Today I’m really excited to share my experience with amazon affiliate program..
You might have heard people earning money online, and you ask yourself, whether it’s possible? then I’ll say yes!
3 Type of source of income are there online.. 1) Freelancing 2) Advertising 3) Affiliate Marketing but I’m not going to talk about all of them, just a small focus on amazon affiliate marketing.
Amazon affiliate program comes under affiliate marketing where you earn commission after successfully selling an item listed in their site. You basically, recommend a product to your readers, viewers or whatever.. and receive a certain percent of commission out of it.
Personally speaking.. this post is written for my friend who asked me to share my secret of earning money from amazon. So, I must say.. there is no big secret, but just moving with time and online available resource.
Before I start, I want to point out a common psychology of new person thinks about affiliate marketing.. they think whether it’ll secure their future or will they able to earn a healthy amount of money monthly throughout their life… blah blah blah.
My answer is “yes” … “No”.
“Yes” in the sense, many people are making money out of amazon for years and still going on… might be future too.. “No” in the sense, no one has seen his future.. Anything can happen, so be prepared for surprises.
Ya I’m earning from amazon & I also don’t know what will happen in future but can say that the amount I’ll be getting from it will run my present life…
Let’s Start: what we call Amazon Affiliate Secret….
Believe it or not, I’m earning money from amazon without spending a single buck. I use the available online resources around me like social bookmarking site like reddit, blogspot blog (recently converted to a domain), video and squidoo which I’ll share in a series of posts.
I’m getting 7-12 sales perday. Here below is the screenshot of my last 7 days report .
I sold over over more than thousand dollar products from amazon & received a small but good amount of commission from them.
Let go with the most effective medium first,
1) Use the power of reddit.
You know, reddit.com is very powerful platform to sell your product if you don’t look spammy. This link sharing site has millions of users every single day & reaching to them can get you a nice sale.
My maximum sale are from reddit… How? I share my affiliate links to recommend the most interesting products to people.
Note: reddit is filled with down-voters & jealous people, so if they find that you’re sharing an amazon affiliate product, they may shout at you, down vote you or even report the admin but you easy escape them if you’re strictly following the community guideline.
For promoting product over this community, you must be aware of the sub-reddits. Subreddits (also known as Subs) are the sub categories where different related links are shared. For eg, if you’re interested in personal photos then go for /r/Pics & if interested in Videos, go for /r/Videos.. so there are thousand of such sub categories.
And you can only promote you amazon affiliate link to the affiliate product recommendation subreddits like
- /r/TheBestOfAmazon – (Recommend the most weird & unique products on amazon)
- /r/AmazonDeals – (The Hottest Deals of Amazon)
- /r/AmazonBestSellers – (The Best Seller Products on Amazon)
- /r/AmazonAdults (NSFW- an adult product recommendation subreddit)
- /r/AmazonUnder20 (only those products which are interesting & comes under $20.)
- More such subreddits, /r/fratdeals, /r/bargains, etc..
There are many more such subreddit… just make a search, you’ll launch into few. So submit where you can easily find the audience who are willing to purchase stuffs online.
While submitting, you should keep in mind that your item should be unique and interesting because reddit community doesn’t want to see those products which are already known to them.
Eg, you shouldn’t submit the common products like Apple Ipad, Sumsung Galaxy, etc… they’re known to them & doesn’t need your recommendation.
You should submit those products like Accoutrements Horse Head Mask, Wine Bottle Holder Floating Illusion Rack Stand, etc… these type of products usually get sale through reddit.
Not all your submissions get listed in these subreddit… they must be approved by the moderators of each subreddit. The possibility are, the smaller subreddits easily gets approved than that of the larger subs.
How much amount of clicks you need and how many of them purchases your product?
It depends like my conversion rate of past few days where I send 3,000+ clicks, I got around 100+ sales.
A fast, Quick guide to whole reddit process:
1. ) Create your Amazon Affiliate Account.
2.) Set up your tracking ID.
3) Create a reddit account.
4.) Increase your Karma upto atleast 200 by submitting to other inetersting small subreddit like /r/OldIndia, /r/Pictures, etc..
5.) Find the Amazon related subreddits… upvote on others submission & comment few if you can.
6.) Submit your aff links to the unique items to those subs & wait for the mod to approve.
