How To Start Amazon Affiliate Marketing (Step-By-Step)

How To Start Amazon Affiliate Marketing

Amazon Affiliate Program is one of the oldest, great, and most popular Affiliate Programs. The Amazon Associates Program helps content creators, online marketers, publishers, and bloggers monetize their traffic.

If You Want To Make Money Online Using Amazon is a great source of selling different categories of products, the program is solid and profitable.

The Amazon affiliate program known as Amazon Associates, this marketing program can help you generate revenues from your blog or website.

To make money from an Amazon Affiliate Program, you have got to sell Amazon products on your website. You will be able to sell all of the products which are available on amazon.

Today, Amazon Affiliate is the most valued affiliate program for beginners of online or digital marketers.

But it’s not as if you can go in and earn thousands of dollars from the get-go. While some have a sizable income from monetizing their websites, some can’t quite get there.

To become a successful amazon associate, you have to do your research, take advantage of SEO to rank your sites, select your products according to your clients’ needs, and many more. But the best part of this incredible program is that it’s completely free!

If you feel a bit intimidated even now, don’t worry. Our guide on how to start Amazon affiliate marketing guide will take you through the whole process.

So, if you’re looking to be an entrepreneur or simply for a side job, this affiliate marketing guide should help you.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based online tactic to promote a specific product or service for merchants in order to earn a commission for every customer or sale that you generate. In the affiliate marketing process, think of yourself as a sales representative who only works for a commission.

That means you only make money when you drive a sale of that company’s product. But all of these are taking place on the internet.

Suppose you’re an automotive enthusiast who has a blog on different parts. Now, an online retailer that sells engines wants to push customers through its sales funnel. But what’s the best way to do that?

The answer is affiliate marketing. Any retailer will look for other websites and blogs in the same niche and ask them to promote their products through their sites.

Now that you’ve become an affiliate marketer for that retailer, you’ll post an affiliate link on your page. Every time a customer uses your link to visit the retailer’s page and make a purchase, you’ll receive a commission for driving that sale.

Seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?

Here comes the best part! As an affiliate, you don’t have to rely on a single product to earn your commission. In fact, you can promote several items to drive traffic to different retailers to make a massive amount of money!

Amazon affiliate marketing is a perfect way to earn money selling products you don’t have to people you’ll never have to deal with afterward.

why become an affiliate marketer?

Now that you have a general idea about affiliate marketing, let’s talk about why you should participate in affiliate marketing. Did we say that it’s free? That’s right!

Affiliate marketing has a greater chance of making thousands of dollars. It depends on how patient, skilled, and persistent you are.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

  • No specialized skills are required.
  • The potential to earning money is higher than blogging.
  • Managing and promoting numerous affiliate programs is quite easy.
  • It’s a low-cost business opportunity
  • Flexibility. Convenience.

You don’t need any money to start affiliate marketing if you already have a website.

As an affiliate marketer, your main task is to recommend products to others. Look at it this way. If your friend was looking for a bakery shop that makes the best cake for the lowest price, wouldn’t you recommend their services to them?

Similarly, as an affiliate marketer, think of anyone on the internet who goes through your website as that one friend.

You’d be recommending other retailers’ products to them. The one and only difference is that you’ll be getting paid for each and every purchase your readers make!

The pay can vary depending on the quality. For example, affiliate marketing for beginners can earn up to three hundred dollars per day, whereas high-tier marketers can earn up to ten times that amount!

Moreover, unlike a sales representative of a store, who can make money only when they’re in the store, pushing their products, you can earn your living while sleeping.

Every morning you turn on your computer and go to your page and see the sales you’ve been making while you were asleep!

And to top it off, you’d be your own boss. It can’t get any better than this!

What is Amazon associates?

aMAZON aSSOCIATE

Amazon Associates is one of the greatest affiliate networks in the world that helps content creators, publishers, bloggers, and website owners monetize their traffic.

