Those who frequent the Amazon platform are likely familiar with its fast delivery options and expansive marketplace – but there’s more to Amazon than a Prime subscription and two-day shipping.
The global online mega-marketplace offers content creators the perfect opportunity to flex their creative muscles and earn money at the same time. Amazon’s Affiliate program allows you to monetize your YouTube channel, blog, or website, and make money with every post.
Keep reading for a step-by-step walkthrough of the Amazon Affiliate marketing process.
How Does the Amazon Affiliate Program Work?
Put simply, the Amazon Affiliate Program allows content creators – including YouTube vloggers and Instagram influencers – to earn commissions. They can do so by linking to or promoting Amazon products within their videos.
Upon signing up, all affiliate marketers can access a dashboard featuring the stripe site bar, where they can get a trackable link page of the product, banners, and widgets they can use for promotions.
This program should not be confused with the Amazon Influencer Program designed for creators with a sizable following (around 100,000 active organic followers in at least one social media platform). Under this program, creators can earn money through referrals and sell products in their Amazon storefront.
Various product categories like luxury items, games, and devices come with fixed commission rates on Amazon. As passive income, your income is dependent on the niche and traffic you get from your blog, videos, or other social media platforms. It’s common to make $100+ a month from affiliate sales, but influencers with larger audiences can bring in thousands of dollars per month, completely passively.
What Are the Rules to Becoming an Amazon Associate?
The Amazon Affiliate Program has extensive rules for those who want to become associates, and these are as follows:
1. Whether you are posting to a YouTube channel, social media account, or blog, it needs to be active and feature original content for public viewing.
2. Amazon can accept or reject an application, and any accounts with violent, sexually explicit, defamatory, misleading, and false content will be denied outright.
Those that collect or disclose children’s personal information, add Amazon trademarks in the domain name or violate intellectual property rights will also be ineligible for the program.
3. Either Amazon or the affiliate marketer themselves can generate the referral affiliate links, but creators will be responsible for placing these URLs in their content. Not all links may be applicable for the channel.
4. You must disclose that you’re earning commissions from your recommendations to your subscribers and viewers.
5. Videos should be truthful and not mention prices unless allowed, since the numbers can change. You also cannot use other links (usually from link shorteners) besides the one provided by Amazon.
6. Content creators have successfully referred a customer to Amazon if they place an order for a physical or digital product from the marketplace within 24 hours, using the referral link, and complete their order within 89 days.
7. Content creators cannot earn commissions from disqualified purchases, which are usually products bought in violation of the Amazon Affiliate Program. Products with cancellation, refunds, and returns also count as disqualified items.
8. You cannot add your affiliate link on any offline promotions or materials, including e-mails (some people can access their mail without the Internet). These links should also not be in ebooks and PDFs.
9. You cannot use the referral link to make your own purchases and offer incentives for people to click on the link.
To learn more about Amazon Affiliate Program requirements and rules, click here.
Referral Fees
In general, Amazon Associates can earn a fixed-rate commission that ranges from 4% up to 20%. Amazon games offer the highest pay, followed by luxury beauty and Amazon Explore products.
Other commission rates are:
- 5% for digital and physical music and digital videos
- 4.5% for physical books, kitchen, and automotive
- 4% for Amazon tech products, watches, luggage, jewelry, handbags, and accessories
- 3% for home products, toys, baby products, Amazon coins, and industrial supplies
- 2.50% for PC products
- 2% for televisions and other digital video games
- 1% for health and personal care products, groceries, Amazon Fresh, and physical video games and their consoles
Amazon doesn’t offer commission for selling gift cards, wireless service plans, alcoholic beverages, Amazon AppStore, Prime Now, Amazon Pay Places, or digital Kindle products bought as subscriptions.
Creators can earn fixed dollars (not percent commissions) during bounty events. For example, when one of your subscribers or viewers signs up for a free trial of Prime Video Channels using your referral link, you will earn $2.50. The biggest payout is $25 if you can convince somebody to join an Audible Premium Plus free trial.
Lastly, you can receive $3 for every successful bonus event, which happens when a customer successfully buys Amazon Fresh products (except Whole Foods) and pet food and supplies from the Amazon store for the first time.
