20 Best Ways To Make Money With Amazon Associates

I’ve been using the Amazon Associates Program for a little over two years and during that time I’ve had a lot of success with it.

In fact, this income source was the second largest chunk of my total $150k + 2015 income.

If I hadn’t sold one of my larger Amazon focused sites last year for six figures this income source would have easily eclipsed $100,000 by now.

Amazon Associates Program Overview

Amazon Associates Program is One of the best ways to earn passive income online by promoting Amazon products.

Amazon Associates Program is one of the oldest affiliate program available on the internet until today. They pay commissions for the sales you generated through your blog or website.

The percentage of commissions they pay varies from product to product.

If you are promoting a Health & Beauty product, you will get around 8.5% commission on each sale you generate from your blog to Amazon and if you are promoting Electronics, you will get only 4% commission for each sale.

These commission rates also vary from country to country.

For example, if you are from India, you will get different commission rates, as Amazon recently started its presence in India, so they are offering higher commission rates to drive more sales.

Whereas if you are from Canada, the commission rates will vary differently. So, always check for Advertising Fee rates for your Amazon account before you promote them.

In India, here are the commission rates Amazon is offering.

In Canada, they pay different commission rates by basing on the type of promotion the affiliate will do.

If you can send a good volume of sales to Amazon, they will give you higher commission rates. Here is the table showing the commission rates in terms of volume.

Why People don’t use the Amazon Associates Program?

• Amazon offers lower commission rates from 4% to 8% and also the commission rates depend upon the number of sales you send to them.
• Usually, many people will buy low priced items in Amazon like books and music. With 4 – 8% commission rates, affiliates can’t earn much by promoting these products. For example, if you are promoting a book worth of $10, you will get $0.4 – $0.8 as commission. So, people don’t think that it is worth their time.
• Most of the Amazon cookies expire in 24 hours, so if your promotion doesn’t produce a sale in 24 hours, all your efforts will be in vain.

Why I like Amazon Associates Programs?

• Amazon is a popular brand, if anyone wants to buy something online, they would prefer to buy from Amazon.
• Even though, Amazon offers lower commission rates of around 4% to 8%. You won’t get much benefit if you promote lower payout products. But, if you promote products like cameras and other high priced digital products, you get good commissions even at 4% to 8% commission rates. So, whoever wants to make some decent money using Amazon associates, I recommend promoting high priced products.
• Amazon offers great integration tools, which helps you in integrating their affiliate links on your website.
• During holiday seasons, Amazon offers great discount sales, this will help in generating numerous sales during holiday seasons, thereby you can get a good amount of commissions from Amazon.
• Amazon has products for every category so you can choose a wide variety of products from Amazon to suit to your blog or website.
• Amazon spends numerous amounts of money on coding experts for landing page optimization to get better conversion rates. So, whatever offer you try to promote in Amazon will yield better conversion rates.
• Apart from that, Amazon also runs remarketing campaigns, where users will be shown with ads with the products they previously visited on whatever website they visit. This will help in bringing back the lost customers.

On the overall, I don’t say Amazon associates is the best affiliate program for blogs, but it’s worth giving a shot.

Now let's discuss the best 20 ways to make money with Amazon associates program.

1. Niche Selection

Selecting the niche is the first and foremost step in earning money from Amazon associates. It’s better to choose your niche something related to a physical product. Since making money from Amazon is all about selling their products and getting some commissions for the sales you generated.

You will get more sales if your blog or website discusses a physical product by explaining its features or a product review. At the end of the article, you can place a link to the actual product in Amazon using your affiliate link.

Once, people read your review, if they are impressed with your review, they might wanted to buy the product and so clicks on your link and makes a purchase and then you will earn your commission from it.

And one more thing to keep in mind is that it will be hard to get sales from my blog, as I am not talking about any physical product here in my blog, so the people who come to my blog, their intent is different and might not buy an iPod from my website. So, it is always important to choose a niche which is relevant to the product you are going to promote.

2. Get more traffic

As we all know, the more traffic comes to a product, the more sales we will get. Of Course, I don’t say not every traffic converts well with your offer.

Does this mean you should not promote the Amazon associates program if you don’t get much traffic to your blog?

Obviously not, you should start experimenting with Amazon associates from the starting itself, but you can’t earn much with low traffic.

Getting a few dollars is always better than getting nothing. In the end, your main focus should be on creating great content, so that it will attract more audience and then more traffic to your blog.

3. Place your Affiliate Links in the Body

You can get lots of sales by placing your affiliate links in the body of your blog post. Suppose if you are reviewing a product, let’s say Electric Scooter Bike, you can promote it like the below.

For example, Check out this cool Electric Scooter, I’ve been writing reviews for an electric scooter from very long, and I’ve never seen this one priced for only $899, as it includes a discount of $300.

