Amazon Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: Step by Step - Solopreneur Institute (2023)

Every day, millions of people visit Amazon.com to buy almost all types of products.

In 2017, Amazon had around $28 million in sales every day, which means there's a huge opportunity to grab a piece of that pie.

Did you know that if you refer someone to Amazon before they buy, you'll receive a small commission on that sale? While 4% to 8% might not seem like a lot, if you send hundreds of people to Amazon a day, that number could be quite large.

There are thousands of people who make a living by referring people to Amazon and making money from selling those items.

Calledaffiliate marketingAnd in this article, I'll show you exactly how to start making money online with Amazon Associates.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as:

“a marketing arrangement whereby an online retailer pays a commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated by its referrals.”

On the other hand, Entrepreneur.com defines affiliate marketing as:

“A way in which a company sells its products by recruiting individuals or companies (“affiliates”) who market the company’s products for a commission.”

In other words, it's basically promoting other people's products and getting a commission for selling that product.

There are many different facets of affiliate marketing, from lead generation to pay-per-call marketing, but let's talk about Amazon affiliate marketing.

Amazon Affiliate Program

The Amazon Associates program is Amazon's affiliate management area that allows you to verify affiliate income, build affiliate links, and explore a wide range of affiliates.announcementtools and ads.

It's completely free to joinamazon affiliate programand earn money online.

Amazon fee structure

Depending on the products you promote and sell, you will receive a different commission percentage. Therefore, it is important to choose a category that has a higher commission rate/fee so that you receive more per sale.

Here are all Amazon fees and commissions:

Now that you know the commission structure, you need to choose a niche or category that you are going to promote. As you can see from the table, it would be smart to start with niches like outdoors, tools, headphones or beauty.

While this is Amazon's normal fee structure, there are tons of other channels you can promote and earn money from. here is everythingAffiliate Program Fees Table.

Introduction to Amazon Associates

Registering as an Amazon member is very easy and free.

If you already have an Amazon account, simply connect your regular Amazon account to your membership account.

Just head toAmazon Associates home pageand click on 'Join now for free'.

If you don't already have an Amazon account, click the Create your Amazon account button to create a new account.

Go through the account creation process by confirming your account information.

Next, you'll need to submit a website or mobile app. If you don't have a website, you can create a free website atWordPress.comoSitio123.comand you don't need to spend money on a website up front.

Once you've added everything up and agreed to the operating agreement, you're ready to start promoting Amazon products and makingpassive incomein line!

The Amazon Associates dashboard shows an earnings overview, a summary for this month, and a quick link search to easily build affiliate links.

To start building your affiliate links, you can go to the Product Links tab at the top and choose Product Links.

Search for any product you want to create an affiliate link for and locate it in the table below.

Click the 'Get Link' button and it will send you to a page where you can copy a text and image link, HTML code, text only and image only links.

Just copy the code and paste it into your website's HTML where you want it to appear.

If you are creating a plain text link, click the Text Only tab and select the HTML for a regular text link and paste it into yourblogo site.

Amazon Tracking ID

To better track and optimize your Amazon affiliate campaigns, I strongly suggest using Amazon Associate Tracking IDs.

The Amazon Associate Tracking ID is the value that comes after the ?tag= query string in your Amazon affiliate links.

This is how you and Amazon track which sales came from which tracking ID.

We can use this to our advantage by creating tracking IDs for different videos and campaigns so we can see what's converting and what's not.

To create a new Tracking ID, simply click on your username in the top right corner and choose "Manage Your Tracking IDs".

This is where you can view and manage all of your current Tracking IDs, as well as create new ones. To create a new Tracking ID, simply click the "Add Tracking ID" button and choose an available name for your ID.

Once you've created your tracking ID, you can select it from any of the link building pages on the Amazon Associates Dashboard.

When you have separate tracking IDs for each campaign, you can track performance for each campaign and tracking ID.

Now that you've created your Tracking IDs, it's time to start making money with Amazon Associates!

Earn Money With Amazon Affiliates

Now that you're familiar with the Amazon Associates program and how it works, it's time to start making money with Amazon.

There are many ways to promote your Amazon affiliate links to start generating commissions online. Here are some great ways to drive traffic to your Amazon links and earn money:

YouTube Affiliate Marketing

One of the best ways to make money with Amazon Associates is to use YouTube to drive traffic to your affiliate offers.

