Amazon Associates Overview
Amazon.com, Inc., or more commonly referred to as simply Amazon, is the largest online retailer in the United States.
The company has separate retailer websites for a number of big countries such as the United Kingdom and Ireland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada, Japan, China, Mexico, India, France, Netherlands, Australia, and Brazil.
International shipping is also available for many products.
As a leader in the e-commerce industry, Amazon invites everyone to join its associate program through affiliation and make money on a large selection of products including books, electronics, jewelry, home appliances, toys, DVDs, apparel, and more.
There are more than a million products available on Amazon.com, providing wide-open opportunities for everyone to take advantage of Amazon Associates, an affiliation program with which you can monetize your marketing skills.
Performance-based Commissions
Similar to many affiliation networks, Amazon offers performance-based commissions.
For every product you help sell, the company gives you a percentage of the sale price.
You don’t actually need to run a website to join the program, but it certainly improves your chance of making money.
Some affiliate marketers choose to market Amazon affiliate links through other methods such as social media posts, email or newsletter, and article submission websites.
The Basic of Amazon Associates
Being an affiliate marketer with Amazon means you can generate commissions from every product available on the e-commerce website, both digital and physical products.
Once you are registered (approval is usually an automated process unless you have serious problems with Amazon before), you’ll be able to access Amazon product links from a bar that appears on the top section of your computer screen every time you visit the site.
You can use both text and image links or one of them. This link (URL) is used by Amazon to track your performance on your marketing medium for examples blogs or websites, emails, and social media pages.
To claim your commissions, place the Amazon product link on your post. If visitors click the link and purchase the product, you earn affiliate commissions. Amazon also sends performance reports to you on regular basis. The reports should help you track your progress and the amounts of earnings you have so far.
Amazon Associates program is technically easy, but convincing people to click the link and make a purchase requires a lot of hard works. Many affiliate marketers have considerable success and wealth from the program; although the failure percentage is high, successful affiliate marketers are not impossible.
Here are some practical tips you can use right now to improve your chances of making money through Amazon Associates.
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Traffic Comes First
In Amazon Associates, just like in any online marketing venture, traffic is always the most important factor to determine success. You can use social media and email indeed, but a website is the most viable option to generate revenues from affiliation.
If you are only starting the venture, traffic is probably low and revenue is small or even zero. It happens to most bloggers, so don’t get disheartened if you don’t make a lot of money for the first few months. As a matter of fact, this is expected to happen.
The story can be different if you have been running a website for a while, implementing proper SEO, and creating good content consistently, and then join Amazon Associates now. Your website should gain enough popularity and a strong presence already, making it easier to do all the visitor conversions.
Regardless of the methods you choose, please understand that it takes time to make considerable amounts of money.
Drive as much traffic as you can to your website. Create quality content, use social media campaigns, do some guest blogging activities, address comments, and put everything in well-designed websites.
You are trying to run a professional business here, so do it in a professional manner to improve visitors/customers satisfaction. Consider this traffic-building a valuable experience that teaches you how to implement SEO correctly and make the website more user-friendly.
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Relevancy Matters
Just like keyword placement, relevancy between your Amazon product link and the content matters. Let us say you run a website that mainly talks about computer tips.
Most contents educate readers on how to fix common issues with their laptops or desktop PCs and peripherals. It makes no sense if you put Amazon product links for furniture pieces. Yes, you can write about an ideal computer desk, which somehow relates to your niche.
However, people visit your website when they want to know about troubleshooting a problem, not about the most comfortable desk for hours of typing job.
Instead of pushing it too hard to sell the desk, try an Amazon product link for relevant products such as keyboard & mouse, computer operating system, antivirus, tweaking software, or printers.
You can also expand your marketing campaign to related products for examples speakers set, webcams, routers, or even mousepads.
If you have to promote a wide variety of products, at least create enough categories to separate your website contents. For example, make a category for hardware discussions containing articles about hard drives, computer processors, apps applications, etc.
Another category for tweaking is ideal for your marketing campaign on digital products such as antivirus or software. When you are talking about software, you can also stretch the discussion to include other products like video editing software and relate it to high-specification computers.
Bottom line, there must be strong relevancy between your content and the products being advertised.
One of the best things about Amazon Associates is that your product link is still tracked and rewarded even when the person who clicks it buys another product. In this case, your main job is to drive people to Amazon; whether or not they buy the products linked to your website, you have no control over it.
Once again, you need to be relevant and convince people through quality content.
Remember that you are not selling anything; you are merely a marketing agent who tries to do your job on online publications.
