How to make money with amazon affiliate could be an option you are considering to supplement your salary or generate a real monthly income over time? You are not alone. Like you, more and more owners of personal blogs or websites recognize the earning opportunities that can result from Affiliate Marketing.
But what is an affiliate program? It is nothing more than a type of online marketing that allows you to convert traffic to your site into money by subscribing to an advertising program. How does it work? By inserting links or banners in your content related to products on sale in certain e-commerce, you make your readers perform actions.
This can be a simple click on the website, signing up for a program by filling in an online form or purchasing one or more products. For each useful action in the program you have joined, you as an affiliate earn a percentage of commission per performance. If this is your project, you may find it useful to learn how best to do this through a course on monetizing a blog or site.
- In this article, I will discuss, in particular, the Amazon Affiliate Program, one of the countless Affiliate Programs available but among the most widely used, and which differs from the others in a number of particularities:
- It is not necessary to have the intermediation of an affiliate network between the Publisher, i.e. the owner of the personal blog or website, and the Advertiser, i.e. the seller. Everything is handled very simply and directly with the Amazon platform. You can register and create your Associates Account in just a few steps.
- The percentages, ranging from 3% up to 12% depending on the category of the product sold, are paid to the affiliate for a single action performed by users who land on the Amazon Marketplace through its sponsorship, and that is the purchase of items. If this sounds penalizing to you, you should know that Amazon recognizes both direct and indirect sales. I will explain later what this is. It should be emphasized that the Amazon Affiliate has no cost for your user, who pays the same price for the article purchased via your blog as he would have paid by accessing the store directly.
Amazon does not use tracking cookies. The affiliate is only credited with sales completed within 24 hours of starting to browse its site.
If you now want to know how to make money with Amazon Affiliate from home, read on. Below I will give you all the information and in particular explain:
- how Amazon affiliate programs work
- why choose Amazon affiliations
- how to earn money with Amazon links
- how Amazon pays for affiliations.
Amazon affiliation: what it is and why to choose it
Earning with Amazon affiliations is in itself very simple. All you have to do is promote a product within one of your articles via an automatically generated link from the platform and start earning passively on every purchase made by your followers on Amazon. The percentage recognized varies depending on the category of the product purchased. Obviously, in order for the conversion process to take place effectively, you must meet the following prerequisites:
- Have a personal blog or website that intercepts a competitive niche and a fair number of followers.
- Write your articles with an SEO perspective, to foster visibility in Google search results and intercept people with interests in line with your topic.
- Treat the topics of interest to your audience and not according to the products to be sold in affiliation.
If, on the other hand, your goal is to write reviews, I recommend avoiding the blog, which risks being too commercial in the eyes of users. There are more suitable social channels, e.g. YouTube, and the Amazon affiliate program for influencers.
The advantages of earning with Amazon
Why choose to earn money with Amazon among all the affiliate programs available today? Besides the differences between the Amazon Affiliate Program and the other Affiliate Programs mentioned above, there are several advantages to being an Amazon affiliate; let’s see which ones.
Reputation
Amazon is known and recognized by all as the largest online marketplace. Recommending an item for sale on the world’s most popular e-commerce platform to your followers means accompanying them to a shop they already know very well and where they have probably made purchases or bought regularly. They know its delivery efficiency and the guarantee of easy and timely returns.
The extensive catalog assortment
You can find everything on Amazon. You have a wide choice of products to sell in affiliation at your disposal. You will have no difficulty in finding the product most in line with your content, whatever blog niche you have decided to use to earn money with Amazon affiliations.
Easy-to-generate links
The system generates product links automatically and you can choose between different advertising formats: text link only or link plus product image. In addition, Amazon provides banners, which are available in different formats and ready to be shared. You can strategically distribute both formats within your page.
Assistance and payments
Amazon recognizes commissions monthly when the 25 euro threshold is reached. The efficiency demonstrated by the Marketplace, when it comes to sales, can also be seen in the relationship with its Affiliates. Payments are on time and support is always available to solve any problems and answer your questions when you choose to earn money with Amazon affiliations.
Reporting section
In your account, you have several types of reports available that allow you to keep track of the results of your Amazon affiliate activity. You can analyze data on the commissions you have earned, the list of orders placed by customers, the performance of links, and daily trends with the number of visitors that have passed through your website.
