In this comprehensive guide, I’m finally going to share with you how to make money with the Amazon Affiliate Program in the most effective way possible.
As the biggest and best affiliate marketing program around, the Amazon Associates Program has long been the cornerstone of the monetization strategy I put together for my content website portfolio and has helped me to grow that portfolio to a value of over $1.5 million.
Below, I’ll share with you the secrets to my success, outlining everything you need to know to start turning Amazon into a major money maker for you.
What is the Amazon Affiliate Program?
Amazon Associates is one of the largest affiliate programs in the world, boasting 900,000+ active users.
The platform allows you to earn money every time you direct a customer to Amazon, and they make a purchase.
The best part is that those customers don’t even have to purchase the product you direct them to.
For example, Let’s say you run a recipe blog, and you direct people to buy a particular cooking pot to help them make the perfect dish.
The customer clicks the link but decides to buy a different cooking pot. You still get a commission on that item. Then, if the customer remains on Amazon and decides to pick up a handful of other household essentials, you’ll also earn on those purchases.
What are the Eligibility Requirements for The Amazon Affiliate Program?
One of the things I love best about Amazon Associates is that the eligibility requirements are fairly easy to meet.
To qualify for the program, your blog must:
- Not make false claims about products when recommending them
- Feature a disclosure on your site that you may earn revenue from products you recommend
- Not include prices in your articles as Amazon frequently changes them
- Avoid using Amazon affiliate links in offline promotions
- Avoid using link shorteners.
Once you’ve created your account, you also need to make 3 sales in order to keep it. However, Amazon does give you 180 days to generate those sales, so you’ll have plenty of time to do it.
How Much Money Can You Make With Amazon Associates?
Your earning potential with Amazon’s affiliate marketing program is practically unlimited. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that it’s restricted only by your ability to drive enough traffic to your site to generate sales.
In other words, the more people read your Amazon-monetized content, the more money you’re likely to make.
Amazon Associates Commission Rates
One of the major factors determining how much you earn is the commission rates for each product category.
Rates for some of the most popular niches and product categories include:
- Amazon Games – 20%
- Luxury beauty – 10%
- Digital and physical music – 5%
- Physical books – 4.5%
- Automotive – 4.50$
- Camera – 4%
- Electronics – 4%
- Beauty – 3%
- Furniture – 3%.
To put that in real terms:
Let’s say you’re blogging in the beauty niche, and you link to a luxury beauty product that costs $100. You sell three of those products daily, earning 10% of each one for a total of $30.
A full list of Amazon commission fees can be found here.
Bounty Events
As well as commission fees, Amazon also hosts certain “Bounty Events” where they pay a fixed fee for each eligible sale.
Some of the more profitable bounties include:
- Audible Premium plus Annual Membership – $25
- Audible Premium plus membership – $10
- Amazon Business – $15
- Amazon Prime Gifting – $5
- Amazon Baby Registry – $3
- Amazon Home Services – $3
- Amazon Prime Video Channels – $2.50.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop you from using both of these approaches to earn money from Amazon Affiliates.
If you run a book review blog, for example, you could earn 4.5% commissions on books as well as $10 or $25 for Audible premium memberships.
How to Make Money With the Amazon Affiliate Program?
So, you’ve seen how much potential there is to make some serious money as an Amazon affiliate, but exactly how do you do it?
Here’s a step-by-step plan to help guide you towards monetization success.
1. Sign up for an Amazon Associates account
- Head to Affiliate-program.amazon.com and click ‘Sign up’
- Sign in with your existing Amazon account (or create one if you don’t already have one)
- On the next screen, confirm your name and address so that Amazon knows who to pay.
- Next, add in the website or blog that you’ll be sending traffic to Amazon from.
If you haven’t already got one, you can read my guide on starting a blog here.
- From there, create a profile and tell Amazon about your site and how you plan to monetize it.
- After you do that, all you need to do is enter your tax and payment information, and you’re ready to start making money.
2. Choose Products Relevant to Your Audience
As you’ll have read in the eligibility requirements, you now have 180 days to generate your first three sales to keep making money.
To do that, you’ll first need to decide what products you’re going to sell.
This is much easier to do if you already have your blog niche worked out. If you’ve not yet decided what your blog is going to be about, read my guide to choosing a blog niche first, then come back to this guide.
Finding products is then as simple as heading to Amazon and searching through the different product categories in the same way that you would if you were buying them for yourself.
