How to Make Money from an Amazon Affiliate Website
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make a lot of money from the comfort of your home.
In fact, affiliate marketing is the most common (and in our opinion, the most effective) way to make money from blogging.
Source: First Site Guide
There have already been many affiliate marketers who have successfully been able to quit their 9-to-5, being able to make a full income within their first year.
The best thing about affiliate marketing is that it’s constantly on a rise.
Source: Founder Jar
However, this rise in demand has also led to higher competition, making it very challenging to stand out and win customers – especially if you don’t know exactly how to make affiliate marketing effective.
In this post, we’ll share our proven step-by-step process to turning your Amazon affiliate website into a very profitable and successful business.
#1: Set Up an Amazon Associates Account
It may well go without saying, but to begin with you’ll obviously need to have signed up for an Amazon Associates account.
If you’ve already done this, then go ahead and log in, then skip ahead to step 2. Otherwise, head over to Amazon Associates and create an account.
You will now need to fill in your personal information, such as your name, address, and payment information (for withdrawing your funds).
#2: Find Your Niche
It’s essential you choose a niche that is highly profitable, so you can make a bigger profit in a short period of time.
Unfortunately, most people often confuse the terms ‘niche’ and ‘industry’.
If you look for the highest-earning blog niches, you’ll get a graphic containing these “niche” examples.
Source: RankIQ
However, these aren’t niches – rather they are industries.
A niche is a much smaller part of an industry. For instance, if you choose a lifestyle industry, your niche might be:
- “Best travel bags for women”
- “Best men’s natural supplements for weight loss”
- “Best fitness equipment for yoga and HIIT”
As you can see, all of these are hyper-specific.
Focusing on only a tiny portion of a huge industry will help you separate yourself from larger competitors who target the whole industry.
Moreover, you’ll also be able to provide more in-depth information, and rank higher than if you simply tried targeting the whole industry.
Plus, the competition can be SUPER-LOW for ultra-specific niches. For instance, let’s take a look at the competitiveness within the “lifestyle” industry.
There are 226 million blogs.
Now if we dig a little deeper and choose a more specific part/niche of the lifestyle industry, we get to 10.2 million blogs – which is way lower than it was.
You can continue this process, focusing on a more specific portion of the industry…
…and as you can see, we’re all the way down to 6 results.
Now this is your opportunity to start your blog and make a lot of money. We highly advise you to do the same with your chosen industry.
However, before you jump in, full of excitement, we recommend that you check whether:
- You’re passionate about/skilled with the niche topic. That way, you can provide real-life experience and expert advice, which will make your content stand out.
- There is a clear monetization strategy. There are products you can sell and affiliate programs you can hop on.
- There is low competition. The niche you choose should have low competition, so you’re able to get traffic early on.
- There is decent traffic. Some niches might not have enough traffic to drive revenue and help you make money.
#3: Choose the Right Products
It’s essential you choose the products not only by how much profit margin or commission is on offer, but also by several other factors. Relying on profit alone usually won’t get you far, nor bring long-term results.
Instead of focusing on profit alone, here are some critical factors to keep in mind.
Hands-On Experience
To create the best possible affiliate content, you should review products that you’ve personally used and liked.
Such products will greatly enhance the quality of your content, and help you stand out.
This is because you can provide genuine advice to your readers and go beyond what most other affiliate marketers have read in the product description. If you’ve really used the products you review, you’ll be able to talk about the specific details that you’d otherwise have had no chance of discovering.
(This can act as a huge separator between you and your competitors.)
This approach really helps you to gain the readers’ trust and drive conversions.
Genuinely Useful
Prioritize products that have a proven record of high quality, with plenty of positive feedback from customers. This is essential because with every product you list, you’re putting your reputation on the line.
You don’t want to be associated with any low-quality products. Most importantly, if you choose to ignore the quality of products and feedback from customers, and start promoting such products, you risk losing customers.
That’s why we always recommend checking customer reviews about every product you promote (or testing products yourself, which is even better).
High Demand
If you promote a product no one has heard of, or people aren’t interested in, it’ll be very difficult to drive sales. To check the demand of the product, head over to Amazon and filter products by Best Sellers.
You will immediately see the most high-demand products, which you can closely examine and look for reviews.
The combination of the quality, demand, and real-life experience is absolute gold.
