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Make Money From Amazon Affiliates, Amazon Affiliates Program Blog & Tips

This post may contain affiliate links.

 I told you I was going to tell you how we made the leap to Living Differently, and Amazon is part of the secret. No paid courses here, no e-books, I’m just going to tell you, for free. I’ve been dabbling with Amazon affiliate marketing for over 10 years now, earning a little here, a little there, but it’s only after a few years and learning a few tricks, did it all started coming together. This site was actually way past the $1000/ month mark a few years ago, long before the global shutdown. I’m more than happy to share some Amazon affiliates (or associates) tips to help you bypass the early stages of trial and error and jump you straight into making real money from Amazon Associates accounts adding to your diverse patchwork income from travel blogging. Or indeed, from any type of blogging.

Amazon affiliates sales can, and do, work for just about every niche site or blog, if you do it right. The Amazon affiliate program also works for most countries, with the United States performing best for me (Amazon.com), followed by Amazon Australia (Amazon.com.au), UK, (Amazon.co.uk), and Canada (Amazon.ca.)

Most Amazon sales for me, come from the countries above, and international sales are now all integrated through the Amazon dashboard, although you do need to create an account for each country individually.

This post contains very simple tips and instructions for absolute beginners based on what worked for me to make money as an Amazon affiliate. If you have any questions or need more information, just put them in the comments.

It could also be helpful if you need to grow your Amazon affiliate income.

I was a 6 figure blogger up to early 2020. Obviously the travel world was decimated by restrictions. Today our income is rising steadily again and our Amazon affiliate program income is rising too.

blogging affiliates making money
Because we make money through blogging and affiliate sales, we get to spend our days hanging out with these guys, rather than tied down by job and mortgage. It’s a no-brainer.

Making Money Through Amazon Affiliates

Some of you will already be bloggers, if not, I have more information on blogging, for free, which you can access via our travel blogging home page.

I’m not a blogging blogger, I’m a travel blogger, but people want to know how we do this stuff so the posts are available. 

I have several other niche websites outside travel too, but this is our travel blog so everything here is travel related. All of our websites make something from Amazon.

Something else I want to tell you is, you don’t need to buy courses. They’re expensive and the information in them is available elsewhere for free.

Sure if you have $1000 to spare and like everything neatly packaged, go for it, but I promise there will be little content you can’t find by Googling.

Ten Top Tips To Make More Money as An Amazon Affiliate

  1. Target the US audience.
  2. Sell expensive products with high percentage payouts from Amazon.
  3. Use your own photos and video, you should buy the products you plan to review to get these.
  4. Have good SEO. Including in-depth content, a fast website and strong internal linking.
  5. Get very niche with your long-tail sales keywords.
  6. Create seasonal sales posts months in advance to allow them to rise to the top of Google in time.
  7. Include a table or comparison chart in your sales page.
  8. Create a variety of posts for different seasons to keep your Amazon income flowing year-round.
  9. Check your Amazon links constantly. Products can become out of stock.
  10. Always update old sales posts with fresh products that have come onto the market.

A lot of people will tell you to use buttons on Amazon sales pages to increase sales, I’ve found that text links perform better than buttons and I’ve tested this using heatmaps from both Hotjar and Affilimate. (Grab a free trial of Affilimate here, it’s good.)

Before You Start as an Amazon Affiliate or Associate

Obviously, sign up for an Amazon Associates account. You can use your existing Amazon account to do this.

You need a website and it needs to have some authority. This means your website isn’t spam in the eyes of Google and isn’t brand new.

Your site needs to either have a bit of age and maturity or some genuine incoming links. Ideally both.

People must like your content. Google can tell if they do. Other websites must like your site or your content and so link to it from their own pages, this tells Google your content is worth showing in its search results.

The more authority your site has, broadly, the higher it appears in search results so long as you get your SEO right.

Obviously, you can’t copy or spin other people’s content. Copyright theft is illegal and Google knows. Duplicate content isn’t smart.

