Becoming an Amazon affiliate is one of the best strategies to work on when you want to make money online. As an Amazon affiliate, you’ll earn money by simply advertising their products. There are several ways to do it, such as promoting through blogs and social media profiles. All of them can be successful when done right.
What we have found is that the most successful way to earn money as an Amazon affiliate is by creating an Amazon affiliate website. An Amazon affiliate website is a website that is designed to market products on the Amazon marketplace to earn money from referral commissions.
The only catch is that you have to showcase said products in an organic way. Some of the most common practices include product reviews, comparisons and top rated product lists. That way, you can easily get people interested in the products on your site, place an Amazon associate link to redirect them to make a purchase, and then cash in!
The benefits of an Amazon affiliate website
- Amazon affiliate websites are one of the easiest ways to start making money online. They are easy to set up and are pretty cost effective
- They offer you a streamlined affiliate earnings method. Unlike traditional affiliate marketing schemes, where you have to heavily promote low paying offers, often with your own money, Amazon affiliate websites are organically found by people searching the products that you market, which means that they are ready to buy
- The Amazon tracking cookie will register any purchase made by a customer coming to the marketplace from your site and pay you a fee for the full amount spent by the buyer, and not only for the product they were referred to
- The fact that Amazon is a trusted place to shop online makes Amazon affiliate websites already valuable and easy to monetize. If you pick a good niche and fill your site with compelling content, you can easily take home earnings as high as $3,000 a month, sometimes more!
Setting up an Amazon affiliate website
Creating an Amazon affiliate website is now easier that it has ever been. Let’s take a look at everything that you will need in order to set up your first Amazon affiliate website, one step at a time:
Picking a niche
You may have been hearing this word being thrown around a lot now that you are getting into online marketing, but what does it mean? A niche is that specific segment of the market that you decide to target. For example, if you decide that you want to set up a site for baby clothing, that is your niche.
Picking the right niche can make a huge difference in how much you earn and how much traffic you get to your affiliate site. Some niches are considered big and some are considered small. For example, the video game niche is huge, but the octopus-shaped niche is small. The bigger the niche, the more profitable it is deemed to be.
Keep in mind that the average price of products in your niche of choice and the average number of sales can have a greater impact on your earnings than how big or small the niche is. If your niche of choice has an amazing market share, but each sale averages only $3, you’ll need to make a titanic amount of sales to turn a decent profit.
On the other hand, if your niche of choice is small, yet each sale is $4,000, you’ll be making big earnings with a few sales a month. Also, consider picking up a niche that you’ll enjoy promoting. That will make your affiliate site much more authoritative, which in turn will make it more appealing to your visitors.
A domain name for your site
Now that you have picked up a niche, you have to pick up a domain name related to it. The domain name is simply the name address of your website, and you can pick up one from a number of vendors online. We recommend you pick your name through hostgator.com. Simply head to hostgator.com and click on “domains”.
In the “choose your new web address” bar, enter the domain name that you would like to use and click on “search” to check if it is available. Once you check availability, proceed to check out.
Website builder and hosting
Now that you have your niche and your domain name, you now need to create an actual site. The easiest way to create a website is to use a content management system, and the hottest one right now is WordPress. Also, you will need a hosting service to house your website. You can find great hosting for a low price on hostgator.com, as well, and pick a hosting service that comes with easy, one click WordPress installation.
You will not have to create separate accounts for everything. Just head to hostgator.com and click on “WordPress hosting”. You have three packages available to get started, and we recommend that you to get started with the “standard plan”.
This plan allows you to install two WordPress sites on the same server, which is great if you decide to experiment with two different, but highly profitable niches along the way. You will be able to get up to 200,000 visitors a month and you get 150 GB of storage space.
Final recommendations
- Use an affiliate friendly theme for your WordPress site such as “Zeno”, “rehub” and “price compare”
- Make sure that your site is neatly organized, that your links are in order and that you use high quality, appealing images
- Make sure that your affiliate links are easily checkable. Lots of affiliates lose a great deal of earnings because they don’t get customers to click through their affiliate links. Don’t be shy!