Not only do Associates earn commission on products they refer traffic, but you can also earn a commission any time you refer a customer to Amazon’s store and a purchase is made.

As you know by now, your chances of success as an affiliate marketer depend significantly on the retailer’s inventory. So, what would happen if you could be an affiliate marketer to the biggest online retailer?

That’s right; we’re talking about Amazon!

Amazon’s affiliate marketing program is called “Amazon Associates.” In this program, website owners and bloggers can increase their revenue through Amazon. With a vast inventory and easy-to-use link-building tools, the Amazon Associates program is a dream come true for any affiliate marketer.

DOW DOES AMAZON AFFILIATE PROGRAM WORK?

You promote products with your affiliate link and receive a percentage each time someone buys them.

But because the affiliate commissions are based on commissions (the average is around 5%), I strongly recommend you to promote high-end products ($100+).

Just like any other affiliate program, affiliate marketing on Amazon gets paid by their commissions. It has a pretty straightforward process.

As an affiliate marketer, you’ll sign up for the program. After signing up, you’ll receive a unique tracking ID. For example, if your signing name is X, it’ll look something like this: x-20.

Now, whenever you’re pushing a product, you can just add your tag to the product link, and voila! That’s your unique product link. As you promote those products on your website, you’ll receive a commission on those sales.

Most people want to know the percentage of the commission or the commission rate of the Amazon affiliate marketing program. To put it simply, the rate depends entirely on the item type.

For example, if your blog is on computer parts, you can earn 3.5% for each sale you push. So, if you drive sales worth a thousand dollars, you’ll be earning 35 USD for that sale.

Amazon affiliate program commission

Keep in mind that the numbers will most probably be on the lower end. But don’t be discouraged because once the sales pick up, you’ll be seeing a massive increase in your revenue.

HOW TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN AFFILIATE MARKETING?

Affiliate marketing is no rocket science. It’s pretty easy if you know how it works, but it takes time to understand the whole system.

Everyone wants to be a successful affiliate marketing marketer. To get a successful start in affiliate marketing, you must be ready and willing to work.

I have been in the affiliate marketing industry for over 5years, as well as helping to create new marketers to become successful affiliate marketers like me.

While it’s a great source of income to be generated from Amazon associates, it’s not exactly an easy task to succeed in this line of business. There are different affiliate marketing strategies you’ll need to know about to become successful.

But don’t worry. You’ll soon get to know all about Amazon affiliate marketing for beginners.

1. Niche Reasearch

Niche is basically the category of products you want to work with. There are many ways but basically, it’s all about researching to find a profitable niche.

Find a profitable niche that you’re passionate about or at the very least have an interest in.

With a massive inventory at hand, it’s only natural to want to make the best use of that opportunity and push all types of merchandise together. But that’s not how it works.

If your website promotes cakes, engine parts, and books, all at the same time, it’s a no-go. Just think about it this way, would you trust a baker with your car? Of course not! While some bakers may be good with engines, it can’t be said for all of them.

Moreover, it might leave your readers somewhat confused. Shifting topics might also be tiring for you as you would have to focus on different affiliate marketing niches at the same time.

That’s why selecting your site’s niche that meshes with your interests should be your top priority. That way, you won’t be bored when writing and talking about your interests, in fact, it’ll only invigorate you.

If your website or blog has a specific niche, it’ll make your content look more authoritative to your readers. Just as we expect a mechanic to talk only about engines, it works the other way as well.

Suppose all you talk about is baking cakes, cooking recipes, or any other single topic. Then your visitors will think you’re an expert on that specific topic.

On the other hand, if your contents are on several different topics, it may seem as if you’re just rambling on only for the sake of rambling.  There’re few tricks to choosing a nice niche. You can follow them for a better result.

– Check Commission Percentage

As it’s a business, you want to maximize your revenue. Since you work on commissions, the best thing to do is choose a line with the highest commission rates.

That way, whenever there’s a sale through your site or blog, you’ll gain the biggest profit. Of course, you’ll want to choose a niche that you’re interested in.