Bloggers tend to measure the authority of a website using a metric called DA, Domain Authority, it’s a score out of 100 and the higher it is the better.

I’ll tell you that DA is not the be-all and end-all. A better post can beat a site with a higher DA. 

So don’t lose hope if your new site’s DA is low, you can grow it and you can still potentially beat higher DA sites.

DA is a metric created by Moz, not Google. DA is based on your backlink count. Actual Google ranking is based on far more factors than just backlinks.

This site has been around quite a while and has reasonable authority, so if I write a post with the keywords “best travel sweatsuit” I have a fair chance of Google showing my post to somebody searching for that exact term.

Of course, I will have made sure that my on-page SEO exactly targets that term and that my site structure and internal linking supports that term.

My posts have ranked on page 1 within a day sometimes (if I check the competition isn’t too high before picking my keywords), more often it takes a few months.

Over time posts rank higher and higher as Google gets good feedback from happy readers in the form of no returns to the search results and plenty of time on page.

On one of my smaller sites, with less authority, I have less chance of ranking highly straight away, so the trick is to look for a more obscure search term, usually a less profitable one that every other blogger isn’t trying to capitalise on.

For instance, I used ” best *****  maker” recently, it was a low competition keyword (Words, obviously, 3 of them) but it ranked quickly and does well in Amazon sales despite being on a low authority site.

This is what keyword research is all about, finding keywords that your site can rank for because your pages need Google traffic to get the customers who are ready to buy.

It’s pointless to halfheartedly put a few links in a post and calling it “Family Travel Gear” as I did on this site. I doubt I’ll ever rank for that term because the competition is too strong. ( I was actually surprised but – that post now does rank pretty well and is one of the bigger ones on this site, it took around 6 years to get there) 

Do it that way and you will only pick up a few bucks now and then from one of your regular subscribers, or somebody who just happens to be visiting your site and stumbles across your page full of links.

You need a targeted, organised approach and I’m going to start you on your way.

Likewise, don’t just stick random affiliate links in your sidebar, it rarely works.

Never Mislead Your Readers

Never promote any product you know to be a dud. It’s the quickest way to lose respect, credibility, friends and readers.

I’ve cursed other bloggers for selling me products just for the affiliate commission. I’ve bought products, courses, plugins, hosting, all sorts of things, that turned out to be sub-standard.

Tell the truth, keep it real.

Don’t sell out.

The products below, I use and need to make an income.

You Need to Target Amazon Customers All Over The World

In 2023 you can ignore everything I wrote about Eazy Azon, you don’t need it any more.

The two best ways of doing this is probably Amazon’s own One Link tool. One link does now include Australia.

One Link will localise your links to the US, Canada, UK, Spain, Germany, Italy etc.

 All of your Amazon links need to lead to the correct Amazon site according to your readers’ locations. If they are in the UK they must go to Amazon UK, in Australia, Amazon Australia etc.

This is called link localisation.

You need to organise this today, because if you do it further down the line you have to go back and change all the Amazon links you painstakingly inserted.

  Amazon One Link,  (go to your affiliate area and find it under ” Tools”. There is some set up involved.)  

Previously we used Easy Azon, we no longer recommend it but Easy Azon does (last time I checked) allow you to localise for Australia. We feel that the Australian Amazon market is too small for us to target.

Most of our Amazon earnings come from the US, so the extra hassle of targeting Amazon Australia just isn’t really worth it currently.

If you need to localise for Australia, maybe go with Easy Azon Pro or One Link.

EasyAzon Pro is a premium, paid plugin that makes your Amazon empire global. There are other, free, plugins that claim to do the same thing, I’ve tried some of them, for years, they didn’t work nearly as well as EasyAzon and I was losing money every day.

EasyAzon Pro is not, by any means, easy right out of the box. I finally got it figured out and it worked well for me for years. Basically, it helps you register with Amazon in most countries Amazon delivers to.

