How To Make Money With The Amazon Affiliate Program: The Newbie Guide

In case you didn't know yet, Mark and I live in Budapest Hungary for most of the year. Why ?

Because the city combines the best of a traditional european lifestyle and the nightlife of central Europe and a comfortable lifestyle here costs only half of what it would cost in western Europe.

​There's only one problem with this place: The product selection available in shops SUCKS due to a tiny local market with limited financial means. Plus, it's all overpriced, thanks to the local VAT set at 27% (the highest in Europe).

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​But there's one company that saves the day for us, poor expats of Budapest: Amazon.

​Amazon UK and Germany both Ship most of their products to Hungary at Local store VAT rates (hint: they're much lower) and only a tiny surcharge for the freight.

As a consequence, anything we need to buy that isn't needed this second goes through Amazon. ​And so does the purchases of an alarmingly increasing amount of people around the world and especially in the US.

Here, take a pick at the sales growth of the Amazon group since 2007. Not many companies can more than 3x in 6 years when they start at 17 billion.

This growth represents an incredible opportunity as an authority site owner.​ as you are able to refer traffic to quality products sold on that conversion engine that is amazon and get paid for it using the amazon partner program.

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What you will learn in this post

What is the amazon partner program

The amazon partner program is Amazon's very own affiliate program. That means that you can get paid for generating sales on Amazon. Being in the english speaking market, I only know of Amazon.com.au not running the partner program.

Every other country should let you send traffic to them and pay you for conversion through the program. It's important to note that every version of Amazon runs its own program and program portal so you may have to sign up to several TLDs if you operate or receive traffic from several countries.

Don't worry, I'll teach you how to route your traffic to optimise conversion later in this guide.​ I recommend signing up per language.

That means that if you're going to be writing in english, you should probably have an account on the US, UK, Canadian and Indian versions of Amazon.

​But what exactly do you get for promoting and selling products on Amazon ? Here is a quick fact table and a complete referral rate index:

Now the main thing people focus on when they learn about the Amazon associate program is the low commission rates. It's true. getting on average 6-7% of a transaction is not a whole lot.

People also get disappointed at the fact that the cookie only lasts 24 hours. This means that if the people who clicked decide to buy the item 2 days later, you will not get paid.

But do not get blinded by this. The fact that Amazon offers unbeatable prices, 24 hours delivery, branded products​ and the fact that you get paid a % of the WHOLE order, not just the products you recommended makes up for the downsides of the program.

The offers are so compelling that reaching 4-5% conversion rate​ on the traffic you send is rather common. To give you a reference point, reaching 1-2% conversion rate with Click bank is already incredible.

This means that if amazon performs 3x better than Click Bank then conversion rates are comparable to being at 18-21% on​ Another network. Sounds more like it right ?

Now it is also true that people tend to order a lot of cheap products on amazon. 7% of a $10 ebook really is not a lot of money. But as you will see in the next section, these add up in ways you would not imagine.​

​Our Personal Experience

We've been running the Amazon partner program on Health Ambition since last July. So we'll celebrate our 1 year anniversary running with them next month at the time when I write this article. Here is a plotted map of our revenue growth with them since then:

As you can see, we started with a modest $49 on the first month. This certainly didn't help us much in paying the bills. But that income doubled almost every month since then! In May 2014, we've made over $700 and the really motivating part in all this is the growth curve.

Because of the way we're building sites, these will probably ​not get penalised or get massive traffic loss ever. If you run that growth curve over several years, Amazon should represent a seizable revenue that can handle a large chunk of our content costs.

As a matter of fact, a lot of way bigger affiliates than us start with even smaller numbers. If you look at Daren Rose from Problogger, he started with roughly the same numbers and now pulls a whooping $80,000+/year from Amazon alone. ​

Because I know you guys love numbers, I've taken the report of all the sales we've done so far and tried to answer some basic questions to try and understand what has worked for us and what has not.

1 - How many sales are coming from mobile and how many from desktop ?​

Google is saying mobile is coming at us faster than we think. I wanted to verify this assumption and see if mobile really weights in for us.

Is it something you can live without and just ignore ? Or do you need to work on making your site responsive and mobile friendly to fuel your growth ? Here are the numbers:

As you can see, almost a quarter of the sales we made were performed on a mobile device. This is a LOT!

