Amazon Affiliate Marketing
You must have heard so much exaggeration about how much money
you can make doing affiliate marketing. Or, might have set up a site with the
aim of making money from affiliate marketing and might have spent money buying
a domain, paid for hosting, employed the services of a web designer to design
your site only to find out the money made isn’t enough to cover your capital.
Well, maybe you haven’t tried the right affiliate program. There’s a way
to make money from the affiliate marketing Amazon program. Yes, Amazon
affiliate marketing which is known as the Amazon Associates program. Before we
talk about how you can make money from this Amazon affiliate marketing program,
we will take a look at its brief history.
What is the Amazon Associates program
all about?
Amazon Associates is one of the first set of affiliate marketing
programs which was launched in 1996. This program has a track record of over 12
years of developing solutions for helping website owners, developers and
sellers on Amazon make money by advertising tons of used and new products from
amazon.com and its subsidiaries like SmallParts.com and Endless.com. Bloggers
and website owners that are associates create links for customers to click on
to enable them to earn referral fees. The Amazon Affiliate program is free to
join and very easy to use!
You can earn up to 10% referral fees if you provide customers
the confidence of purchasing product via a referral link to a trusted site of
yours and when they make the purchase, you get your commission.
Another cool side is that you get up to 15% referral fee if you
are promoting certain products like gadgets. What you need to do basically is
to write a review on the gadget and provide an Amazon affiliate marketing link.
Anyone who clicks on this link and purchases the item would automatically earn
you your commission.
Your geographical location is also a determining factor for your
target market. For instance, if you are in the U.S., then automatically your
target audience would be the U.S. market and you should sign up for the US
Amazon associate program. On the other hand, if you are in India, you would
want to sign up for Amazon affiliate India.
How to make Money from Amazon Affiliate
Marketing
There are various things that you need to do and know if you are
serious about making money from Amazon Affiliate Marketing.
Below, we shall look at how to beat the odds in Amazon Affiliate
program and how you can increase your sales after making money:
1.) Learn some basic HTML of you have
no knowledge about it
To reduce your costs, you need to learn some basic HTML. It
doesn’t matter if the site is basically laid down for you, it is important to
know how images are inserted, creating of hyperlinks and some text formatting.
2.) Choose your topic
Since you are going to do a lot of product reviews and
recommendations, you are going to have to pick a topic that you have the
passion for or something you have a wide knowledge of. If your passion is not
within that topic, then you are likely to lose interest eventually. Therefore,
it is pertinent to choose something of your interest.
3.) Pick a domain name
It doesn’t really have to be clever but keyword rich. Take time
to think of how people will find your website. You should think of a suitable
name that people would search for in the search engines.
4.) Register the domain name you pick
If you aren’t technically inclined, you can register your domain
name at the same site you set up your hosting to make it easier for you.
However, if you want to save some money, you can choose a lower-cost provider.
This shouldn’t be a big deal using one or two sites but might be a big deal for
up to ten or twenty. Domain companies like GoDaddy.com have great domain
management tools are very affordable charging less than $10 yearly.
5.) Set up web hosting for your site
This is the part where people make mistakes the most. You don’t
need to spend up to $10 per month for web hosting. There are companies that
charge as low as $4 per month with unlimited domains which mean you can run
more than one sites in this same package.
6.) Install a blog software
This gives your site the structure it needs and makes it easy
for posting new content. WordPress is the best option because it is easy to
install and use, it is an open source and very powerful. All you need to do is
download it and follow what is said in the instructions.
7.) Make it look good
This is one thing that makes WordPress stand out from the rest.
There are various templates available that could give your blog/site a unique
look.
8.) Set categories up
You are allowed to create sub-categories on most blog software
so you can organize your entries. Visitors use this to narrow down their search
on their interests.
9.) Go to Amazon.com and sign up
as an associate
There’s no difficulty in in getting started with Amazon
Affiliate Marketing. All you need to do is go to amazon.com and click on the
Join Associates button and the page’s bottom. By now, your site should have
been set up at the basic stage, at least even if there is no content yet
because they will manually review the site before it gets approved.
10.) Create
blog posting links/bookmarks
There are two important links
you need to make it easy. The first is the blog posting link which is at the
bottom of the posting page of the blog software written as “bookmarklet”. Click
on the link while holding down the mouse and drag it up to your Links toolbar
on the browser you are using. This makes it possible to use a mouse click to
blog a product.
11.) Create
the Amazon Build-a-Link bookmark/link
This makes it easy to build the
link with affiliate ID built in. You need to log in to Associates Central and
on the left navigation sidebar, go to Build-A-link, and below Static Links,
look for Individual Items. Click on this link and drag it onto your Favorites
menu or Links toolbar.