Otherwise, you’ll get tired of it quickly and your content will appear robotic.

But, if you’re considering any product with a commission rate of zero percent, it’s better to cross that item off your list. After all, it’s a business.

You can also cross off any items that have a yield of two percent or less than that.

– Estimate Required Traffic

To figure out what kind of traffic your site requires, you must first figure out how much traffic it should be making. If that sounds way too intimidating, don’t worry.

There’s a simple formula you can use to estimate the amount of traffic your site’s going to need. Let’s take a look at the said formula.

Monthly Goal / (Average Product Price * Commission Rate * Average

Affiliate Link Click-through Rate * Average Conversion Rate)

This formula may look a bit complicated. Let’s see a rundown of the formula with a real-life example.

Suppose you want to choose the green tea niche. You set yourself a monthly goal of USD 1000, and you’ve done a market assessment and know that the average product price is approximately USD 40.  If you’ve gone through the commission rates, you should know that most coffee-related merchandise has a commission rate of 4 percent.

So, you now have all the information you need to calculate your required traffic except for your link’s average CTR.

Let’s start a bit low and say you have a CTR of 10 percent with a conversion rate of 7.5 percent. Now do the math.

          1000/ (40*.4*10*7.5) = 83333

From the figure above, we can see that your page will need around eighty-three thousand visitors per month to reach the goal of a thousand dollars.

However, keep in mind that the numbers we used aren’t exact. We used a bit lower numbers not to keep your hopes up!

– Estimate Potential Traffic

With that, you should know the amount of traffic your site needs to meet your monthly traffic quota. If you want to know how to do affiliate marketing, you need to know about it.

Pro tips:

Find a Profitable Niche for Affiliate Marketing in 7 Easy Steps

  1. Consider Your Own Interests and Pastimes
  2. Identify Potential Monetization Options Within the Niche
  3. 3Assess the Competition and Search Volume for the Niche
  4. Gauge the Number of Traffic Sources Available
  5. Search for Market Deficiencies You Can Exploit
  6. Check for Previously Sold Websites or Profitable Acquisitions
  7. Decide What Your USP Is

Now the question is if the niche of your choosing can deliver you the required traffic or not. There are different tools to help you figure out an approximate number of traffic leading to money pages.

You can use any of them to help you figure out whether the niche of your choosing has the potential to deliver you enough traffic.

2. Keyword Research

Keyword Research

Doing keyword research is a crucial part of modern SEO. Whether you are kick-starting an old/new website or increasing your content strategy for a new one.

Then good quality keywords are one of the great ways to attract consistently, quality traffic to your site.

There are many ways and many tools, but basically, it’s all about researching to find a profitable niche. Find a profitable affiliate niche that you’re passionate about or at the very least have an interest in.

There are 9 types of Keywords:

1) Short-tail Keywords.

2) Long-tail Keywords.

3) Short-term Fresh Keywords.

4) Long-term Evergreen Keywords.

5) Product-defining Keywords.

6) Customer-defining Keywords.

7) Geo-targeting Keywords.

8) LSI Keywords.

9) Intent Targeting Keywords.

Top 5 Keyword Research Tool 2021

  1. SEMrush
  2. Ahrefs
  3. Google Search Console
  4. Google Trends
  5. Moz

Choosing niches for affiliate marketing is the hard part. Next, you’ll have to conduct a little keyword research. Sounds pretty easy, right?

In SEO, the best and easiest way to chosen keywords are based on the following criteria:

Keyword defficulty

While it’s quite a straightforward topic, there’s a fatal mistake most people make. They search for low competition words, write their content, and push down as many affiliate links as possible.

It’s an entirely wrong approach. While this process will get you lots of traffic, they won’t be your customers, meaning a lower conversion rate. And since you work on commissions, that means no sales, no commissions.

However, there’s an easy solution to this problem. You simply have to look for keywords with heavier search volumes that you can naturally use to rank your article.

