier. It’s the only way to have your website rank higher in the search engines.
Set up a blog for your website. The blog can be hosted inside your affiliate marketing website or you can have it hosted in a separate domain.
Create a lead page or a sales funnel for your website. This is a static website that you use to redirect traffic to your website. The sales funnel or lead page should have an offer for visitors. It could be a free ebook, a piece of software, or any digital product which the visitor can consider as valuable.
Be active on social media. Everybody is on social media these days. Use sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to drum up hype for your website.
Set aside a budget for paid advertising. Explore various online advertising methods like pay per click marketing, direct advertising, or video advertising.
Partner with other affiliate marketers. Get in touch with other marketers who are promoting products that are relevant to yours. You could enter into a deal wherein you cross-promote each other’s products. It’s a win-win situation for both parties involved.

It takes time to master Amazon affiliate marketing. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t earn right away. It can take weeks or even months before you get to see any substantial affiliate revenue coming in.

This is normal for all new affiliate marketers. You should be in the business for the long haul. Just keep implementing the tips and advice discussed above.

Sooner or later, you will achieve the revenue levels you’ve always wanted.