Then it allows you to add Amazon links and images simply and quickly, right from your WordPress interface. You won’t have to skip back and forth to the Amazon websites ever again.

You need to localize each product. That means, make sure your Amazon dot com link, points to the same product in each country.

If you don’t localise your customer will possibly click-through to a “product not found” screen or something unrelated based on keywords.

You can pick, through the Easy Azon Pro interface, exactly which product your customers, in each country, see.

Use your Google Analytics to see which countries your site’s visitors are coming from. This will give you a good idea as to how much money each country should be making for you.

For me it’s USA by a long way, then the UK and Canada. Australia is high up there but Australia is tricky and is a low-volume market. For every dollar I make from Amazon Australia I probably make 50 from Amazon USA.

You certainly need to target the US. That’s where the big Amazon money seems to be.

Easy Azon also has some useful ad-ons such as a bestseller list creation tool and a table creation tool. I own both and the product comparison tables are supposedly a fantastic thing to add. They never made me a dime.

Comparison tables are a great thing to add (although we didn’t test EasyAzon’s version in the end) but the EasyAzon bestseller list drove zero sales. I had a unique tracking code on them and there was no increase in Amazon sales at all through adding those.

As I said above, Amazon’s own localisation tools, from the Associate’s Site Stripe, are all you need now. I haven’t needed Easy Azon in years.

You Need a Way to Collect Your International Amazon Earnings

This is another of those things you need to do now, today. I’ve learnt this lesson through bitter experience.

I had hundreds of dollars of Amazon credit on Amazon USA, enough to keep us in Kindle books forever, because there was nothing else I could spend them on.

Amazon US credits can only be spent on Amazon dot-com and you’ll find they deliver very few items to the rest of the world.

I was hoping to use my credits to buy my new DSLR, unfortunately, when push came to shove, not one camera on Amazon dot-com was deliverable to Romania.

It was my own fault entirely. We eventually discovered that we could collect international Amazon earnings through Payoneer, today we use Transferwise. This has now rebranded as Wise. You can sign up for Wise here, it’s great for collecting, and spending, international earnings around the world.

Each country’s Amazon will pay onto a card and I can use it like a pre-paid debit card, anywhere. Depending on your location, you may now be able to collect payments direct from Amazon.

Payoneer Amazon

Amazon do pay out by cheque too, but the banking fees involved were steep for us and we needed a permanent address, which of course, we didn’t have.

Please check with Amazon as these details change all the time.

You Need Targeted, Ready to Buy, Customers

You need people arriving on your site, ready to buy whatever Amazon product you’re recommending.

That means, the woman who wants to buy a travel organizer and is in the decision making process of Googling for more information on which organizer to choose.

You need to get her to your site and give her information to help her make her purchase. She then clicks your link, straight through to Amazon and makes her purchase.

How to do that? It’s usually done through good SEO. That’s Search Engine Optimisation if you’re a complete beginner. SEO is about getting your search results to the top of page 1 of Google.

You need to find the right Long Tail Keywords, find out how many people are entering those keywords into Google and discover how competitive those keywords are.

Pick a keyword set with high traffic, low competition and write the post to fit the keywords. That’s how it works.

The tool I originally used for this job was called Long Tail Pro and it was incredibly useful, not just for your Amazon earnings, but to get more traffic (and more advertising revenue) to your websites.

Keysearch is another keyword research tool, I’ve used both and I prefered Longtail. It’s just personal choice.

These days I use SEMRush for my keyword research. It’s a more expensive tool and not for beginners.

I won’t tell you to do this one now, because it’s a little advanced, if you’re new it may be just too much to figure out.

This tool is also expensive and you pay every month or annually, so until your website is earning nicely you maybe won’t want to commit. But if you invest upfront, now, your path to financial freedom will be shorter.

Another tip here, pick your competition. Don’t go after the same keywords as Amazon, it won’t work, you have to be different when up against the e-commerce sites.