For instance, someone searching for the best vanilla shakes is more likely to purchase than those searching for vanilla shakes. The latter is less likely to make a purchase after clicking on an affiliate link.

So, you’ll need to target the former party to drive them through Amazon’s sales funnel, and voila! You get your commission.

3. Buying Domain Hosting

Domain Hosting is a process in which a website related webpages, web content is hosted on a server that is available on the world wide Web and may or may not be accessible through the internet.

In order to put your best step forward in affiliate marketing, you need to have an online presence with all these qualities: availability, speed, affordability, and conversion.

To do that, you’ll have to find the best domain hosting. When buying domain hosting, you need to go for a plan that lets you keep your overhead costs low while providing you with all these qualities. You can choose from several plans including premium, paid, or free.

You can purchase it online by way of an online payment gateway built by domain hosting companies like Namecheap, Godaddy, Blue Host, and my absolute favorite, Flywheel.

4. Website Design

Website Design

Designing your affiliate website is no longer as difficult as before. If you’re afraid of the tech stuff, don’t be. There’re different resources and tools for affiliate marketing to help you design a website best suited for your niche.

When designing your website, keep in mind that most buyers use PC and mobile devices to shop online. So, make sure you host a website that has a suitable version for both these devices and not just one.

You can easily set up your website with the help of WordPress. Make sure to install a suitable theme, and keep a few helpful plugins handy.

Publishing an author bio makes you seem trustworthy to your readers. You should also add some necessary pages like Terms and Privacy, Contact, etc. If you’re looking for suitable free training, here’s a site that caught our eye.

5. Product Selection

Choosing the perfect merchandise can make or break your business, so you must select the right product to push. Of course, it’s no easy job.

Fortunately, you can do a few things to make sure you have the right product in hand.

In amazon affiliate marketing amazon gives us 5 to 10 percent commission.

7 Amazon Product Selection Tips For 2021

  1. Find Evergreen Products
  2. The price tag should be reasonably high (100$)
  3. The product must be a bestseller
  4. The product must have more than a 4.5-star review
  5. There is enough demand for the product in the search engine
  6. Choose a product with more than 20 reviews
  7. The Product Has Popular Keywords

– Observe Market Trends

You should check out what your client base is looking for.

For example, if you’re selling beachwear in the winter, you’re going in the wrong direction. But if you push snow skiing products in the winter, you’ll find a lot of profit from your affiliate website.

– Try The Product When Possible

Always try to try out a product before pushing it. If you end up pushing a product that does more harm than good, even by accident, your readers will lose their trust in your site, and you’ll lose out on profits.

6. Publish Reviews

Reviews are an excellent way to help your readers make an educated decision regarding the product they’ll buy. By publishing these reviews, you can gain an edge over your competitors.

More importantly, these reviews will help you prove your expertise in the field, making readers more likely to make a purchase according to your suggestions.

7. Rank The Website On Google

SEO

In affiliate marketing, you need a certain amount of conversion rate to reach your monthly goal. And the precondition for that is traffic.

An efficient SEO strategy helps you in promoting & reach a huge audience. It involves optimizing your website so that it appears higher in search results, where customers may find your blog easily.

As you are much familiar with a big audience, SEO creates goodwill & a good impression on your target customer.

Nobody will click on your affiliate links if your site doesn’t have the required traffic, leading to a non-satisfactory conversion rate. The best way to drive traffic to your Amazon affiliate link is SEO using specific tools.

When promoting your site on different platforms, you’ll see a spike in traffic almost immediately. But sadly, once the readers have finished reading your post, the traffic will subside and go back to zero.

But that won’t be the case with SEO rankings. By using SEO, you can rank in Google, and then Google will suggest your page to readers months after months, creating consistent traffic to your website.

While it takes lots of research and hard work to rank using SEO, it allows you to know your product more, helping you create more helpful content.  Moreover, it’s completely free!