In the above, I have included my affiliate links as simple links, but are very effective in driving sales.

People tend to trust the content on the body rather than an area on the website. So, it is the best position to promote your affiliate links.

4. Place affiliate links for your product images

After placing your Amazon affiliate links in your body, try to hyperlink all your product images with your Amazon affiliate links.

This is another way to drive potential buyers to your affiliate links.

Many of the experienced bloggers have claimed that hyperlinking product images with affiliate links resulted in an increase in sales to their amazon associates account.

5. Link more often to Amazon.com

Like I said in the above, placing your affiliate links in your body will bring more click-through rate for your affiliate links.

So, linking many times in an article to Amazon using your affiliate links is the best way to get more from amazon associates.

If you are doing a product review, I would suggest you have more hyperlinks in your body to the actual product in Amazon using your Amazon associates link.

This will help in getting more clicks to the product you are promoting it through amazon associates and thereby it will end with a purchase from the user.

6. Write Product Reviews

Product reviews are one of the best ways to get sales from Amazon. Writing a quality product review on a product which is related to your niche will help in getting more engagement like higher landing page CTR and good conversion rate for your affiliate products.

If you own a high authority blog in your niche, you can contact the product owner for a demo product and post a review about that product and by the end of the product review, you should be able to transit the reader’s intent from learning to buying using your product review.

Just place a link to the Amazon product page at the end of your product review.

By placing a link to Amazon page at the end of the product review, makes the user to transit from the learning stage to investigating its buying options.

7. Building an Email List

You might hear this many times on many websites. But it is true, building an email list is still an effective strategy for promoting a product.

It is pretty easy to build an email list for physical products because people will be looking to find reviews about that product before they buy and also some people might be skeptical about buying a physical product online.

If you can offer a buyer’s guide or more information about that product they are researching in exchange for their email. You can easily build up your email list.

Once, people join in your email list, gain their trust by providing some useful information to them, once they start trusting you, you can send them promotional emails with your Amazon associates link in it.

Since people trust you already, they will buy from you using your links. Apart from this, you can also send other similar offers to the same email list and double your ROI.

8. Earn more during Holiday Seasons

You can earn a lot during holiday seasons because Amazon creates special landing pages for popular festivals and holidays.

Apart from that, Amazon also offers great discounts and amazing deals which increases the conversion rate a lot.

So, you can write a blog post containing amazing discounts and great deals and promote this to your readers and also to your email list during holiday seasons.

Don’t forget to link as many times as possible in your post, this will increases the number of visitors visit your affiliate link. Apart from that, link the product images with your affiliate links.

You can able to see a huge increase in your ROI during holiday seasons for sure by applying all the above methods.

You can also try including the most common searched keywords in your articles and email subjects to grab the user’s attention.

For example, use the most common keyword “Cyber Monday (Your Niche) Discounts” or “Black Friday (Your Niche) Deals”.

These commonly searched keywords are being searched millions of times every year, so use these subject lines to grab your user’s attention.

9. Sell more – Earn More

Like I’ve shown you in the above, Amazon offers different commission rates basing on the volume of sales you send to them.

They start by offering 4% commission rates to 8.5% commission rates. So, try to link different products together, to increase the number of sales.

For example, if you are trying to promote a mobile phone in Amazon, you can also promote its related products in Amazon in the same article.

Similar products like cell phone case, cell phone screen guard and other cell phone accessories may come under related products.

People who bought a cell phone may also buy its related products. So, you get many conversions from a single article. In holiday seasons, you can earn even more, by offering discounted products.

10. Sell low priced items more and earn higher commission rates

This is a great way to get higher commission rates from Amazon. Suppose, if you are in mobile phone niche, try promoting cell phone cases which worth less than $50.

These cell phone cases will be bought by many people and you can get numerous sales, but the commissions are very low for these low priced items.

Since there is a chart showing if you can send a large volume of sales, your commission rate will be raised to 8.50%.

So, after you get into 8.50% rate for your commissions, you can set up a new blog in the same niche and try promoting high priced items, now, you will earn higher commissions and also for high priced items.

Imagine promoting an iPhone for $800, you will get an 8.50% commission rate which is $68 in commissions.

But normally you would get only 4% commission which is equal to $32. So, the above method will increase your ROI a lot.

11. Track more effectively

By default, your Amazon associates account will create a single tracking link for all of your products which will make it difficult to track different products on different websites.

You can create multiple tracking links using this link for better tracking.

By using different tracking links for a different website, you will be able to tailor clicks to each offer from different websites.

In this way, you will be able to concentrate more on what is working for you rather than what is not working for you.

For example, no one will install the same Google analytics code on multiple websites, right? It’s the same thing, you shouldn’t use the same tracking link for all of your websites.

12. Get better conversions using WordPress plugins

EasyAzon is an amazing tool for promoting Amazon products on a WordPress blog. This plugin will help in adding your affiliate links to your blog much more easily.