Buy Longtail Pro Platinum Here  (it’s essential to have the Platinum for the keyword competitiveness data) or try the trial to see how you like it. Have a play around, it’s pretty neat. It would also be a very good idea to use Longtail Pro to pick the domain name and get ideas on traffic volume in the niche of your new website if you haven’t even started yet. Just saying.

Don’t Lose Your Readers

These Amazon posts  (I often refer to them as Sales Pages ) don’t have to go out to your regular followers, they can go straight to the website, no announcement. You’ll lose your valuable subscribers if you bombard them with every Amazon earning post you pump out.

For Jetpack users, just switch off subscribers before you hit publish. Easy! Just don’t forget to switch it back on again.  

Same for sponsored posts, never send those out to your subscribers if you don’t have to.  

When you’ve been blogging a while switch from automated notifications of new posts to an email notification service provider like Mailchimp, MailerLite, Convert Kit or any of the more expensive ones.

It gives you greater control and your sales pages can then go in your newsletter. Both Mail Chimp and Mailer Lite are free to bloggers with small subscriber lists. Once your list is big these services get expensive.

Hope this helps you to get it right from day 1. I’ve just shaved a few years off your learning curve if you’re a new blogger. Happy to help.

Other Things You’ll Need to Make Money Through Your Website or Blog

I’ll give you another heads up here, you may need a plugin called Advanced Ads (alternatively, AdInserter) to place adverts in the same place on every page of your website. I used it for Adsense before I joined Mediavine, but it works for Amazon ads or any others.

My Adsense earnings multiplied 100 fold the day I set that plugin up properly and it’s just so much easier than coding in adverts manually. 1 click and an ad is placed wherever you want it, on every page. Thank me later.

You’ll also need great hosting. Great hosting is fast and page speed affects Google rankings. I struggled with Host Gator before switching to Blue Host because of a blogger recommendation. That was a disaster.

Site Ground is the hosting company we used for years now, our big site uses Agathon, but this is probably too expensive for new-intermediate bloggers.

I couldn’t be more pleased with Siteground and the customer service and support was superb. Any tech problem I’ve had, they fix, for free, instantly. I loved them, check them out here.

This big sitejust outgrew them and now we pay a lot for hosting on this one.

What Goes on An Amazon Sales Page and More Amazon Affiliate Sale Tips.

  • Your well-chosen keyword will be in the title, url, a subheading, your meta description, image alt tags and the text. As always, keep it natural.
  • Likewise, any secondary keywords that you think or hope your post will rank for. Improve these over time with feedback from Search Console.
  • Purchasers really like buttons, graphs, tables, and charts, easy to use, easy to compare, easy to buy. I had add-ons of Easy Azon to create these page features I did implement Easy Best Sellers lists but it didn’t perform, which was no surprise.
  • A video is always a good idea to hold people on page longer.
  • Table of contents plugins are generally recommended for better SEO. You’ll see one at the top of this page.
  • Really go to town on useful information to help people make up their minds and make yourself sound like the ultimate authority on whatever it is.
  • You should make sales pages that fit with other content on your site. Choose items that Google may already think you’re an authority on and that you can easily internally link to. Internal linking is a massively important part of SEO.
  • Try not to get too complicated or generalist with sales pages. Don’t include extra items that don’t really fit with the keyword. I was very guilty of doing this when I first started. Keep it niche and specific.
  • Use stock images if you have to. I buy stock images from Shutterstock sometimes if I need to but I always prefer to use my own unique images.
  • You can add Amazon links to every page if you like. If, for instance, you have a post on Sri Lanka, you can add an Amazon widget featuring items you would recommend for travellers to Sri Lanka. These will never perform as well as targetted sales pages but they can bring a few sales here and there.
  • Just getting people to Amazon is a big part of the process, who knows, once they’re there they may remember that TV they wanted to buy. Amazon is very good at selling.
  • Check all your Amazon links regularly, things change.
  • Check your localisations too if you use Easy Azon. There is a lot of work involved in this, don’t let anyone tell you it’s truly passive income.