#4: Optimize Your Website
The user experience throughout your web design has a tremendous impact on metrics such as bounce rate, time on page, and return visitors.
In fact, a website’s UX has one of the highest return-on-investments – a whopping 9,900%.
Source: UX Collective
This means that every dollar you spend on improving your user experience will bring you $99 in revenue – which highlights just how important (and worthwhile) UX is.
Here are some of the most powerful ways to offer solid user experience.
(i) – Make Speed a Priority
As customers we’re all becoming increasingly impatient online, with average attention spans getting shorter year after year – even a goldfish can stay focused for longer than us!
Source: Better Marketing
This is why a website’s loading time plays such a critical role in the bounce rate and conversions.
As little as a one second delay is enough to lower conversions by 7%. And the bounce rate is just as crazy too – rising to 90% with a 5 second load time.
Source: CXL
To check your site’s speed, head over to PageSpeed Insights and fill in your URL.
You’ll get an in-depth report about your site’s load time, core web vitals, and suggestions to speed it up. In our experience, the three practices below are the most powerful for lowering your load time:
- Enable browser caching.
- Compress and minimize images.
- Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
(ii) – Mobile-Friendly Design
Most online searches (as well as purchases) are conducted on smaller devices.
Therefore it’s vital to make your website accessible, appealing, and optimized for mobiles and tablets too. A single instance of a bad user experience on smaller devices can scare away potential customers – it’s enough for them to never come back.
Source: SuperOffice
To prevent your customers from having a bad experience, you need to have a responsive design. If you’re using WordPress, this should NOT be an issue since most themes are mobile-friendly.
You can always check your website’s mobile experience by using your phone, tablet, or use the Mobile-Friendly Test from Google Search Console.
If you experience any issues, or your mobile experience isn’t on point, we recommend making a few adjustment, such as:
- Choose a mobile-responsive theme or template.
- Change button size and placement.
- Avoid flash and pop ups.
Haven’t Created a Website Yet?
If you haven’t created a website yet, we suggest starting with a mobile-first design.
This is an approach where you begin by designing your mobile site and then continue making adjustments to create a version suitable for larger devices.
Source: CSS Tricks
The reason behind this approach is that it can be very easy to include too many elements on your desktop site.
Unfortunately, since mobile websites are smaller, you might not have the real estate to have each of these elements properly visible. If you reverse this process and start with a mobile website first, you eliminate this problem.
(iii) – Error Pages And Bugs
404 Not Found pages kill user experience and make you look unprofessional.
The first step to eliminating error pages is by checking Google Search Console for your website and looking for any errors there.
If you haven’t found any errors, that’s great.
However, there might still be bugs on your site, which is why we suggest walking through the whole customer journey yourself and testing everything. You’ll also want to include a feedback form, so if your readers do experience any errors, they can leave you suggestions, comments, or a bug report.
#5: Create Affiliate Content
To promote your products, you’ll be mostly writing three types of content:
- The best posts. Listing and comparing multiple similar products.
- The review posts. Extensive review of a single product.
- The comparison posts. In-depth comparison of two or three similar products.
However, there are thousands of these on every possible product you can promote. To get ahead and win readers, you need to produce superior content which is more in-depth, readable, and useful.
Keep on reading to learn more about our approach to creating superior affiliate content and winning customers.
Match The User’s Intent
Relevance is the most critical factor for customers and Google rankings.
It’s essential you provide your readers with what they’re looking for – instead of what you want to write about.
The first step is to understand the searcher’s intent and align with it.
Source: Leanne Wong
There are three main intents:
- Informational. Searchers are looking for more information.
- Transactional. Searchers are looking for the best product to buy.
- Navigational. Searchers are looking for specific brands or companies.
After you discover the user’s intent, we recommend conducting keyword research.
We’re not suggesting focusing on excessively adding keywords to your content or achieving 1 – 2% keyword density – this doesn’t work anymore (even though almost every ‘SEO pro’ obsesses about it).
Instead, focus on the meaning of keywords – what are customers searching for and why.
Be Genuinely Useful
Similar to products you choose, you shouldn’t write content just for generating sales.
Instead, make sure to be useful, dive deep into each product, and bring unique features that readers are interested in.
But you might be wondering how to do this when you have no real-life experience.
If this is the case, we recommend going on YouTube and looking at extensive reviews of the products you promote there.
These YouTubers have usually used the products (and you can often see them in the video).