Fret not. There are some useful tricks and tips to using SEO to rank your website. If you’re interested, check some of these out here.

SET UP YOUR AMAZON AFFILIATE ACCOUNT

Amazon Associate is a free affiliate program. And they’ve made it relatively easy to set up your Amazon affiliate account. Here’s how you can do it.

– Create Your Website/Social Media, Or Youtube Channel

The first and foremost condition of becoming an Amazon Associate is having a blog, website, or any other platform to promote your products. It can also be a social media account through which you can drive sales, such as Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and many more.

Make sure to have a firm idea about your website as you’ll need to explain it all

– Join Amazon Affiliate Program

Go to the program’s homepage and check which region you can operate from, and choose the one most suitable for you. Then click on the “Join” button. You can sign in if you have an existing account, or you can create an account.

– Enter Account Info

Amazon Affiliate Setup

After you choose to open a new account, you’ll need to enter the general info of your account. This information includes the name, address, and phone number of the payee.

– Enter Website

After putting in the information, you’ll be directed to the next page, where you’ll have to enter the address of the website or the mobile app you own.

– Enter Preferred Store ID

Amazon Preferred ID

As we told you that, you’d need to know the purpose of your website, i.e. why it was created and other stuff. Here’s where that will come in handy.

Enter your site’s preferred ID and explain your site’s purpose. Finally, choose the Amazon topics that that your affiliate links will be targeting.

– Explain How You Generate Income

In this section, you’ll need to explain how you build links, your site’s income-generating method, how you aim to drive traffic to your site, and the average volume of readers your site has monthly.

– Choose Payment Method

Finally, you’ll be asked to put down your payment method and credentials (credit card, tax ID) to complete setting up your profile. You can also fill out this part later.

AFFILIATE MARKETING BENEFITS

Thousands of companies are spending so much money on affiliate marketing. It may make you wonder: is affiliate marketing worth it? Is affiliate marketing profitable?

Well, there’s a plethora of benefits to affiliate marketing. Here are some that caught our attention.

1. Low Startup Cost
Low Cost

I can’t emphasize this point enough. You need little to no money to start as an affiliate marketer.

The only cost you can incur is the cost of setting up a website. And if you already have a website or a blog, then you’re all ready to go.

2. Low Rist And High Reward

Since the only job you have as an affiliate marketer is to promote goods, not make them, you have nothing to lose but a lot to gain.

3. Low Maintenance Cost

Unlike other businesses, you don’t need a lot of money to keep your business running.

Once you’ve set up your website and published your content, you’re good to go. However, you’ll need to invest a lot of time if you’re going to succeed.

4. High Returns On Investment

With a low startup and maintenance cost, you can keep a low overhead investment. On the other hand, you can potentially earn over a thousand dollars each month with the least amount of effort.

I have covered all of these steps(Affiliate Marketing) in detail in this post, but it’s important to understand the common process from the beginning of affiliate marketing.

So just do some research about affiliate marketing, learn some skills, and then execute them. Be focused and be patient, One day you will be successful.

AMAZON AFFILIATE VS AMAZON FBA

These are two different types of businesses, but both are done on Amazon.

Amazon affiliate program is what we talked about in this article, which is promoting other people’s products for a commission.

Amazon FBA is selling your own products on amazon. There are some courses you can take on that like amazing selling machine. I have a detailed review of amazing selling machine.

FINAL THOUGHT

The fantastic thing about Amazon Associates is that you can turn your passion into a source of income. Settle on a niche of your choosing and write quality content on those products.

Just let your readers know about the fantastic items that impressed even you. And with time and effort, you’ll be able to increase your monthly income exponentially!

Keep in mind that affiliate marketing isn’t so glorious as you may think. Is affiliate marketing dead? No. But Amazon affiliate marketing for beginners can pose quite the challenge.

But despite that, if you’re interested, we hope that our discussion on how to start an Amazon affiliate marketing (step-by-step) guide will help you. Happy marketing!

Nabil Al-Baidhani
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