Bonus Amazon Affiliate Sales Tips

I update these old posts all the time and I’ll keep adding tips to help you make more affiliate sales.

  • Tracking. Something we’ve been working on recently is really getting organised with the Amazon affiliate pages. Everything was a mess and we didn’t know which pages were driving sales, which were a disaster. So slowly we’ve been creating unique tracking codes (you do this in Amazon under “manage tracking codes”) and inserting them into old links, just so that we can better see what’s going on
  • It’s also worth looking at the percentage payouts Amazon allocates for different types of sales. These vary from 10% to just 1 %.
  • So if you’re going to create Amazon sales pages, don’t just think about SEO and what you can rank for. Also, go for higher-priced items with higher percentage payouts.   
  • Monitor each sales page obsessively to drive those posts up the rankings, using your Search Console data.
  • Christmas has a massive effect on sales, start pumping out your sales pages in January to grow their authority for Christmas and around Christmas time give them a big push on all social media channels.

Making Direct Amazon Affiliate Sales From Social Media

Yes, you can do this too. If you look at your Amazon affiliates bar at the top of your account, you’ll see buttons to create Twitter and Facebook links. Use these, sparingly, to drive more people to Amazon from your personal and business social accounts.

Be absolutely certain that you read all of Amazon’s requirements and service terms. They do have some strict rules on what is and isn’t allowed.

Amazon Affiliate Earning Proof

I’m not going to give you screen shots of my bank balance nor of the back end of my Amazon affiliate account. I don’t need to. So why add this paragraph?

I noticed people were searching for proof and ending up on this page. Our proof is this, we’ve travelled full time for 6 or 7 years on our affiliate earnings and advertising revenue.

If you look around this website you’ll see photographic proof from over 50 countries, including Bhutan, possibly the most expensive country to visit. This isn’t a scam or a pyramid scheme.

Affiliate marketing is a legitimate way to make a living and there are millions of people doing it.

Amazon Rate Cuts on Affiliate Sales

Amazon cut their rates from time to time and there’s nothing we can do about that.

Before going into Amazon affiliate sales seriously, do check out the percentage payments on the different kinds of products Amazon sell.

Some products give the affiliate better returns than others.

As a rule of thumb, target expensive products from the higher rate brackets for maximum affiliate return.

Some Strict Amazon Affiliate Rules to Follow

Always check Amazon’s own terms and conditions, they are very strict as to what is allowed and what isn’t. You will need to display a precisely worded Amazon disclaimer. Ours is in the footer of this page.

You also need to disclose that a page contains affiliate links, you’ll see ours just below the heading. I hope, I think that ours are OK.

Never offer incentives to suggest people should visit Amazon from your site, that’s not allowed. Do not put direct Amazon links in your newsletter.

Make Money Amazon Affiliate Program

Is it worth selling through Amazon Affiliates in 2023?

Yes, it’s still very much worth selling through Amazon affiliates. Even if you only make $1 per day, that’s a useful amount of cash at the end of the month. Amazon have cut their rates, this is true, but spending a day creating an Amazon sales page on your website could make you an income, every day, every night, for years to come. Why leave money on the table?

Create a few sales posts with correct SEO, tables, a unique video and your own images. You need to show that you’re actually using the product, so order it, get the images, and test it properly. Google wants authentic sales pages, your readers need authenticity too. Honest content creators win at the end of the day and several Google updates have aimed to take affiliate spammers out of the search results.

So off you go, start focussing on your affiliate sales.

I’ll tell you now that Amazon is just one part of the puzzle, on this site we maybe have 50 different affiliate schemes and programs set up and each one brings us an income.  None are implemented perfectly, but we get there.

