20 Ways To Maximize Your Amazon Affiliate Earnings
Looking for surefire ways to maximize your Amazon affiliate earnings?
So are over a million other Amazon Associates!
But don’t worry – we’ve got you covered. In this article you’re going to learn not just one or two tips – but a stonking great list of 20 top strategies to give your Amazon affiliate earnings a solid boost.
With 310 million customers, and average sales of $1.29 billion per day, it’s easy to see the appeal of working as an Amazon affiliate.
But what if you wanted a bigger slice of that pie?
Amazon is currently valued at $705 billion. As the largest e-commerce platform on the planet, there’s more than a good opportunity to make some pretty decent income from jumping on board their Amazon Associates scheme.
But what you need are key strategies to use that will make sure your hard work as an affiliate translates into a healthier bottom line.
Let’s dive into exploring 20 key methods you need to be using in 2024 to maximize your Amazon affiliate earnings.
Get your wallet reinforced, rotate your bank statements to landscape (for all those long numbers!), and let’s get earning!
A Quick Note About Amazon’s Affiliate Program
If you’re already signed up as an Amazon Associate, and understand both the terms and how their SiteStripe works, then feel free to skip ahead to the next section where we get started with the first of our 20 ways to boost your Amazon affiliate earnings… we won’t mind at all!
But if you’re relatively new to the game, Amazon’s affiliate scheme – known as Amazon Associates, is open to anyone to sign up to. You’ll need an Amazon account, after which you can head over to their Associates sign up page. Registration is free, but will take a few minutes to work through.
We have a guide on how to become an Amazon Associate that includes our tips and advice on getting your application approved, and what information we recommend including in the application form.
Once you’re registered and approved you will be able to start listing products and services through your website or social media.
Links can be generated either through Amazon’s built-in ‘SiteStripe’ bar found at the top of the screen when you’re logged in, or using our Amazon affiliate WordPress plugin – AAWP. This will give you significantly greater control over the structure and appearance of your product listings, as well as including dynamic listings such as bestsellers and new releases.
Note: In December 2023 Amazon changed how their SiteStripe tool worked. Previously it was possible to generate image adverts that included your affiliate link, but this was changed so that it is now only possible to obtain text links. Clearly these are not as eye-catching, which is why most successful Amazon affiliates now use our Amazon Associates WordPress Plugin (AAWP). This plugin not only lets you create visually engaging product ads with images, but gives you tons of control over exactly how these look. We’ll cover some of the features and tools throughout this article.
1. Find The Right Niche
In evolutionary terms survival is about finding a niche, and dominating it. Affiliate marketing is much the same – but too many people tend to forget this.
If you’re just starting out with Amazon affiliate marketing, or are still relatively small and looking to grow, you’re clearly going to struggle if you try to compete within the same niche markets as huge, experienced, and successful affiliates have been doing for ages.
You need to be different, find your own focus, and work tirelessly to dominate within a niche that hasn’t already been dominated by existing affiliates.
But how can you do that?
How do you find a niche that combines low competition with high customer interest?
If a particular product search is carried out 10,000 times per day, and another product search only gets 100 queries per day, many people assume that going for the bigger number is best.
Wrong. Almost every time.
If you’re starting out, you’re going to find successful affiliates already dominating within those large search volume markets. If you work hard you might end up with 0.01% of the market share in that product.
After a few weeks you may even earn enough to buy a celebratory cup of coffee.
But with the lower product query there’s likely to be significantly less competition. Which means that with hard work and persistence you could find yourself dominating within it.
Even if you pocket 10% of sales, that’s ten times the number you’d make in the larger market.
To maximize your Amazon affiliate earnings it’s imperative to use this technique for accurately identifying good niche markets within Amazon ➡️
- Start by thinking about your own interests and pastimes, identifying potential monetization options within those niches.
- You’ll then need to assess the competition and search volume for the niche, gauging the number of traffic sources available, and searching for those markets with lower search volumes that you can exploit.
- There are a number of tools you can use to help identify niche markets, including:
- Remember – be the big fish in the small pond, rather than the frantic minnow dashing about furiously between the sharks in the ocean.
2. Create High Quality, Engaging Content
There are three very good reasons why you need to put a great deal of effort into developing high quality content for your affiliate website:
(i) Audience Engagement
People aren’t going to visit your site just to see a lot of product listings, when they can just as easily go to Amazon’s main site and see the exact same items there – complete with customer reviews and ratings.