7.) Keep in mind, never go against the submission of the mod. Never down-vote, always give a up-vote or else they may unapprove your submission if ever they get a hint of your activity.
And also don’t forget to make Tie-Up with other redditors because alone submission in subreddits doesn’t make your link reach to your buyers. For that you need vote-up & you can get it in the beginning with tie-ups.
Message other redditors with a promise like
“Hey (username) voting problem is going really bad out here & the story is going buried. Let's make it fixed, when we both will publish a story, we both will put our votes-up unbiasedly. So 2 votes in fixed in our every story. This will make our story visible to our subscribers without getting it buried & let them decide whether or not to down-vote or up-vote it. 2 votes will make every story strong from getting out of the front page..”
Same message to other active redditors of that sub. It gona work well…
Pros of Amazon Affiliate:
- A Large number of products available covering almost every needs & categories.
- If a buyer click through your affiliate link & end up buying other product you’ll also get the same commission.
- Instant Download Digital Products like movies, music gets commission upto 10 percent.
- As your sale increase your commission will also increase from flat 4% to 8%.
Cons of Amazon Affiliate:
- They release the payment quarterly, that means if your earning reached to $100 this month, you’ll get the payment on the third month.
- Extreme spamming may terminate your account.
If you try hard, then you may get your regular sales through reddit community…
Now let’s move to our another technique. That' is blogs.
How to Sell Items through your blog:
If you’ve a blog that also going to work really well to sell your product because blogs have dedicated readers. It’s very easy to sell through a dedicated reader base who trust you and are always ready to purchase your recommended product.
You can also use the niche websites to sell your products, I’m not going deeper into that topic but brief of it because many people have already covered it many times into their course you purchase those and go through the entire process. Here I recommend few courses that you may go through (I’m an affiliate of them, and include the affiliate link)
Course 1.
Let’s make a brief of the mentioned technique .e. 1) sell through authority blogs; and 2) sell through niche blogs. Then I’ll go to further my own researched technique 3.) sell through photoblogs, tumblr & low value traffic into my next post.
Brief: Sell through Authority Blogs
1.) A Proper Website & a Domain Name
Authority blogs are a proper website which are specially done with a .com domain. You might have heard about Gizmodo.com, that’s we call an authority website/blog because it’s a proper website & has a lot of contents that comes with killer gadget review. Another example of authority website is digital-photography-school.com which got a lot of articles related to photography & a huge reader base.
2.) They’re Brand
Basically Gizmodo, Digital Photography School are brands. I mean they established their blog with the consistent content creation for years & that build a lot of trust for them among the readers.
3.) They’re Time Consuming process
Indeed, the term authority is itself time consuming because gaining authority need a lot of practice, research, hard work & ofcourse consistent content creation. Which will together with time make you reach to the people and will gain their trust with your non-stop contribution and effort to a single blog.
Then how they make money? How they sell Amazon Products?
They make more money then the normal affiliate market blogs (overall). They generate revenues through advertisements, paid posts, etc but its authority on a subject makes it more effective in selling the amazon product.
Their conversion rate is much more higher.. .i.e. if they get approx. 2,500 clicks, almost 60% of the clicker ends up purchasing which is around 1600 people purchases through that link and not only that, even the costliest products (eg, $400-$1000) with high commission are sold by them easily.
As their click through ratio (CTR) is more, so Amazon also put them in premium affiliates & increase their affiliate commission percentage than that of others.
So, how they sell the products..??Basically, the authority sites usually comes up with Review posts (like, Canon 50D Review) with complete a to z coverage of the product along with some hand-held experiments done by the reviewer, pros & cons, features, everything that a buyer needs to make a decision.
Secondly, they write the Best Of List products, which includes the best of some related product of the year comparing multiple products in a single place. (Here’s an Example: 2013 Best Upright Vacuum Cleaner Comparisons and Reviews) This really benefits the buyers to find the alternative products at one place & compare them.
Overall Authority Blogs are best of Best for affiliate sell along with ads, but the difficulty level is high & a time killer.
Quick point out on how to create your own authority blog & make money out of it..
1) Register a domain name that is not a keyword. Domain a with a brand potential, like eg, SharmilazKitchen.com (an Indian Cooking Site)
2.) Start creating quality content without thinking much of money… Just go on creating.