It automatically converts your US links to other country amazon affiliate links.

You can also add image affiliate links with product information blocks and also call to action buttons to your WordPress blog. These features will help in yielding better conversions rates from your blog.

This plugin also helps in cloaking your Amazon associates affiliate links.

Apart from the above features, here are some of the additional features this plugin is offering.

• Product popups
• Add to cart functionality
• You can use multiple tracking links using this plugin.

13. Promote by using product comparison charts

Many successful amazon marketers promote Amazon products using comparison charts. This is a great way to promote a product.

You can simply create a product comparison chart and compare different features for different products. From that chart, the visitor will be able to pick the one which suits his needs.

Using this feature, we will help the user understand the product’s features well and also yield good conversion rates to our offers.

If you want to create the comparison charts manually by yourself, you might need this plugin Pricing Table which will help in creating product comparison tables manually.

Also, include a buy now button for each product in the comparison chart, and make it easy for the user if he wants to buy the product right away from Amazon.

14. Offer weekly deals

If you want a way to promote products which are on sale frequently, you can promote them by creating a blog post saying weekly deals post which offers exclusive deals every week.

You can also send an email newsletter to your email list with “weekly deals” as the email subject.

In the email or blog post, I will list the products which are on sale more frequently and use the above tactics to promote these products every week like linking the product images with your affiliate links, etc.

15. Monthly Best Sellers in your Niche

Amazon offers a listing of best sellers in each category. Here is the link to best sellers in Amazon - http://www.amazon.in/gp/bestsellers

In the right-hand side, you can choose your category for your niche and see the best sellers for your niche.

Now, write an article or email listing the 5 best sellers in your niche, the products from best sellers are more likely to be purchased more than normal products.

So, just visit the above URL and pick the first five or ten best sellers in your niche and write an article and list the products.

16. Use Carousel Banners

When promoting your affiliate links through banners, try to use Carousel banners from Amazon which will help in increasing your conversion rates more than normal static banners.

Many experts say that using carousel banners from Amazon has increased their affiliate earnings a lot.

Here is how the carousel banners look like from Amazon

You can simply create this banner from your Amazon associates dashboard. You can add products of your choice to this widget or you can simply display the best sellers using this carousal banners widget.

17. Amazon Astore doesn’t work

Amazon also offers aStore feature for amazon associates which they say that it will help the visitors to stay longer on their website.

But there are numerous reviews about aStore from many experienced amazon marketers saying that it did not produce expected results.

So, unless you have too much spare time to spare, I wouldn’t recommend you to spend time on creating an aStore for your blog.

Many people like to shop a lot, but they would rather shop from the website which gives the best deal.

18. Test different landing pages

As a marketer, we need to test different landing pages constantly, because different landing pages will generate different conversion rates.

Not all landing pages suit well for the products you are going to promote, as some landing pages may generate only a 10% conversion rate while other landing pages might generate a 30% conversion rate.

So, if you are not testing different variations of landing pages, you might be losing a lot of money.

Because, for some landing pages, you can get a sale even with few clicks, but for other landing pages, even if you send 100 clicks also, you won’t even get a single sale.

We never know how the user’s intent is going to be, so by testing different variations, we can use the one which converts really well for many users.

19. Send users to Amazon.com

If you have read my article completely, you might have understood that I have put some stress on using your affiliate links more often in your blog post or emails and also for product images.

The reason is that, if you can able to send visitors to Amazon.com, it will save a cookie on the user’s computer.

So, even if they don’t buy right away, the cookie will last for 24 hours. So in 24 hours whatever, they purchase from Amazon, even if it is not the product from your niche, you will earn a commission for the products they bought from Amazon.

Apart from that, Amazon stores cookies for 30 days, if the user has added some items to his cart. So, for this, whatever the user buys from Amazon during these 30 days, you will get commissions for it.

For example, if you are trying to promote a kids product, and the kid actually viewed the product from his computer and didn’t buy that product.

Later, if his father used the same computer and bought a $5000 worth watch from Amazon, you will get $400 commission for that sale even if you don’t try to promote watches here. This is a great way to double your commissions.

20. Product reviews using YouTube videos

Many smart marketers review a product using video and then upload that video on YouTube and then place their affiliate link in the description of that video.

So, people who watch the video review will end up visiting your Amazon affiliate link, once they purchase something from Amazon, you will get your commission.

For example, you can review a mobile phone or a watch and then place your affiliate link to that product which takes them to the Amazon website. So, after the user purchases something from Amazon, you will get your commission.

Conclusion

Many marketers are making their living by promoting Amazon products.

So, if you want to earn some money using the Amazon associates program, try to choose a niche first and then using the above-discussed tips start promoting your amazon products and earn commissions.

Please let me know if you need any help or if you have any comments on this post.