The old good Amazon Affiliate Program.. Some affiliates hate them for their crappy commission rate, some love them and make a full time living of it. In my honest opinion, any type of affiliate program can be mastered, it’s just a matter of time, focus, concentration and hard work. Amazon Associate Program is not an exception.

I’ve been getting quite a lot of requests from my subscribers in regards of this topic, so I’ve decided to put up a huge article and discuss the best practices using Amazon Associate Program. In this post you will discover how to start making money with Amazon.com if you are completely new, how to increase your existing revenue if you are already experienced Amazon affiliate, aswell as discover a software (AMAZON NICHE FINDER) that will help you find untapped million dollar niches with a push of a button. So, let’s get started shall we…

Getting started with the Amazon Associate program

 
If you are just starting out with Amazon.com – STOP what are you doing right now! Don’t jump promoting every single product. There are a few golden rules to follow that will let you to make more money with less work and in a shorter period of time. These are:

1. Always choose products over $150.
2. Choose products that getting good reviews (four to five stars).
3. Create review type blogs with exceptionally good content and use text links instead of widgets when referring readers to Amazon.

Why it’s important to promote higher commision products? Because Amazon pays only 4% from the item you sell. Yes, that’s very low, however the percentages can go up to 8.25% if you sell enough products. At the end of the day you will make more money selling high priced products vs low priced products. On Amazon you can sort products by Price. See image below.

Promoting products with a good reviews is a MUST. Trust me, it sells like hot cakes and get higher convertions. You can easily sort products by Avg. Customer Review. See image below.

In my experience review type of blogs works best promoting products from amazon.com. It’s because people always like to read reviews before they make their final decision. You do that too, right? The more compeling review is – the faster you make money. Simple.

One thing my subscribers questioning alot is – do I need to buy a hosting and a domain name in order to start my amazon review site? And the answer is NO! You can start with a simple blogger.com blog if you don’t have money to invest in hosting and .com domains. However, it’s very important to choose an exact match or close to the original product name subdomain. For example, if you want to promote ProForm 290SPX Indoor Exercise Bike, then I would suggest you to pick proform-290spx-indoor-exercise-bike.blogspot.com if available. This will help with the SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

So, what are these 18 Tips To Earn $90K+ with Amazon.com Affiliate Program?

 
These tips actually came from the Warrior Forum member ChrisGuthrie. While writing this post, I thought they will perfectly fit in this article. Chris is using Amazon Affiliate program for about 2 years now and in this short period of time he managed to make more than $90.000.00 in profit! I think you will agree with me that it’s worth listening to what Chris is about to say. So, here they are straight from the Chris thread on Warrior Forum:

Top 18 Tips I’ve Used To Make $90k+ With Amazon.com:

1. Niche Selection Is Crucial

I’ll get to the actual methods I use on my websites in the next tips, but the first thing I want to say is that the niche you choose is the absolute most important decision you can make.

I love to target physical product focused niches and keywords

It’s easiest to make money using Amazon’s affiliate program if the people coming to your website are looking for a specific product that your website discusses. It’s more difficult to use a random personal blog and make money linking to physical products because the people coming there are most likely not actively looking to buy something.

2. Link To Products Inside Your Content

Important:

Roughly half of my Amazon income comes from basic text links posted inside the content body area of a blog post or page.

Simple text links in the content of an article are the most effective way to get web visitors to click. People trust the body of the content on a page more so than any other area of the website and I know this because of the tracking data I’ve collected.

3. Make Product Images Clickable Affiliate Links:

The second best thing I’ve found next to a simple text link is to use images of the product you’re talking about and make them clickable like this cool usb missile launcher:

Roughly 15% of my total Amazon income has come from simply making all of the product images on my websites clickable affiliate links.

If you’re not sure how to do this with the HTML code, I made an image to show you:

4. Link To Amazon.com As Many Times Possible

I alluded to this in the previous few tips but I want to make sure you understand that each link inside one of your articles is another opportunity for a visitor to click through and make their way onto Amazon.com.

Important: It’s common for me to link to Amazon five to ten times in a single article (more if I’m doing a product review).