We have around 10 Amazon sales pages on this site because I find them boring to make. Had I made more, sooner, with good know-how, I’d be rich today.  Like you, I’ve learned over the years so what I did as a new blogger and what I do today will look very different, but if you want to sell on Amazon get those sales pages made now, don’t put it off because those posts will bring future-you an income, a growing income as they rise through the search results.

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Anna

Thursday 9th of December 2021

Hi all, In my blogs, I always try to finds niche and good quality products, the first products I started with were from Secrets Of Tea, I'm making very good commissions with them so I kept looking for companies that have the same quality and standard, it will be nice to get more ideas from you where to post more links. Thanks.

Alyson for World Travel Family

Friday 10th of December 2021

Thanks Anna. Small companies that nobody has heard of tend not to do as well as the mighty Amazon. Which is a shame, but it is what it is. People are used to buying from Amazon and all their details will already be in there. But as I'm a huge fan of tea, and we really struggle to get good tea in Australia. I'll check your company out. Thanks. I have bought that particular beverage on Amazon from the usual British companies because its just not in the shops here.

Ioana

Friday 2nd of July 2021

Hi ! I'm from Romania and I registered for amazon affiliates, but with an US account. How do I receive any payment? Because I put my romanian account. Is there any issue with that?

Alyson for World Travel Family

Friday 2nd of July 2021

I don't know specifically how to deal with it from a Romanian account, but for US payments we use Wise, formerly Transferwise.

Paul Claven

Friday 21st of May 2021

Hi Alyson I have just registered the first of my blogs after months of ghost writing for other bloggers.

It is too soon to start moving on the suggestions made in your post, or should I start setting up affiliates now?

Travel safely. Paul

Alyson for World Travel Family

Saturday 22nd of May 2021

If you have content published that need affiliate links in them. Put them in. If you want to create sales posts, create them. But it will take time for a new site to rank, without your posts ranking you won't get sales and there is a lot to getting them to rank. Google is in the middle of rolling out new updates, Core Web Vitals, be extra careful to make your site and individual pages as fast and minimal as possible.

Magda

Wednesday 24th of February 2021

Hey,

I was wondering how your income has changed since the amazon affiliates commission rates cuts? Is your website mostly geared towards amazon products? If so, how has it been impacted and do you have any thoughts on whether its still worth it to have an amazon affiliate website?

Thanks!

Alyson for World Travel Family

Thursday 25th of February 2021

Hi Magda, the changes didn't affect us too badly because most of the items we sell weren't slashed. I have a friend who sells a particular product that was in one of the categories that was just decimated, and yes, she was badly affected. It's very underhand and not at all fair, but it is what it is. Yes, I think it's worth it. But you're still at the mercy of Amazon. Obviously, we've been smashed by Coronavirus, we're on about one-third of our normal traffic, but the Amazon sales pages stayed fairly strong. The "incidental" Amazon earnings have gone though. Like when people buy a huge food shop via your links, that doesn't happen because those items are 0% now. So yes, impacted, but ticking over. I do have to hold my hands up and say that I've barely bothered with the Amazon links lately, a lot of old links will have expired or become broken. But it's only a small part of our income so not top priority. Best of luck.

Suha

Saturday 30th of May 2020

Hey Alyson,

I wanted to get on your radar and leave a comment because in the interview the guest mentions using Keywords Everywhere when it was still a free tool.

Of course Keywords Everywhere is now paid, and I think a great alternative for your readers would be our tool what's my serp everywhere - a free keywords search tool, with unlimited searches displaying CPC and volume metrics.

It has 5 star reviews and 20k+ users. I'd love for you to try it and see what your thoughts are.

Alyson for World Travel Family

Sunday 7th of June 2020

Thanks, I'll take a look. Yes, it was very annoying when Keywords Everywhere stopped being free. At that time I switched to SEMRush but stil, my favourite keyword research tool is Longtail Pro. It's the one I've used for years and years while others I've just tried and not really got along wth as well.

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