This will let you gather a few gems and little-known information about these products that your competitors didn’t mention.
Include Images
Using product images in your content does two things for your readers:
- Shows that you’ve used the product. This will increase your trust and make readers stay on your website longer.
- Helps readers imagine using your product. This will massively increase the chances of driving sales.
Plus, you will also be more likely to receive shares on social media. Just make sure you don’t include generic stock images from Unsplash, Pexels, or Pixabay.
Check Your Grammar & Styling
A single grammatical error can cut your conversion in half, according to the BBC.
While spelling and grammar don’t play a role in Google rankings, they might have an indirect impact on the perceived quality of your content. Think about it, how can a post be very high-quality when it’s full of errors?
It automatically signals to readers that the writer didn’t put enough effort into it. To prevent grammatical errors, we recommend always doing this three-step process:
- Proofread your content. You want to ideally read the content out loud.
- Use Grammarly. Go through each of the Grammarly suggestions.
- Use the Google Docs Spelling & Grammar check. Quickly spot and resolve those typing errors or spelling mistakes.
Also, we suggest using bold for highlighting important words or sentences. It can make a huge difference – mainly for readers who are just skimming.
#6: Promote Your Content
You almost certainly won’t have enough loyal readers who will share your content for you from the beginning. That’s why it’s essential to actively share and promote your content online. There are a lot of useful ways to promote affiliate content.
We’ve chosen our most effective ways for promoting content that work instantly.
Leverage Social Media
Social media is the best place to connect with potential customers and share content.
What social media platform you use largely depends on the type of products you promote and what platform are you the most familiar with. Join groups, interact with others, and start conversations to drive attention and clicks.
We also recommend being consistent and posting regularly, making sure your content is focused on topics and ideas that people are interested in – and which provides value.
Repurpose Your Content
Not sure what content to create for your social media?
We recommend repurposing your existing content and turning it into different content types. For instance, if you have a blog post, you can turn it into:
- Social media posts
- Infographics
- Videos
You can transform your content and reach different audiences or just appeal to the same audience who is looking to consume your content differently.
Answer Quora Questions (Or Any Other Forum)
One of the less known ways to promote your content is to head over to online forums and answer people’s questions with your content.
For instance, let’s say someone asks about what are the best lifestyle shoes for men. You can then go ahead and answer the question and offer a way to learn more or discover other alternatives on your blog.
Even though this approach takes a lot of time, it’s highly effective since it’s personalized.
#8: Build an Email List
Email marketing is a very effective way to make money with affiliate marketing websites. It also has the highest return on investment.
Source: K6 Agency
To get people to sign up to your email list, you’ll need to create opt-in forms.
Each opt-in form should get the following information from potential customers:
- Email address
- First name
You also need a lead magnet – something valuable you can give to your readers in exchange for their email address and name.
This is usually something you can give away for FREE, such as:
- Cheatsheet
- Checklist
- Ebook
After the potential customer is on the email list, it’s vital you send valuable emails to your leads regularly (or you risk getting unsubscribed). We suggest creating a welcome email sequence, which can look like this:
Source: Automizy
We also recommend providing value in the form of a newsletter or exclusive content.
Present Your Affiliate Products In a New Way
The only way to really make a difference and drive revenue using affiliate marketing is to provide more value and separate yourself from competitors.
To learn more about how to do that, check out our resources about affiliate marketing:
- From Hobby to Hustle: How to Turn a Blog Into a Thriving Business
- How To Write A Good Product Review That Sells
- How To Create Affiliate Links From Amazon — Ultimate Guide
Looking to stand out even more?
AAWP, our Amazon Affiliate WordPress plugin, lets you create stunning affiliate content that will set you apart from competitors and make it easier for your readers to choose the right product – which will greatly enhance your chances of conversions.
You can choose various content types, including:
- Comparison tables. Comparing two or more similar products.
- New Releases. Showcasing the top products from a product category of your choice.
- Single (or multiple) product boxes. Providing detailed information about one or multiple products.
Just take a look and compare the wealth of information we help you to include with the products you promote…
…as you can see, we’ve also solved the issues with Amazon’s small image sizes.
If you’re looking to stand out and become your reader’s go-to source of product reviews and recommendations, install the AAWP plugin today, and look forward to increased affiliate earnings tomorrow!
Earn More Money with Amazon Affiliate Marketing 🤑
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