3.) Keep on building audience & large reader base (subscribers)
4.) Run it for atleast 6 months with atleast daily one unique content.
5.) As you gain your audience, start making reviews & refer products to amazon along with your affiliate tag.
Now here we go to selling products through niche blogging.
Sell Products Through Niche Blogs.
That’s what most of the affiliate marketers are relying on. Niche blog/websites. It’s a very big topic but I’m gona pick out the most important points.
Niche blogs basically rely on Search Engine, mainly Google so if any change comes in search algorithm can end all your efforts & time. So they’re very risky & in same time very profitable.
Risk = Profit.
What are Niche blogs? Niche blogs are those blogs which based on a particular keyword. Let’s assume the keyword “Sumsung 3d TV”, so a marketer get himself focused on that particular related products, I mean if he wants to promote sumsung 3d tv’s he have to search for different models of sumsung 3d TV’s and make as many descriptive review of them & publish it inside a dedicated blog. That brings him a lot of buyers.
Niche blogs gets a lot of sales because the audience they get are mentally prepared to purchase that product & that’s why they came to that blog to confirm his/her mind queries & to decide whether to move forward or not.
How you can build a Niche blog? Here below I mentioned few brief points about the process, I’d highly recommend to go through this free course (Udemy: My Amazon Associates Affiliate Marketing Secret Revealed) that shows the whole process in detail.
Quick point out on how to create your own niche blog & make money out of it..
1.) Do Keyword Research
You should the do keyword research before setting up your niche blog because all your success depends upon it. You can use the Market Samurai ( I’m not affiliate of them & not earning anything by referring it) or Google Keyword Tool which is free. Use these tools to find the most globally searched & low competition keyword so that you can dominate it.
2.) Get a Domain name based in it
After searching for the keyword, get a domain name based on it. Find the keyword alive domain, like if you search for 3D Cameras, you may search like “3dcamerareviews.com” if available or else keep on adding extra words wisely to search for such effective domain.
3.) Host it
Self-host the domain with wordpress which is the best CMS available which can be converted into a product squeeze page at any moment with proper themes and plugins.
4.) Get a Content writer Or Write yourself
That’s vital part, if you’re on niche blogging world. Make your decision whether you’re going to write the content or gona hire a writer because at the end of the day you need some content on your site to attract readers & convert them into buyers.
5.) Connect your Readers – Engage your readers with a human model.
If you want to connect with your website readers then I’ve a very interesting tool for you. It’s called “model2web” which gives you a model to speak about your website & gain your trust among your readers… You know, readers gets highly engage with an original man which you can hire it from here. Only for my readers there’s a coupon code for discount on this product. Use “aqs9a1ao3wfcb” and get 20% Off. So, get it here.
6.) Do Optimize it for Search Engine
Making a website won’t make you an affiliate sale.. you need to optimize it for Search Engine. For that purpose submit your website to different & many directories as you can. Interact in related forums & put the link in the signature. Keep them doing… And don’t forget to add meta tag to your website for better listing. Also Use video marketing if you can.
By following the above techniques you can sell products through niche websites.. there are few more effective way to sell through tumblr, squidoo & photoblog, which I’ll write it in my next post.
Attitude to Become an Affiliate Marketer:
1) Be Selective
Your Selection will your followers decision.
2) Be Genuine/Look Genuine
Share those products which makes you look very genuine. When recommending a product, please mention the cons you found out with that product. This adds genuinity to your product.
3) Good Judge
Make Effective comparison among multiple products of the same type, and put forward the cons in a manner so that the best products looks good in comparing to other listed & makes it a good decision for the buyers.
4.) Your Story is yours
Relate everything you’re your own story so that the trust easily gains between both of you .i.e readers & you.
5.) Be Open
I mean be open to your ideas & be flexible to the queries they made because when they’re in decision making process there arises a lot of queries.
6.) Be aware about what you’re recommending
I taste it, loved it & then say “it’s good!” this will make them curious & ends up tasting the same thing. So, use it before telling other to use it.
7.) Community Maker & Feed Them
Right from reddit, blog and squidoo, everyone deals with a community of its own & sells the product to them. You may build it Or use the pre-established community & feed them.
Stay tune…. Or Subscribe through Email Newsletter… My next article will be about generating amazon affiliate sales with more easier technique..