If you write about tennis, for example, and your niche is teaching amateur players how to improve their game, you might use Amazon to find tennis rackets, training equipment, or clothing and then add them into your content.
3. Create Valuable Content
With your products chosen, your next step is to create content that allows you to link to those products in a relevant and meaningful way.
The first step to doing this is to use any top keyword research tool that will allow you to find the most searched-for keywords relating to your niche.
If you’re new to blogging and affiliate marketing, I wrote a comprehensive guide to teach you everything you need to know about keyword research which you may find helpful.
If you don’t have time for that right now, here’s an abridged version:
Let’s stick with the example of writing about how to improve as a tennis player. One idea would be to write a post promoting tennis rackets for beginners.
So you’d open up a keyword research tool (SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool is my favorite) and type in “tennis rackets for beginners.”
SEMRush shows us that “Best tennis racket for beginners” is the most popular search term with 1,900 monthly searches, with “best racket for tennis beginners” close behind.
The tool also shows us that the intent behind that search is commercial. In other words, people are searching “best tennis racket for beginners” to find the best rackets to buy.
This is where you put your knowledge and expertise to work in writing a guide with a heading such as “Top 10 Tennis Rackets for Beginners.”
You then write a post about the ten top rackets you’ve found on Amazon, outlining why you believe they’re the best of the best.
Alternatively, you might decide to write a more general piece on “how to improve your serve,” again using keyword research to find which keywords to target for that post.
Within that guide, you could recommend a few tennis rackets or other equipment that could genuinely help people to improve their service.
Don’t forget to optimize your content with headings, images, and both internal and outgoing links. A plugin like Yoast SEO can help with this, as can my guide to writing the best blog posts.
Whatever you decide to write about, keep in mind that the trick is to create content and offer products that offer real value to your readers.
If you simply decided to write a post about why your favorite tennis player is so great and then randomly go in with a hard sell on a tennis racket that doesn’t seem directly related to your content, it could be jarring, off-putting, and simply ineffective.
If, on the other hand, you wrote a post about how to play like your favorite tennis player and linked it to the equipment they use, that’s going to produce much better results.
4. Include Product Links in Your Content
Once your content is written, it’s time to link to your products.
Doing this is as easy as going to the product page on Amazon and -providing you’re logged into your account- using the Amazon Associates site stripe bar at the top of the page to generate your links.
You can generate a standard text link that you can include in your content the same way you would for any other hyperlink, or you can use a combination of text and images to improve your post.
Once your links are done, simply publish your content, and you’re on your way.
5. Grow Your Audience
Having your Amazon-monetized content published is all well and good, but if nobody knows that it’s there, then it’s going to be much harder for you to make any money from it.
With that in mind, it’s time to start getting your content out there.
Use social media, newsletters, paid ads, or any other means to get eyeballs on your content and grow your audience.
To help you with this, I put together this guide on the best ways to promote your blog.
Frequently Asked Questions About Making Money as an Amazon Affiliate
How much do Amazon affiliates make a year?
ZipRecruiter notes that the average Amazon affiliate earns $59,000+ per year, though that’s likely based on someone working full time (or at least close to full time) on their blog.
Some blogs may generate as little as $100 per month, while others can bring in six-figure incomes.
What is the best Amazon Affiliate alternative to use?
ShareaSale, CJ (formerly Commission Junction), and Clickbank are among some of the top Amazon affiliate alternatives to use right now.
Is it hard to be an Amazon affiliate?
Not at all. One of the best things about making money from Amazon’s affiliate program is that anyone can sign up and get started. As long as you follow a few simple rules and earn three sales in 180 days, you can create as much content with as many links as you like.
Is Amazon Affiliate Marketing Profitable in 2022? My Closing Thoughts
If you’ve read this far, you’re now armed with all the knowledge you need to know in order to start making money with the Amazon affiliate program.
You know how easy it is to sign up to the platform, you know the importance of creating quality content with relevant products, and you also know that you’ll need to keep growing your blog in order to get enough visitors to purchase from your links.
Before I go, there’s one last thing I need to tell you:
Making money with Amazon isn’t a one-and-done deal. You could have the greatest “Top Ten Tennis Rackets” post in the world, but if that’s all you do, it’s not going to make you as much money as you’d earn if you keep repeating the steps outlined above.
Choose your niche, choose products, create high-quality content around those products, promote that content, and do the same thing over and over again.
More than anything else, it’s this persistence and repetition that is the true secret to making real money with Amazon Affiliates.