Become an Amazon Associate
If you are interested in making the most of Amazon’s Affiliate program, you can become an Associate by following these three simple steps:
1. Create and Grow Your Platform
If you already have a Google account, you can start a YouTube channel immediately. Otherwise, register here. You can create an Instagram account or start a blog fairly easily, too.
While you can apply to the program without a substantial audience, you are more likely to get approved if you already have a regular following. The number is arbitrary, but according to the online retailer and other affiliate marketers, a good figure is at least 500. Learn to grow your personal brand with these tips.
2. Sign Up for an Account
Sign up for an Amazon Associate account here. Fill out the form honestly and completely. It will ask you for essential details such as:
- Account information, such as your name, address, contact details, and primary contact of the account
- Website and mobile app list, where you add your website address and social media accounts
- Profile, which includes a profile user ID (or name, which is also usually the website name, website description, and niche)
- Traffic and monetization, where you identify how you drive traffic, build links, total unique visitors, and reason for joining the Amazon Affiliate Program
- Payment and tax information
3. Wait for the Review
Next, wait for the Amazon review team to check your channel or account, evaluate your content and followers, and approve your application. The marketplace doesn’t provide a timeframe, but you will likely get an update within 12 to 24 hours.
During the review, Amazon considers many factors – mainly the customer experience bar. You can increase your chances of getting approved by checking these off:
- Content should be no older than 60 days.
- Your account must contain at least ten original videos or posts, excluding those that include referral or advertising links.
Once approved, you will have access to a dashboard to get marketing materials (i.e. referral links and banners), view your earnings, and generate commission reports.
Where Can You Find Product Ideas?
Now that you know how to become an Amazon Associate, it’s time to choose what you will promote. How do you come up with fresh product ideas? Here are some tips:
- Browse the Amazon store and search for items that fall into your video niche or topics. Use analytic tools like Google Analytics to see which of your videos received the most views, then search for products on Amazon accordingly.
- Use social media, especially Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Check out what’s trending. Pinterest, for one, has Pinterest Trends.
- Visit forums, subreddits, and review sites where people often share product ideas and recommendations.
- Check out Amazon’s Best Seller pages or use Google Trends to see which products are trending in your niche.
- View the list of Amazon’s Most Wished For items, which displays products frequently added to wish lists and registries.
- Spy on your competitors. You can learn about their products, pricing, advertising approaches, and items they’re selling.
- Head to other marketplaces such as eBay or Barnes & Noble (if you’re selling books). These places also feature a list of their hot-selling products.
- Read the news to spot new trends.
Products to Choose for the Amazon Affiliate Program
Amazon sells over 12 million products, so when it comes to choosing which products you will promote, the options are vast and varied. Some, however, are more suitable than others. To increase your chances of earning a high commission, follow these criteria when choosing items to sell:
Low Competition
Products with too many sellers are hard to rank among the first on Amazon, which means you’ll have little – if any – sales. Invest in a platform that features a product database search, where you can perform competition analysis.
Daily-Use Products
Selling frequently used or searched products can help you meet or maintain your desired revenue, even if your profit margin is small because you can potentially sell by bulk or volume.
Affordable Products
The average price of Amazon products is between $11 and $25, which implies that these are the amounts most customers are willing to pay. Use this as your benchmark when searching for affordable goods with a potentially high-profit margin.
High Estimated Sales and Revenue
Affiliate marketing is still business, which means your ideal sales and revenues should be higher than your costs, such as video production and advertising. Some of the best Amazon affiliate marketing platforms already include a sales estimator to forecast revenues of a specific niche based on sales rank.
Connect the Theme of Your Platform and Audience
Promoting irrelevant items may negatively affect your viewership and jeopardize your membership to the affiliate program. Remember, Amazon will ask you about your niche and also your reasons for becoming an Amazon Associate.
Conclusion
With the Amazon Affiliate Program, YouTube creators, bloggers, and social media influencers now have another way to generate passive income, maximize their content, decrease production costs, and leverage their subscribers and traffic. With this guide, you’re on your way to enjoying these benefits.
So, what are you waiting for? Ready – set – profit!