The great thing about YouTube is that you don't even need a website. All you need is a decent camera, a computer with internet access and the desire to make good videos referencing your products.

You can do this in many different ways, such as:

• Product review videos
• Product comparison videos
• top 10 product videos
• unpacking videos

This is how you can start using YouTube to earn money with Amazon Affiliates.

Step 1 – Create a YouTube channel

To start, justcreate a youtube account.

Create a new channel in your account and name it related to your products or niche that you will promote on Amazon.

Creating a niche channel will help you position yourself more easily and grow faster. A good example would be to create a channel that reviews DSLR cameras.

When you focus on one type of product or niche, your channel becomes an authority in that niche faster, getting more views and organic search traffic from YouTube.

Step 2: Create Content

After creating your channel, it's time to start creating videos. They don't have to be perfect, so don't worry too much about production value, but try to add value to the viewer because the longer people watch, the better your videos will rank on Youtube.

But how do you come up with ideas for videos?

Simply doing a search for your niche or product will attract other people doing the exact same thing. Find videos with high views and replicate what they are doing.

You can also use keyword research tools like KeywordTool.io to find relevant video topic ideas that get high searches. Just add your niche or category in the keyword tool to see volume and competition.

Look for a keyword that gets high search volume and has less competition. These types of fruit videos at your fingertips can really make you a lot of money.

As you can see from the keywords, review-based videos get high volume and often convert very well if the product is good. You don't even have to show your face if you don't want to!

To earn money, you will need to add your affiliate link in the YouTube video description. I would recommend using a service likebit.lyso you can track outbound clicks to your affiliate link.

Now, when people watch your video and want to buy, they'll click on the link in your description, buy the product, and you get the commission!

Once you accumulate a good number of videos, your affiliate income will grow more and more.

Step 4: Promote your videos

When you promote your videos, they get more views and likes which helps you rank higher on YouTube.

But how do you promote your videos?

Well, there are many great ways to promote your videos and get more views and more affiliate commissions. Here are some great ways to get more views for your affiliate Youtube videos:

• Optimize your videos
• Embed videos on your blog
• Add call-to-actions to your videos
• paid advertising
• Share on social networks

The more and more videos you create and share, the greater your affiliate income, so keep creating quality content around your niche and you will succeed withyoutube affiliate marketing.

affiliate blog

If you prefer writing over creating videos, then blogging is probably the path you want to go.

Starting a blog can be very affordable, and the start-up costs are pretty low for something that can make you big profits if you put in the effort.

I'll show you exactly how easy it is to start your own blog and start making money with Amazon Associates.

Step 1 – Choose a niche

First, you need to pick a niche like you would if you were creating a YouTube channel. When you focus on a niche, you can generate more traffic by being an authority in that niche.

Consider choosing a niche that has a higher commission on Amazon's fee schedule.

Once you know your niche, you will need to choose a domain name for your website.

Step 2: Buy a domain name

The domain is the URL where your WordPress blog will be located. For example, our domain name is solopreneurinstitute.com.

Abuy a domain nameyou can use many providers butDominio.comis an excellent and affordable domain name provider. A domain name usually costs around $10 a year, so it's pretty cheap.

You want your domain name to be niche-focused, but don't waste a lot of time fussing and choosing your domain name. what's important is the content you put on the site.

A great way to find recently expired domains isexpiredomains.net.

This way your domain has some age and hopefully even some backlinks. to use expireddomains.net, justregister for freeand enter your keyword or niche category to find relevant domains that have just expired.

These domains will cost the same as a new domain and are senior, which can help your site rank faster on Google.

You can even sort them by BL (backlinks) or DP (domain pop) to see which domains already have links pointing to them.

If that's too much for you, you can always go to Godaddy and search for your ideal domain until you find one:

It will let you know if there is already a registered domain and you will have to look for another one.

Now you will need a server to host your WordPress site online.

Step 3 – Choose a hosting provider

First go tositeground.comas you will need hosting to get your blog on the interwebs.

Create your accountand login to your cPanel area.

cPanel is a web-based server management software that lets you easily install WordPress, create email addresses, FTP, manage databases, and many other things you really don't have to worry about.

Step 4: Install WordPress

Once in cPanel, there is a 1-click WordPress installation.

Simply install WordPress on your new host and remember you can change your settings later so add an email, password and site name and click install.

Once your WordPress blog is set up, you will need to login to the WordPress admin area.

