Have you heard of Amazon Associates? What if we told you there is a way to earn extra money from home and put aside your desk job? All you need to do is join the world’s largest e-commerce company! With an Amazon Affiliate website, you can monetize your online presence, make a living creating content, and earn passive income in no time.
However, it is not as easy as it seems. To do this, you will have to put in a lot of effort to become a successful Amazon affiliate. This step-by-step guide will explain Amazon’s affiliate program and how it works.
So, get your bank account ready and dive into the Amazon affiliate program! The data provided in this article was gathered from the OABeans website.
What is an Amazon Affiliate Website?
An affiliate website for Amazon is a web portal that is only created to attract users and lead them to the Amazon website to make a purchase. This program allows you to earn money by recommending Amazon’s products within its extensive catalog on your website. In other words, you help Amazon promote their products and sell more while giving you a commission for each product sold.
This is how it works:
- You choose the products you want to promote or recommend.
- You create articles on your blog or website to talk about them and add some affiliate links provided by Amazon that carry a specific identification.
- Every time someone enters the Amazon website through your link and makes a purchase (or several) within the next 24 hours, you will get a percentage of the sales.
- Thanks to the identifier of the links you use in your blog or website, Amazon will know that the commission of that sale belongs to you.
The more traffic your website receives, the more likely you are to generate sales through your affiliate links and earn money with Amazon.
How to Build Your Own Amazon Affiliate Website?
Creating an Amazon affiliate website is not that difficult. If you already have a decent website, you must sign up for Amazon Associates. But for those of you who never had a website, we have prepared the step-by-step guide below:
1. Choose a Market Niche
First, you need to choose a market niche. Niche is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focused. We advise you to consider choosing low-competition niches such as sewing, pottery, darts, farming, and other similar topics.
Look for these characteristics in your desired niche:
- It should be easy to position.
- It should give you a decent amount of profit when you position.
- It should have enough products and subcategories for you to make a whole site out of them.
- It would be best if you had an interest in the topic.
2. Choose a Domain and Hosting
Now that you have chosen the niche in which you will focus your Amazon affiliate marketing website, the next step is choosing a domain name to help your target audience identify your website.
It’s recommended to look for a name relevant to the topics you talk about, but that does not force you into talking about a single product so that you can cover more topics without getting out of context. So, choose a domain of one or two words that helps you create a brand.
Next, you need to choose a hosting service provider. Choosing low-quality and cheap hosting are some of the most common mistakes people make. Not only does cheap hosting offer terrible page load times and uptime, but they also offer lousy customer service, which leads to you being left with a dysfunctional website. So, make sure to choose a reliable hosting service.
4. Set Up Your Amazon Affiliate Website
The next step is the creation of your Amazon affiliate website. If you’re not a technical person or not particularly keen on programming, it’s highly recommended to use WordPress. There is no other option that is as functional, flexible, and useful as WordPress, especially for niche sites.
Setting up a WordPress site is pretty straightforward. You can set up the basics of a WordPress-based affiliate site in just 20 minutes. After setting up your website, you need to choose a theme. You can follow these guidelines to choose a suitable theme for your website:
- It should be optimized and fast by default.
- It must be compatible with the plugins that you use.
- It should be flexible enough to offer different content formats and enough customization options.
- The topic should focus on conversion. Your ultimate goal is to make the visitor feel confident to click on the affiliate link and buy the product.
- The theme should be mobile-friendly (responsive) by default.
5. Decide on a Content Strategy
Now that you have your website with Amazon affiliate up and running, it’s time to move on to the most crucial section of all: the content. If your content is boring and of little value, no visitor will continue reading, much less buy from Amazon based on your recommendations.
Here are some types of content you can post on your website:
- Informational articles
- Q&A articles
- List articles
- Top-product articles
- Individual Product Reviews
6. Sign Up for Amazon Associates
You can go directly to the Amazon Associates configuration if you already have an Amazon account. If not, you will first need to create an Amazon account. To do this, click on the “Sign up” button and “Create your Amazon account.”
Amazon then asks you for a name, email, and password. Enter the data and click on the “Create your Amazon account” button. On the next screen, you must fill in your details in the Account Information section.
With everything filled in, click Next.
7. Add Your Website and Create Your Affiliate ID
On the next screen, you will have to indicate your Amazon affiliate website. Finally, you must create your affiliate ID and indicate how you prefer to be paid.
In this part, you will have to add information about your website, the primary and secondary thematic categories, and the types of products you will promote.
They will also ask you for information about generating traffic, how you use your page to generate income, how you will generate the links and other related info. After providing the required information, accept the terms and conditions and finish the registration.
Pros & Cons of Amazon Affiliate Program
If you’re unsure whether you want to set up an affiliate website for Amazon, knowing its pros and cons might help you decide easier. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of creating an Amazon affiliate website:
Pros:
- It is totally safe (every month, Amazon pays like clockwork)
- You start to earn money with few visits (unlike AdSense)
- You do not have to manage anything (Amazon takes care of the stock, shipments, returns, etc.)
- Amazon is a selling machine (once you send users there, they will almost certainly buy more than one item)
- You can implement it immediately on new websites (unlike AdSense)
Cons:
- It is very passive, but not completely (you will have to talk about new products that come out to be up to date)
- They can cancel your account if you do not comply with all their rules
- Low commissions for some products
- Amazon can turn off the tap whenever it wants (it would be time to move to another platform with affiliation)
Top Amazon Affiliate Websites
Many Amazon affiliate websites look like regular blogs or review-based websites. So, you might have visited one before without even noticing. These websites are usually packed with information and reviews of products linked to their respective Amazon product page.
Here’s a list of the most successful Amazon affiliate websites to give you a general idea of what yours should look like:
- The Prepared.com
- DogFoodAdvisor.com
- Equipboard.com
- Homegrounds.co
- PCPartPicker.com
- Territory Supply.com
- TheSweetHome.com
- LiveLongerRunning.com
- PichMyShaver.com
- LongBoardReviews.net
Amazon Affiliate Marketing Alternatives
Amazon Associates is the most extensive affiliate marketing program in the world, but it’s not the only one. Many platforms can help you monetize your website, such as:
- MyLead
- AliExpress Affiliate Program
- ClickBank
- Shopify
- eBay Affiliates
- Awin
- Hostinger Affiliates
- Rakuten Marketing
Final Thoughts
Websites or blogs monetized by the Amazon affiliate program have great potential. You can turn a site generating next to nothing into a profit any time you want or create a new Amazon affiliate website using the instructions in this article.
As long as you are technically consistent, understand the fundamental SEO concepts, and have some basic website-building skills, you can make good money from the Amazon affiliate program.