5. Product Review Articles Convert The Best

Doing a quality product review for a product directly related to your niche is a very easy way to garner higher click thru rates and increased sales, but only if your review is higher quality.

Ideally you contact the manufacturer’s marketing team or PR agency and get them to send you a demo unit of the product to review, but this takes a lot of effort and may not be worth it on a smaller traffic site (at first).

You want to convince the reader to investigate their purchase options by the time they finish reading an article, which is why I’ll always include links to all of the products mentioned in a review at the end of the article. That way it’s an easy transition from learning about the product during your review and then at the end it’s time to make a purchase.

i.e. Link: See more about this product on Amazon.com

6. Build An Email List

You’ve probably heard this over one thousand times by people telling you to build an email list from the blogger and internet marketing crowd, but building an email list is way easier to do on a physical product oriented website.

Why? People don’t have their guard up when they are researching a physical product to purchase (when compared to other purchase decisions online i.e. digital goods). So what I like to do is offer some type of freebie like a buyers guide or some type of information that provides more details about the products they’re researching.

Overall I could attribute at least five to ten percent of my total income due to my email lists because I like to focus on promoting products heavily to my lists during the holidays which leads into my next tip.

7. Write Sales And Promos During The Holidays

I typically made between $500 and $1,000 a day every day during Black Friday Week, Cyber Monday and Cyber Week. It is lower during other holidays like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Presidents Day, Valentines Day etc. but you can still promote various sales during these holidays as well. I target every holiday because Amazon creates an actual dedicated sales page every time one of these holidays come around. The deals shared on these pages are generally really good too.

So what I’ll do is put together an article of all the top products that are on sale in my niche using the tips I’ve shared earlier like linking as many times as possible, making the product image clickable and then sending out an email to my list etc. to get even more conversions.

Stats From A “Cyber Monday (My Niche) Discounts” Post Last Year:

(Some of that traffic pop is also attributed to the day I mail out to my email lists though)

For the structure of these articles I like to target a frequently searched keyword such as “Cyber Monday (My Niche) Discounts” etc. because I know people search for “Cyber Monday” and “Black Friday” millions of times each year but they also search a longer form version like “Cyber Monday (My Niche) Discounts” as evidenced by the above traffic graph from one of my Amazon sites.

8. Sell More Products To Make Incrementally More Money

This one sounds simple enough and it really is. The more you sell with Amazon the more you make AND the higher percentage you earn. During holiday months I will typically hit around the 8% mark which is double the 4% rate you start with for shipping only 1 – 6 items per month. Even if you sold 7 items you get bumped up to 6% and the best part is that this increase in commission percentage is retroactive (meaning once you reach the next level you get to apply the higher percentage referral fee to every product you’ve sold during the entire month):

9. Sell Large Quantities Of Inexpensive Products To Boost Your Payout On High Priced Products

One thing I do is have websites that are set up in lower competition niches where the items typically aren’t as expensive and where it’s easier to sell these products in larger quantities ($50 or less). Then I have other niche sites that sell more expensive products at much higher prices ($XXX – $X,XXX) that are sold less frequently. So this way I get to use the increased quantity of sales from these lower priced product websites to help me get up into higher payout brackets so instead of making 6% on that high end item I’ll get 8% instead.

10. Use Multiple Tracking ID’s For Each Website

By default Amazon assigns you one tracking ID like blahblahblah-20 but you can create additional tracking ID’s here up to a total of 100. If you hit that total you can always ask for more so feel free to be liberal with your creation of tracking ID’s for your websites.

You wouldn’t install the same Google Analytics code on every single website you own right? Of course not, because you wouldn’t be able to tell how much traffic each of your websites were receiving individually. So the same thing can be said for tracking the money you make on your websites (and yet people still tell me they use only one Amazon tracking ID for all of their websites /facepalm). In the past I’ve gone so far as to create 15 different tracking ID’s for use on a single website.

11. Insert Buy Now Button Into Your Articles

I use buttons like this (or a WordPress theme that auto inserts them) and these buttons have contributed to about 5% of my income.

12. Create A Product Comparison Grid

Creating a product comparison grid for all of the products within your niche and allowing people to sort by various features is a great way to get some additional sales. I’ve used this tactic on several of my websites and the product comparison page alone can add an additional 5% to 10% income increase for a website.