12.) Build your first link
Log in to your Amazon
Associates accounts and look for the product you intend to review then use Site
Stripe (that is the gray stripe at the top of the screen you see when you log
in) to get your personalized link to the item. There are also a wide variety of
options for creating banners and links.
13.) Blog
your review
Once you are done writing your
review, the next thing is to post it live by clicking on your blog posting the
link (on WordPress you will see it as the Press It! Icon). You will see two
pieces of link code on the posting form if it is WordPress you are using. The
first one ends with “Associates Build-A-Link></a>”. Delete all through
that point. The other part is a link to the product having your Amazon
Associate built in. So, go ahead and write your product review, select the most
appropriate categories for it then click on Publish.
14.) Build
out your site
Before promoting your site, you
would want to make sure there is a good amount of content there. You need to
write several product reviews with 2-3 in each category created. You might also
need to make categories for news, articles, commentary and others about the
topic. The more the content on your site, the better. The amazing thing about
all this is that as you writing all this, the search engines automatically are
getting notified, if you turned the notifications on, mentioned earlier.
15.) Promote your site
The most efficient free way to
go about this is to let other bloggers who write similar topics know about
yours, and you can also participate in online communities and discussion forums
where you can discuss your topic with other people.
Useful
Tips to Get You Started
1.
It is important for you to learn some basic HTML as well as
basic concepts pertaining to running a website. It’s not really tedious to
understand and within a short period, you will have a grasp of it. Relying on
purchased software might backfire because it might not give you what you really
need and when things go wrong you will end up spending more than you ought to.
Take time to learn these things and you won’t regret it.
2.
If you are a music lover, it would be a good idea to promote it
over books and even other products. All you need to do is listen to clips of a
full album within a short period, say 10 minutes, get a good feel of it without
you purchasing it and do a short review. If there is another niche you are
passionate about, make sure you get a unique discovery about it. Of course,
there are hundreds of thousands of reviews about these products all over the
web but you need to make yours more unique to attract people to your site.
3.
If you want to make even more money, sign up for Google AdSense.
Although, it might not make too much income but it’s worth it since it is free
to sign up and doesn’t require anything to maintain.
4.
Set good expectations for your earnings. Since you must have
invested $20 and you are going to make 5% per product, it means you need to
sell $400 worth of products to make your investment back. If you want to make
$20 per hour, what you write on must generate $400 worth of product purchased.
How to
increase sales in Amazon Affiliate Marketing
(1.) Post
links regularly to optimize your earnings
This requires you to discover
creative ways you can incorporate product recommendations into your posts on
your blog while still creating the impression that you are offering your
readers expertise on the subject.
It should be noted that the links
to the affiliate program Amazon provides are active for 24 hours after it
is clicked by a potential buyer meaning that they expire after 24 hours with fresh
links providing the opportunity to earn money.
(2.) Build
links for several kinds of products over time
You get paid an advertising fee
by Amazon on the whole purchase made and not just the product advertised. This
means you need to make sure people use their link on Amazon so they can make
the full purchase they wanted to make using your referral link.
(3.) You
can use your referral link to send information via email or to family members
You earn commission on
anybody’s purchase, except yours, if they use your referral link within 24
hours. One tip here is that you can trade referral links with family members
and friends and use their link to make your own purchases and ask them to do the
same so there can be sharing of the spoils. This might not be the major way to
make money in the affiliate program Amazon runs, but it can help your
commission structure.
(4.) Add
widgets to your site
There are widgets and online
stores of the Amazon Associates program that can be added to your website
templates. Make sure you list various recommended products in your sidebar.
(5.)
Promote products worth $100 and above
Products that are higher in
price would give you a higher commission. Therefore make sure you recommend
such products.
(6.) Use
lists
Make a recommendation list
monthly on a new topic because they are valuable to your readers and potential
customers.
(7.) Use
Amazon Associate links to post seasonal content
Obviously, around Christmas
period, people tend to buy more, therefore, post recommended products before
this period to take advantage of sales that will go on on Amazon affiliate
marketing. It is better to start creating a seasonal schedule for your blog
posts early enough. There are several holidays, so you can plan ahead of them
to make more sales and earn your commission.
(8.)
Optimize your website or blog
Run an SEO analysis on your
site to know what adjustments to make in order to improve its coverage.
Amazon Affiliate
Marketing is a very good way to make money if you are serious
about it. With the necessary knowledge, skills, dedication and right attitude,
you are bound to make such money in no time!
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