Download free guide on new business ideas
How to make money with Amazon affiliate
If you are now wondering how Amazon affiliation works, know that in order to earn money with Jeff Bezos’ giant, you don’t need to own a product, you just need to place a link generated within your website that refers the user to a product sold on Amazon’s site.
The links contain a tracking code and this causes you to receive a percentage for each purchase you make. As I have already mentioned, unlike the other Affiliate Programmes, Amazon does not use cookies. This difference means that the purchase, in order to be recognized by the affiliate, must be made within a single session within 24 hours.
Otherwise, if the product has been placed in the shopping cart, Amazon recognizes a 90-day window. The sale will be awarded if the user completes the purchase within this period. But let us now see in detail what the steps are to start earning money with Amazon affiliations.
Join the Amazon Affiliate Programme
To start earning money with Amazon links, you must first sign up for the Amazon Affiliate Programme. Even if you already have an Amazon account, you will be asked to create one specifically for the affiliate program, and that is the Associate’s Account.
To do so, you must register by filling in all the mandatory fields of a simple form; you will have to specify the various information needed to outline your customized program. Specifically, you must:
- Enter your personal details: the address to which the payment cheque is to be sent, your program name, telephone number, and state whether you are a US citizen.
- Provide information on the top-level sites on which you want to affiliate. You will have to enter the URL and click on “add”. The same applies in case you also want to register mobile apps or social media. If you are wondering how many accounts can be associated with the Amazon affiliate program, know that you can associate up to 50 websites or apps with one account.
- Create your affiliate shop profile. To do this, you must create your PartnerID, i.e. a customized identifier of your site or name. As a rule, it should consist of letters and numbers. This will become the name of your shop and enable you to be recognized as an affiliate partner. Your PartnerID will be displayed in the form of a tag within the product links that you place on your pages.
- Specify what topics your site covers and what types of Amazon products you intend to advertise. Defining your target niche is very important because it allows you to offer your readers products that are consistent with the subject matter of the articles on your site/blog. One of the reasons that can lead to your Amazon membership application being rejected can be precisely the lack of originality of your site topics or content.
- Indicate the type of site: you will have to define whether it is a Blog or a Content, Manufacturer, Discount/Offer Site, or other.
- Specify how you usually direct traffic to your site. You will find a list of methodologies, and you should select the ones you usually use, for example: whether you do SEO, whether you generate traffic to your site with social media, whether you do inbound marketing or e-mail marketing, whether you use search engine sponsorships.
- How you generate income on your sites/apps: e.g. through contextual advertising, other affiliate networks, E-commerce, and banners.
- Explain why you decided to join the Amazon affiliate program and how you came to know about it.
Once you have answered all the questions and completed the registration, all that is left to do is to start generating links and placing them on your website to start earning money with Amazon affiliations.
Get links to products
Creating links to earn money with Amazon affiliations is very simple. Once you have signed up for the affiliate program, when you log into the Marketplace with your account, you will see the SiteStripe of the Amazon affiliate program appear above the product search bar. Through this control panel, you will be able to generate your links and customize your banner adverts.
But let’s see how to get an Amazon affiliate link in practice. Once you have identified the product you want to sponsor via the search bar, simply click on “get link” and the program automatically provides you with the shortcode to copy and paste on your page.
Insert links on your site/blog
Amazon gives you a choice of two formats: text only or text + image. In the first case, you are given an abbreviated link to insert directly into your page via the anchor icon.
If you choose the option that also includes an image of the product, the system automatically generates an HTML code that must be pasted into the text version of your page. Once inserted into your content, you will be able to display the product image with its price.
Another option made available by the Amazon affiliate program to include an item in your content is the banner ad. You can choose between different shapes and colors, and customize your ad by taking advantage of promotions and special discounts for certain products at particular times of the year. However, these should be used very strategically.
Online users are used to seeing banner ads often not relevant to the content in the sidebar or in non-contextualized positions on the page and are equally used to ignoring them.
Banners generate fewer conversions (in the case of Amazon affiliation we are talking about purchases) than a strategically chosen link placed within the text precisely where the user would like to find it so that it appears as natural as possible. If too many links sown without logic weigh down the content, too few risks not intercepting the user’s intention to purchase, who would be forced to search within the text for that link which he had noticed at the beginning of the reading but which he missed.
Direct buying and indirect buying: what is the difference?