You need to provide regular, high quality, engaging content that gives people a reason to visit your site, to keep coming back, and to develop enough trust in what you say that they go on to click your Amazon adverts.
Simply copying and pasting the product descriptions and reviews from Amazon will not work.
Firstly, copying their content (including reviews and star ratings) is a violation of the Terms of Service you agreed to when you signed up – so you could see your account closed down.
Secondly, your content will be unoriginal, and therefore of no interest to the search engines. You’ll be waving goodbye to any traffic by doing this.
Instead, spend time researching the needs of your target audience, and provide them with great advice, delivered in a helpful, and well-structured way.
Don’t just describe products – describe the problems your visitors are experiencing, and then help them solve those problems.
You could create how-tos, tutorials, your own reviews, comparisons, or even information that’s related to the niche market, but not directly to a specific product.
For example, if your website is all about DSLR cameras, you could include guides on lighting, focus, camera maintenance, selling photos, editing software for photos – any of which will be useful for your audience, while still allowing you to include relevant adverts for Amazon products throughout.
(ii) Brand Trust
Why should people click your links?
Why not simply go to Amazon and search for the product?
People these days are very cautious about clicking links, and so it takes deliberate effort to instill enough confidence in your visitors for them to trust your advice, your product recommendations, and your links.
Creating content that makes it clear you’re an expert, and that your advice and recommendations are worth something to your audience is crucial.
Being consistent, personal, and not being too pushy will all help foster a sense of trust and loyalty that will translate directly to clicks – and commissions.
(iii) SERPS Ranking
You won’t get any visitors at all if they can’t find you! Making sure you rank well in the search results for keywords and keyphrases related to your niche market will be vital.
This will happen through a combination of several factors, including the design of your website, the user experience, the page speed, and the adaptability of your site for mobile browsing.
But adding regular, high quality material will show the search engines you have valuable content. Once people start clicking through to your website, and staying for a while, this will also tell the search engines that you have worthwhile content, and this will help you rank.
3. Optimize Your Website For A Better User Experience
If your website is slow to load, littered with adverts, hurls popups at your visitor as though they’re confetti, and makes content difficult to access, your visitors will head out quickly.
The user experience has always been important, but with Google’s Core Vitals it’s now absolutely vital that you make the UX of your site a high priority.
Make sure your site loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, and regularly test your site using a range of tools to assess its performance. These tools include:
4. Use A WordPress Plugin Such As AAWP To Make Your Ads Stand Out
One of the major problems with affiliate marketing, and in particular Amazon affiliate marketing, is that adverts for products are almost everywhere.
And what’s the problem with something that’s almost everywhere?
People become blind to them.
Amazon product listings created using the built-in SiteStripe toolbar all looked exactly the same. And that was always a problem.
Now that Amazon has withdrawn the ability to create product listings with images, it’s harder than ever to create ads that truly stand out, whilst also staying safely within the terms of Amazon’s affiliate scheme.
Unless you have a WordPress site.
In which case you must use an Amazon affiliate plugin such as AAWP.
By using the AAWP plugin you have complete control over your product listings, choosing what information to include, and increasing the size of key information, such as the main image. With this plugin you can make your affiliate links and adverts stand out, grab attention, create interest, and significantly increase your affiliate earnings.
5. Use AAWP To Create Dynamic Product Listings, Including A/B Testing
While we’re on the subject of WordPress affiliate plugins, AAWP has another major advantage over the default Amazon listings – the ability to generate dynamic content.
A normal SiteStripe Amazon product advert can only ever be for one single product. You choose the product, create the ad, paste the HTML code into your blog post, page, header or footer… and that’s it.
However, with AAWP you can create dynamic product listings, such as bestsellers and new releases.
What does this mean?
Well, rather than choosing one single DSLR camera to list, you can instead choose to have the top five best selling DSLR cameras listed – whatever they may be. The listing updates regularly, so you’re always offering your visitors visually appealing adverts for the very best cameras currently on sale.
The same is true for the bestsellers. Choose the category, and the number of products to display, and AAWP will automatically query Amazon’s database, identify the currently best selling products in whatever niche category you’ve chosen, and display those in a visually appealing way on your site.
Dynamic content will always be fully up to date and totally relevant to your audience.
It’s a no-brainer – but don’t let everyone know, because you still want to make sure your product ads stand out from the crowd.