Our site is already responsive but could do with some work. With a much sleeker redesign coming in a few weeks, I'm curious to see what the results will be and how much the user experience improvement will move the needle.

2 - Since I only get such a low % of sales, is it worth even considering the promotion of small items ?

This one is an interesting one as well. Are you wasting your time if you're not promoting big ticket items ? Since you will only get 6-8% of the sale, a $20 item will only earn you around $1.4. That's not exactly the payday of your dreams.

We're promoting a lot of small ticket items on Health Ambition like specific oils, extracts and gadgets. But we're also promoting big kitchen appliances costing upwards to $600 a pop. This should make a great case study to see what kind of items yields the biggest rewards.

​In order to understand the correlation between item price and affiliate earnings, I've split our earnings in 2. The earnings from items that cost more than $30, and the earnings from items that cost less than $30.

​Here are the results:

As you can see, the big ticket items are representing around 2/3 of our Amazon income. This means that if you want to go for raw revenue, you should sell expensive items.

However, over a third of the commissions we've made came from sales that made us less than $2. This is way more than most people would imagine and it is certainly worth it to push small items on top of big items.

3 - Since I get paid for everything people order in 24 hours. What generates the most money, what I link to or the other stuff they pick on top of it ?

If it was not too hard to predict the results of the mobile test, this one has been tormenting me for a while. It's not very easy to extract that data from Amazon as it's hidden in a separate report somewhere. Here's where we've been standing:

I have to admit, these results are a little crazy. The products we promote represent ONLY 17% of the transaction log in our amazon account. And a lot of these products have NOTHING to do with what we're talking about or promoting.

So what does that mean? Well there's several possible explanations to this crazy number:

1. ​Amazon is truly amazing at upselling people
2. When people begin an order on amazon, they like to make bigger orders to save on shipping.
3. Once on Amazon, people can't stop the shopping frenzy.

No matter what the reason is, this means that no matter what niche you're in, as long as you refer enough people to amazon for ANY product, you have a shot at making a bunch of sales and commissions.

If you check the answer to the 3 main questions, you'll probably come to the same conclusion as me: It doesn't matter too much how much the item you're pushing people towards costs.

All that matters is that you're pushing people interested in buying anything towards Amazon. They'll just get hooked from there and buy a ton of stuff you haven't even mentioned. 

Going from traffic to the sale

Now that you understand what the goals are and what works best when it comes to the Amazon partner program, it’s time to work on creating content that will earn you traffic ready to buy some products.

Luckily, Amazon sells almost anything that’s available on earth. Here's a little Mind map of the different types of contents we've tried that have triggered sales for us:

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1- Specific product reviews/unboxing

This one is probably the most basic and common way people use to make money on Amazon. They simply pick a product in their niche and review it.

This segment is actually becoming more and more competitive as it’s the simplest and most direct angle to sell stuff. Customers also love reading in depth 3rd party unbiased reviews.

As you can see from the graph above, Unboxing videos are an absolute hit as well. Yet, most affiliate marketer’s fail at writing great reviews because:

1. Most of the time they don’t even bother trying to get their hands on the physical product and simply rewrite other reviews found online.
2. They’re way too biased and just focus on saying the product is fantastic and you should buy it without giving genuine information.
3. Most of the time the research is very limited and adds little to no value compared to the official product description.

After reading the 3 points above it should be pretty obvious to figure out what we are going to recommend next. BE GENUINE!

It’s really simple, in order to earn the trust from your readers, you need to make it a real user review with the followings:

• What’s not so good about the product
• In depth explanation about the technology powering the product and its pros/cons.
• Power user tips & tricks
• Alternatives that may be better in certain situations (hint: these can also be affiliate links)

Some example headlines for this content category:

2- Best of product category

It’s no secret; people always want the best of everything. The good news about these people is that they’re usually happy to spend more money to get the best possible setup for whatever they’re trying to achieve.

These people will very often use Google to find information about the products in the category they’re looking to buy. They’ll often type keywords such as “best x” or “best x for y”.

They’ll often ask question about it on Q&A or forums sites such as Quora or Yahoo answers which presents a great opportunity to build links if you have content that matches the request exactly.

3- Dangers of / better alternatives

In case you didn't know yet, the fear of loss is always stronger than the bait of gain. Making people aware of the flaws of the solutions of whatever solution they're using will very easily convince them to swap to something better/safer.