It is usually located at www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/ and this is where you will create your website and content.

First, you'll need to install a theme to make your website personalized and professional looking. If people are going to buy from you, you need to look like a legitimate source of information.

Forest ThemeIt's a great place to get affordable themes that are already SEO-optimized, mobile-friendly, fast, and easy to use.

Here are some of the best WordPress themes for affiliate marketing blogs:

Voice

Voiceit's a really cool theme for affiliate marketing blogs. It's an editorial format with a custom cover that features your most recent posts.

It is fully responsive and is one of the top rated themes on ThemeForest. It works with all the latest plugins and includes its own built-in banner system so you can easily embed Amazon affiliate ads.

buy voice here

RECOVER

RECOVERis a multipurpose extended WordPress theme that includes functionality for Woocommerce, coupon sites, comparison sites and a host of other themes that are perfect for Amazon affiliate marketing.

Choose from 13 different themes in all different styles and layouts. It uses Elementor's drag and drop builder, which makes it easy to build pages without knowing any code.

ReHub costs $59 and can help you earn income with Amazon Associates. It will include everything you need to get a professional website.

Buy ReHub here

clave

claveit's a clean and minimalist blog, perfect for fashion, jewelry or watch affiliates.

It has 10 different themes that you can choose from, including customizable layouts, colors, and pages. It comes with everything you need to run a successful affiliate blog with WordPress.

Being one of the top rated themes on Themeforest, Claue is a very powerful theme that will allow you to customize your website exactly the way you want.

Buy Claudio here

Contraption

If you are promoting gadgets, cameras, electronics or computers thencontraptionis the perfect magazine theme for your Amazon Associates blog.

This theme is Retina display ready, fully customizable, Google Rich Snippets ready, SEO ready and includes Visual Composer which is another great drag and drop builder that lets you create pages in minutes without knowing any code.

Buy Gadgetine here

There are also thousands of other amazing WordPress themes that you can use to easily set up your website design in minutes.

Now that your site is ready, it's time to add content to rank on Google.

Step 5: Create content

To get traffic from Google you will need to create good content on your website in the form of blog posts.

Just like YouTube, we want to do a content search to see what kind of content is already getting a lot of traffic on Google.

We can use Ahrefs Content Explorer to find relevant content that is getting good organic traffic. Add your keyword in Content Explorer and sort results by organic traffic.

This will show you some great content ideas that you can use to create content similar to the articles you found on Ahrefs. You can see here in our example that the article “Best DSLR Cameras for Beginners” gets around 40,000 visitors a month from organic traffic. Not bad!

Just look at the content and create similar or better content by adding your affiliate links throughout the content.

Typically, the longer your content is, the higher the chance it will rank and the more keywords it will rank for, which means more traffic. You rarely see articles of 1,000 words or less on the first page of Google.

You'll also want to create a good amount of content around your niche or topic. Don't expect to rank if you only have 2-3 articles on your blog. You will need at least 25-50 articles to start getting traffic from Google.

You will also need to get backlinks and social signals to get a lot of organic traffic to your affiliate marketing blog.

Step 6: Promote your content

social media

Using social media to promote your Amazon Associates blog can generate a source of organic traffic that returns on a regular basis.

Create a page on all popular social networks for your niche blog.

Post regular content and grow your following on all your profiles. Connect and interact with other pages or people interested in your niche or category.

we have a greatdigital marketing guide for independent entrepreneurswhich delves into how to market your blog with social media.

I recommend just focusing on one social media platform and focusing all of your time on it. See our guide onhow to start a successful blogfor more information on using social media to promote your blog.

obter backlinks

Backlinks are the foundation of SEO. This is how Google knows which site is popular on the web and which ones should rank on the first page of Google.

If many websites link to a particular website, Google thinks it must be an important website. Of course, there are thousands of other factors that go along with this, but without backlinks, you're unlikely to get traffic.

But how do you get backlinks?

Well, there are many ways to get backlinks to your blog. So many that I can't go through them all, but here are some good methods I use.

broken link building

Affiliate sites are always being sold or closed, so there are many opportunities to create broken links.

Frequent other sites in your niche or category and look for broken links to other sites. If you find a broken link pointing to content, please create that content and contact the site owner and report the broken link. Let's say you have some content they can link to instead and they'll be happy to link to you.

Use a tool likebroken link checkerfor Chrome to find broken links on websites.