I use WordPress on most of my websites so I use the WP Table Reloaded plugin to create my table. What I do is include various columns for information about the product and in the final column I use a buy now button that people can click to see more info about the product.

13. Publish A Recurring Deals Post

If you want to find a way to be able to mention products that are on sale more frequently on your website one of the easiest ways I’ve done that in the past is to just do a weekly deals post. So what I’ll do is publish a post every week with the best deals for my niche and then incorporate all of the previous tactics I’ve discussed above to link to the products on Amazon.com. Depending on how often you publish articles you could do it more or less frequently (I’ve seen some websites do these style of articles every day).

14. Publish A Monthly Bestseller List

Amazon has a bestseller page found simply at Amazon.com/bestsellers and so one thing I’ve done on my sites is publish a bestsellers list and simply mention the currently trending bestsellers. Generally speaking the cream rises to the top so if you write an article talking about the bestselling products those are likely to be the best products your visitors are looking to buy anyway.

Just go to Amazon.com/bestsellers and look for your respective niche category. I shoot for listing off the top 5 or top 10 products.

15. Use Carousel Banner Ads Over Static Banner Ads

Through testing I’ve found that the carousel style Amazon banner ads are about 3 times better than the static style Amazon banner ads. Even Adsense out performed static Amazon banner ads in my testing.

Carousel widgets spin are interactive and typically display 5 – 10 products in a banner.

You can create the Amazon carousel banner ads inside your Amazon Associates account here and you’re able to manually add products or just display bestselling products from a specific category.

16. Don’t Bother Creating An Amazon Astore

When I created a store page and used the Amazon Astore tool to “build my own store” I found it converted terribly. Less than 1% of my total income came from Amazon Astore pages before I stopped using them. If you’re not familiar with Astore’s just take my word for it when I say they suck.

I know people like to shop, but sometimes I believe they’d rather just find a resource that tells them what the best deal is instead. Whatever the reason, the tracking data I used to track my Amazon Astore’s showed that they routinely underperformed.

17. Just Get People On To Amazon.com

I know 30% of my earnings came from products people bought because I happened to be the one that sent them onto Amazon.com. For example, I sold a watch a while ago for $5,000 and got a $400 commission but I don’t even own a website that even remotely discusses watches. This is one of the other reasons why I love using Amazon’s affiliate program.

When you send someone to Amazon.com you get a percentage of anything they buy for the next 24 hours (30 days if they added an item to their cart) so if you can just get them onto the website and they happen to buy something completely unrelated you’ll get the money for it.

Amazon spends millions of dollars on improving the way they get people to convert. The fact that they provide a custom user experience for every person that goes to Amazon.com based on the buying behavior and viewing patterns tells me they know what it takes to close a sale. Some of the best closing advice I can give is to simply find ways to get your visitors onto the Amazon.com webpage and they’ll take care of the rest.

18. Stop Reading And Start Doing

When I got started making money online I spent wayyyyyy too much time reading about how much money other people were making and not nearly enough time actually doing stuff.

Just do something. I don’t even care if you go check out my blog. I love what I do for a living and the internet is huge so . Sharing these tips is my contribution towards helping you quit your day job.

It is possible. I built my Amazon income up to several thousand dollars per month all while I was working a full time 50 hour a week day job.

Now go get after it!

Source: WarriorForum.com

WordPress plugin that creates profitable Amazon affiliate blogs automatically

 
Tools and automation are always useful saving our time and effort. This is probably my favorite one. If you are lazy like me and your time is valuable for you, check out Associate Goliath WordPress Plugin. You won’t find any other plugin that do everything for you automatically.

Check out the video below to see what I mean:

CONCLUSION: If you haven’t tried promoting physical products yet, I suggest you to give it a shot and of course don’t forget to implement every tip (see above) to maximize your earnings. Over the years Amazon.com have done an incredible job converting visitors into buyers. Very often people end up buying several products instead of just one thus maximizing our profits. So, our only job as affiliates is to send traffic to Amazon.com and let them do the rest of the job.

As always, if you have any questions – let me know them by posting your comment in the comment box below.