We've run a ton of articles about unhealthy habits or items in the house that have made a killing on Amazon.​

Some example headlines for this content category:

4- In depth benefits of x articles

Talking about benefits or desired goals is a great way to introduce product based solutions. People are always trying to get better, faster, stronger at everything. If you create content based on the benefits and mention the product as the best way to achieve it, you'll be killing it in sales.

Some example headlines for this content category:

5- Product or category comparison articles (x vs y)

People love nerding stuff out and read product benchmarks and comparisons for hours online. The good news is that if they are, they're probably pretty close to be buying. If you can provide enough data, you may be able to take them to the end of the journey and have them make the purchase decision on your site.

Some example headlines for this content category:

6 - How to choose x

When you're about to buy a product in a product category you've never bought before, you usually have tons of "newbie" questions and need someone to hold your hands through your first buy. If you create that kind of content, it's fairly easy to grab this audience, build trust and walk them through choosing one of the products you recommend.

Some example headlines for this content category:

7 - News/product launch

Product launches are hot. There certainly is a lot of competition writing about them, but there is an equally big amount of people consuming content about new products. If you can just grab a fraction of a launch's traffic and make it convert, this can easily be worth your while.

Some example headlines for this content category:

8- Complementary products to x

We always have issues with the products we're using. Laptops heat up, wooden floors get scratches and phone screens shattered. If you can promote cheap products that solve or help solving these issues, you're golden.

Some example headlines for this content category:

Directing traffic to amazon​

Now that you know what works both in terms of content and linking, it's time to get our hands dirty.

Amazon offers plenty of tools and fancy banners for you to link back to them. Unfortunately, we haven't had any success with any of those​. It seems like people do not like clicking on banners (surprised).

The only thing that really worked. What really works for us are plain and simple links to products inside the content. They also look super clean and your content​ doesn't feel like a giant ad.

Click here to create additional tracking IDs

​One thing we highly recommend you use on the other hand is tracking ID's.

Tracking IDs basically allow you to track specific links and see which ones convert/don't convert.

We usually use IDs to define the placement within the article. 1 ID = 1 placement. Our placement rules are:

1. ​1 link in the intro paragraph for the people who directly want the solution.
2. a few contextual links in the content contextually.
3. a final call to action in the final paragraph.

Simply use a tracking ID for each type of link and you'll be able to see where your audience converts the most. You can then sub segment to further understand what works and what doesn't (like splitting ID's between categories or on high traffic posts).

There's one more thing I wouldn't do without in my setup: My affiliate link management plugin.​

I personally use Thirsty affiliate. It's a free plugin (with premium add ons) that allows you to do the following:​

While the plugin is free, the stats and geo ip redirect add ons are actually paid but well worth it if you considering the monthly/yearly cost of substitute link tracking & geo IP scripts.

While stats are fairly straight forward, a lot of you may not know what Geo IP is. It basically is a script that looks at the IP address of the person that clicks the link and conditionally redirect them based on that criteria.

Here's how Geo IP redirects work.

​This allows you to understand where people are at the time when they click the link and direct them to the version of Amazon where they are the most likely to buy. This is VERY useful if you get traffic from search and social because you can not control who will visit your site and what country they will be in.

If a visitor is in the UK, he will not likely buy from amazon.com and pay triple delivery fees. He will go to amazon.co.uk and order there. As all Amazon partner programs are operated independently, you will NOT get paid if the user goes from .com to .co.uk and buys there. That's why GEO IP is needed.

Here's a quick video of how this works in practice:

Closing thoughts

Wow, that post took way longer than anticipated to put together but I think it's a good summary of everything we've learned for almost a year now on how to make money with Amazon.

Most people get discouraged by the low commission rates but far under estimate the number of extra items people will pick up while shopping there, boosting your earnings massively.​

If you're going to grow a big site that you're truly going to commit to and it is in the B2C market, I highly suggest you get started with Amazon early.

It will probably not pay much at first, but as you grow, it will become a very decent secondary source of income that doesn't spoil your site design with massive banner ads.​ Simply link to the stuff you mention.

If you have any question on this post, as usual, post it in the comment section bellow and I'll get back to you. If you think this was awesome, please consider sharing the post as well.​ This encourages us to put more of these things together.