Just visit relevant websites and look for broken link opportunities!

skyscraper technique

The skyscraper technique is quite simple. Basically, it's about finding the most trafficked content for what you're trying to rank for and creating better content.

It shouldn't just be a little better, but 10 times better. You can then see who is linking to the original article and reach out to those people and tell them you have 10X better content to link to. Most of the time they will be happy to update your link to better content.

Once you start getting more and more backlinks, your blog posts will rank higher and higher in Google. For more information aboutstart a successful blog and earn moneyCheck out our other post.

junk mail

Although Amazon Associates links are not allowed in emails, it is still a great way to earn more affiliate income with Amazon.

I even run a service that sends subscribers Amazon's best daily deals every day via email, calledninja agreements. You just scrape Amazon and find the best deals, then compile it into an email and send it out to thousands of subscribers. When they click on products in the email, they are taken to alanding pagewhere they can click to buy the product.

Bam, using email to monetize Amazon Associates.

If you have an email list, you can submit relevant deals and products on Amazon, but make sure you don't link to the Amazon product in your email or you could be suspended from Amazon Associates.

If you've never built an email list, you're in luck.

I'm going to show you a super simple way to build relevant email lists to promote your Amazon associate links.

Step 1: Start creating a list

The first step is to start building an email list!

There are many ways you can build your list, but here are the ones I think are the best:

• Newsletter Subscription
• facebook ads
• No check-out
• current customers

Once you start building an email list, you can start marketing to them on a regular basis. Unlike ads, SEO or direct visitors, email marketing allows you to market to a potential customer multiple times instead of just once. This is what makes email marketing such a powerful traffic source for affiliate marketing.

Basically, you can automate this whole process usingget an answerand I'll show you how.

Step 2: Send newsletter

sign up forget an answer, which is alanding pageand email marketing software that will basically automate this entire process.

The first thing you will have to do is create a list. This is where we'll put all of the emails we collect from our list.

Go to the Lists tab in the top navigation and click 'Create List' on the list page.

Choose a name for yours that includes underscores instead of spaces.

Click the Create button and your list is already created!

Now we can set up an automated email funnel to send to people who signed up to our list.

Go to the menu at the top and click on the automation link.

First, we need to create our automation message, then we can create our email workflow (the fun part).

Click the automation messages tab on the automation page and click "create draft".

You will first need to create your email messages before setting them up in the generator. So, create all necessary emails first.

Choose a linked list and give your message a name. Create a catchy subject line so the subscriber can easily see your email. A good tip is to use the subscriber's name in the subject line.

Not only will this increase open rates, but it will also decrease the chance of it ending up in your spam folder.

Choose the email address you will be sending from and click Next to start creating your email.

I like to choose a blank template and start from scratch, because plain text emails are more likely to end up in the inbox than the spam folder.

Choose the blank template and add a text block where you will add your email text. Here's an example of what you can write for your first email in your sequence.

Create all necessary emails, go to Automation and create a workflow.

There are several great templates that you can do with just a few edits and have a working email sequence.

But I'll show you how to do it from scratch. So click the start now button in the 'build from scratch' box.

You will now need to name your email string and choose an action to start your email with. In this case, we'll start this sequence when someone joins our email list.

You will now be taken to the workflow dashboard where you can develop your workflow.

Use the conditions on the right hand side to perform certain actions when someone opens, clicks or visits a certain page.

To connect actions, just click on the dots and connect them. In the example below, we'll send a message when someone signs up for our list.

Now you can build each step of your email sequence, making sure to add a day or two between sending each email.

Now that you have your email sequence set up withget an answer, you can start building your list and guide people through your sequences, promote certain products on Amazon and earn money.

Step 3: Promote your listing

Keep building your email list and you will grow your affiliate income more and more.

You can even promote other relevant affiliate offers to your followers.

Keep an eye on unsubscribe rates and try to send emails only once or a few times a week. If your unsubscribe rate starts to increase, send emails less often.

Amazon Influencer Program

If you have a large social media following or are an influencer, you can earn money with Amazon Associates by having your own Amazon store where people can visit and buy the products you recommend.

When they buy those products, you get a commission based on the value of those products. Not bad, right?

HeAmazon Influencer Programgives you your own URL to share with your followers.

To apply, you need to apply and wait around 2 weeks for your account to be approved. If you have less than 1000 followers in total, you might not be accepted, but that's okay because now you know many other ways to earn money with Amazon Associates.