You can try out a demo of AAWP and see examples of dynamic affiliate product listings by visiting https://getaawp.com/demo.
6. Take Advantage Of Amazon Onelink To Boost International Traffic And Earnings
If you’re based in the US you may be listing products from Amazon’s US site, with prices listed in dollars.
Which is fine, until someone from the UK visits your site.
They click on the link, and are sent to the US store, where they find out that it’s going to cost about $45 to post the $5 pen they were interested in buying. So they don’t.
Amazon OneLink is a tool that allows Amazon Associates to create links that direct customers to Amazon products from their own geographically relevant websites.
It does this by automatically redirecting international visitors to their local Amazon store. In this way, you can expand your reach across multiple countries, reaching a massively bigger market.
To find out more, read our previous post, “What Is Amazon OneLink And Why You Should Use It”.
7. Use Social Media The Right Way To Promote Your Links
You don’t have to be a massive TikTok superstar, a Gold Play Button-owning YouTube star, or an Insta-famous celebrity to be able to make social media work its magic for you.
One of the key points about social media is that it’s – well – social.
That’s the point.
It’s a way to put a face to your business, create a community that trusts you because they can see you’re a real person who has genuine knowledge about your niche market, an interest in helping and supporting people, and can be reached easily.
Social media can help build a loyal following that becomes a regular target market. As long as you don’t force advertising down their throats, it can be an excellent way to drive traffic towards your website – or even sell directly.
One of the best ways successful Amazon affiliates use social media is to add a link to their affiliate website in their bio.
Then, if they’re talking about a product they recommend, they simply tell their followers to check out their website for full details and the link.
This way, not only do you avoid including lots of long affiliate links in your posts (which may not even be clickable in certain cases), but you also increase the exposure of your other product adverts and listings to a target audience that’s already made the decision to follow up on your advice.
If you have a memorable website domain name, this is great, but if you either want to link directly to a specific Amazon product, or to a specific page within your own site, we recommend using a URL shortener. These are tools that create short website addresses that are much easier to copy, type in, or include in an image or video.
We highly recommend using ClickWhale – a free WordPress plugin that not only generates short URLs, it does so using your own domain name!
And if that wasn’t enough, it also includes link analysis tools, so you can see exactly where traffic is coming from, and which links are being used.
An especially useful feature with ClickWhale (and which makes it stand out against almost every other link tool) is its Link Page feature. This allows you to create a beautifully formatted page of links (often used by social media influencers and sellers using the one link in their bio).
These links can include Amazon affiliate links to products, or to show more information about your business.
Find out more about ClickWhale’s Link Page tool here.
8. Use Email Marketing The Safe Way
You probably haven’t thought about using Amazon affiliate links in your marketing emails, since Amazon’s Terms of Service for Associates makes it very clear that you can’t do this.
Including their affiliate links in emails or email attachments could cause you to have your Associates account closed down – with the loss of all revenue earned up to that point.
But this doesn’t mean you can’t still use email as a powerful tool to increase your Amazon earnings.
We’ve already written an article about how to use Amazon affiliate links with email marketing, but our core recommendation is to include links in your email that direct visitors to your website, where the actual Amazon affiliate links are.
There are several advantages to doing this (aside from not breaking Amazon’s ToS!), including being able to take advantage of a highly targeted audience, as well as exposing them to other product links once they click through to your site from the email.
9. Consider Paid Advertising Through Facebook Ads Or Google Ads
We wouldn’t recommend this for people just getting started with Amazon affiliate marketing, but if you’ve managed to discover a niche market, and you’re already starting to see significant growth, this may be a way to increase the rate of that growth.
Using Facebook Ads will allow you to finely tune the target audience who will see them, helping you reach people who are most likely to engage with your niche market.
Use A/B testing, monitor click-through rates, and be prepared to try different approaches until you find one that works best for you.
10. Join Amazon’s Influencer Program
Amazon’s influencer program is something we’ve covered previously because it’s a terrific opportunity. You can read a more in-depth analysis of the scheme by visiting our article “What Is Amazon Influencer Program & Is It For You?”.
But in essence the new Influencer program is an extension of the Amazon Associates program, and gives social media influencers extra tools to drive customers to Amazon from product-related content. Influencers earn additional commission rates for all sales they bring to Amazon.