If you decide to start working with Amazon affiliations, you should know that in its program you are recognized for both direct and indirect purchases. This is because Amazon makes a distinction between two types of purchases. When the user accesses the marketplace via the code of a product he has encountered on your page and buys the same product or one belonging to the same category, Amazon considers this to be a direct eligible purchase and pays you the percentage for that product category.
If, on the other hand, the user makes a purchase of a product belonging to a different category, it will be considered an indirect eligible purchase and you will still receive a percentage, albeit a lower one.
Why does Amazon allow you to earn money with affiliations even in the case of indirect purchases? As you know, Amazon uses related product suggestions, i.e. those products that it thinks will be of interest to the user, and these are the ones that appear on the shopping page in boxes dedicated to brands related to the keyword entered in the search bar, related products, other products bought by users who have bought the same product.
For Amazon, it is important not just to sponsor a single item, but to drive traffic to the entire shop and expand sales to all products in its catalog, regardless of category. For this reason, it wants to reward you for any purchase that generates your sponsorship.
The Amazon Influencer Programme
Is siteless affiliation possible? If you are wondering whether it is really necessary to have a website or blog to earn money with Amazon affiliations, the answer is no. This does not mean that you only need to share Amazon products on Facebook to earn money. You have to consider that the basis of a purchase by a user is trust in the person who sponsored that product.
For this reason, a user is more likely to make a purchase if he comes across a product he is interested in on a blog that is considered authoritative in a certain sector; this is because he feels reassured by the reputation of the person who recommended it. The same user will hardly trust a sponsored recommendation on a stranger’s social channel; on the contrary, he will interpret it as a shameless attempt to earn a commission.
So, yes, it is possible to earn money with Amazon affiliations without a site, but only if you are an influencer with a good reputation and a good number of followers on your social channels.
Amazon dedicates its Amazon Influencer Programme to this category, an extension of the Amazon Affiliate Program reserved for those with a YouTube channel, Facebook account, Twitter, and Instagram. By creating their own showcase within the Amazon Marketplace, the Influencer will be able to review, sponsor selected products, and earn money from purchases made by their followers.
How much is earned with Amazon affiliations
At this point you may be asking yourself: but how much do you earn with affiliate links? Now let us come to the numbers, i.e. the real figures you can earn with Amazon affiliations. The commissions recognized are in the Amazon affiliate program percentages of the purchase price of the individual product that the reader of your blog buys through your sponsorship, and it varies depending on the category.
The products with the highest earnings belong to the Fashion category. This includes all items of clothing, shoes, watches, and jewelry. For each eligible direct purchase in this category, you receive a percentage ranging from 10% to 12%. The lowest commission percentage, on the other hand, is for Electronics and Computers products.
For each direct item purchased, the commission paid to the affiliate is between 3% and 4%. Although this may seem like a very low earning percentage to you, you have to consider that items belonging to this category are generally rather high-priced.
So, on balance, even as little as 3% is good revenue. The other product categories, e.g. Consumer Goods, Home, Hobbies, and Digital Products, bring the franchisee a maximum earning percentage of 7%. While the average price of products sold by Amazon is medium/low, which may lead one to think that earnings are relatively small, one must consider that a user rarely accesses Amazon to make a single purchase.
Furthermore, for all products that are placed in the shopping cart, the customer has up to 90 days to decide to complete the purchase and validate the attribution of the sale to your affiliate account.
The minimum monthly revenue threshold to be reached in order to receive payment from Amazon is €25.00. If you have not reached this amount at the end of the month, it will be counted against the next month’s revenue. Any monthly revenue exceeding this limit will be paid to you within 60 days after the month in question. How does Amazon pay for affiliations? It provides for two payment methods:
- Via an Amazon Voucher spendable in its Marketplace
- By crediting your current account with a bank transfer or by sending a cheque.
Conclusions and Strategic Coaching
Earning with Amazon affiliations can be a valid opportunity to make a passion profitable through a personal blog, or a particular expertise in a particular niche sector with a dedicated site. Generating affiliate links is really easy and the variety of products in the store makes it suitable for a variety of content. With the right following and the ability to create engaging and authoritative content, affiliate marketing can become an online profession in its own right.
Affiliation without a VAT number is only possible if it is an occasional activity, although this is difficult to prove. However, given the numerous advantages of self-employment online and the possibility of joining the Forfeit Scheme, affiliations are undoubtedly an opportunity to consider.
Want to understand how to make the most out of selling Amazon affiliations through your website? Book a free strategy consultation with one of our experts
0 Comments