You will also have your own personalized page on Amazon (with your own custom URL) where you can curate products, as well as publish your livestreams, photos and videos.
As long as you have a YouTube, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok account, you can apply to become an Amazon Influencer. They will take a look at your profile, the number of followers you have, and several other metrics to assess what the engagement is like through your content. If approved, this could be a fantastic way to increase your Amazon affiliate earnings, especially if you already have a strong social media profile.
To apply to become an Amazon Influencer, visit https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/influencers.
11. Create Detailed And Valuable Product Reviews And Comparisons
It’s stated in the Amazon Associates ToS that you can’t use the product reviews published on their main site.
But that doesn’t mean that reviews can’t be provided to your visitors.
By creating valuable product reviews you can create content that engages your target audience, keeps them on the page, increases your brand reputation, fosters trust – and encourages more people to click on your affiliate links.
So how can you write reviews?
There are several approaches to take.
The best way of all is if you actually own the product yourself, or have at least been in possession of it for a while.
Some affiliates purchase the products so that they can take their own high quality photos, create unboxing videos, and get first hand experience of the product. Then they use the Amazon returns service to send it back once they’re done. We wouldn’t advise doing this on a regular basis, but many people do this.
There’s also nothing to stop you from reading the product reviews on Amazon, as well as in relevant forum discussions, and then going on to distill all of that feedback into your own product review. This provides a balanced review based on multiple people’s experiences.
12. Create How-To Guides And Tutorials That Incorporate Amazon Products
Although reviews and comparison guides focus very closely on the specific product you’re promoting, this isn’t the only way you can include Amazon products in your content.
A good approach you can take is to create how-to guides and tutorials that relate to the niche market you’re targeting, and include Amazon products as an almost by-the-way recommendation.
For example, if you’re targeting the DSLR camera market, you might create a tutorial about how to take better night photos. This could well include camera settings such as aperture, ISO and shutter speed…
…but then you might also go on to mention that when the shutter speed is increased, there’s a greater chance of camera wobble when you’re pressing the shutter button….
…which would lead you nicely to recommending a remote shutter control that you can demonstrate, and then helpfully provide your affiliate link.
13. Use More Visual Content, Such As Images And Videos
Try to break up the text content on your site with good quality images and videos that demonstrate the product, or show what it’s capable of.
Although words are useful, images and video will grab attention, and often provide more information in a split second than several paragraphs of writing could achieve.
You have a number of options.
As stated by Amazon, you are free to use any of the seller’s images that are already published on the product page on Amazon. However, you are not allowed to edit these, apart from altering their size. This means no cropping, no annotating, and no editing out parts of the image.
You can also obtain your own, original photos of course. If you already have the product, or buy it yourself, then you can either take good quality images yourself, or hire a photographer to take these.
If you’re using the services of a professional photographer then we recommend doing this in bulk, to cut costs.
Amazon affiliate links can be quite long, which means they’re not memorable, and they’re almost impossible to include in videos or social media content.
By using a URL or link shortener, you can create short, memorable links that can easily be added to images, videos or posts.
ClickWhale is a free WordPress URL shortener that lets you take Amazon affiliate links and make them much shorter.
It also does this by using your own domain name, which makes them look much more professional, and trustworthy.
Many link shorteners provide click analysis, as does ClickWhale, allowing you to identify which links are working better than others, and exactly where your traffic is coming from.
Note: You will find some people claiming that Amazon’s ToS states that you can’t use URL shorteners, but that’s not true. What Amazon has said is that you can’t use a URL shortener to disguise an Amazon link. But if you make it clear that the link will take visitors to the product page on Amazon, then you’re fine.
15. Use Tracking Links To Identify Traffic Sources And Link Engagement
If you’re already using a link shortener such as ClickWhale (mentioned above), then this tracking analysis ability will already be included.
Use link tracking tools to find out which of your links are working best, and try to work out why.
If you see traffic clicking through links relating to a select type of product, or in response to a particular type of post, or from a specific platform, then this is a good signal to focus your efforts there more.
Also consider factors such as time of day, and geographic location, as this might help you develop content that more closely relates to the most engaged audience you have, as well as when the best time of day is to post new content.
Using tools like this may allow you to refine your niche market further than you originally imagined, perhaps discovering a niche in which you emerge as a leading voice.
16. Use Deep Linking To Product Pages For Greater Targeting
What is deep linking? This is the practice of linking directly to specific products, where alternatives exist such as sizes, colors, or materials.
For example, let’s say you were wanting to sell a men’s jacket. You could link to the main product page on Amazon, but alternatively you could select a specific size, and a specific color – as shown below.
Once you have selected the color and size, you can create an affiliate link to it. This will help your target audience, and significantly increase engagement.
How?
Well, let’s say your target audience are men of a larger build, who prefer muted, calm colors. If the default size of the jacket is extra small and fluorescent orange, then the customer is going to have to manually change these settings.
If they do this and then find that the lovely gray jacket you linked to isn’t even available in the larger sizes, you’ve lost your trust and reputation, and that customer may feel unwilling to trust your links in future.
17. Monitor Your Earnings And Traffic Using Amazon’s Reporting Tools
When you log in to your Amazon Associates account it’s easy to become fixated on your total earnings. But learn to spend time going through the extensive data available. This will provide you insights into product categories and types that are working well, links that are generating good traffic, as well as those products or links that are underperforming.
This data allows you to adjust your affiliate marketing program, increasing your focus in certain areas, while perhaps moving away from less effective products or marketing techniques.
The most successful Amazon affiliates are those who take full advantage of the data available, either through their Amazon Associates dashboard, or through URL shorteners that provide link tracking analysis.
It’s this approach that can help you discover a tighter niche market than you had before, and with even more focussed marketing you can encourage strong loyalty and high levels of engagement, with minimal competition.
18. Run Other Affiliate Programs Alongside Amazon’s Listings
Although Amazon Associates is the largest and most popular affiliate program on the planet, it’s certainly far from being the only option. Many successful affiliates find that by combining affiliate links for Amazon products with links from other affiliate schemes they achieve a much higher level of earning.
What is interesting is that many affiliates have noticed that by including links from other schemes, their Amazon links have actually generated higher click-through rates.
Why might this be?
The answer could well be that if someone visits a product comparison, review, or how-to site and notices that all of the adverts are for Amazon products, they may assume the affiliate marketer is lazy – taking an easy route.
By including alternatives to Amazon products, the impression is that you’ve really done your work – you’ve looked beyond Amazon to provide genuine comparisons.
You’ve done the leg work, and saved the customer time and effort. The customer’s faith in both links increases, as does engagement.
And of course, your commission rate.
19. Build A Community On Your Website Or Social Media
What do your followers or visitors want? As an affiliate marketer, you often have to guess, using data to analyze how good your guesses were, adapting your approach accordingly.
But by creating a community through either your social media profile, or through comments on your website, you can gain valuable feedback, suggestions and recommendations directly from your target market.
Try posting open-ended questions, run polls, invite questions – these are all going to increase engagement and loyalty, as well as providing you with really useful information you can use.
You may also find other people following your account simply because of the useful answers, suggestions or comments of those already following you, drawing in a wider audience.
20. Be Open To Change By Continuously Evaluating And Adjusting Your Strategy
The best affiliate marketers don’t just publish content, slap on a few links, and walk away. They are constantly analyzing data, constantly trying out different approaches, and often adapting their methods, niche, product lines, and even platforms.
To begin with, you’ll need to explore markets, and use the available data to identify a niche market, and then use your own knowledge and experience to develop content you hope will work.
Sticking at this for a while will be important.
But then as soon as data starts to become available that shows the type of products that are selling, and the type or location of links that are generating clicks, you must be prepared to make whatever changes are needed to adapt your business to the needs that your target audience actually has.
This is how the most successful Amazon affiliates end up cornering a niche market nobody else realized was even there – through trial and error, and a great deal of data.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that with the right approach almost anyone can generate a good income stream through the Amazon Associates program.
But just because it’s easy to sign up and get started, that doesn’t mean everyone is going to automatically earn a fortune.
These 20 ways to maximize your Amazon affiliate earnings take advantage of this, allowing you to adapt your approach, take advantage of tools and data, and make decisions and changes most people never even consider.
To really make your Amazon links stand out you definitely need to be using the AAWP WordPress plugin for Amazon affiliates.
Being able to customize your product links, create beautiful and engaging adverts, and develop dynamic content that’s always up-to-date and relevant helps put you several steps ahead of the competition.
Visit https://getaawp.com today to see increased commission earnings tomorrow.
Start now with AAWP!
AAWP is the #1 WordPress plugin for Amazon affiliates who are serious about earning more. Get started today!