How to become an Amazon Affiliate | 5 Easy Steps

How to become an Amazon Affiliate? What are the basic requirements for being termed as an Amazon Affiliate? And many more queries of such kind keep of wandering around us. Today, you will have your every query encountered and clarified with me. 

As for now, we all are pretty much aware of what Affiliate Marketing is and how it is beneficial for website owners and bloggers belonging to any niche. If yes, then you must have come across an affiliate marketing program, Amazon Associates or Amazon Affiliate. Amazon Associates is an affiliate marketing program where an affiliate (a term used for affiliate marketers) promotes Amazon products via a link on his/her YouTube channel, website, or blogging site. In return, the affiliate gets a commission for every sale made via that link. Pretty cool in reading, isn’t it? Then, how to become an Amazon Affiliates, is what you all must be thinking of. So, today, in this blog I am going to share those 5 steps following which your dream of becoming an affiliate marketer (of Amazon) will get fulfilled.

Table of Contents 

1. Introduction to the Amazon Affiliate Program
2. Select your Niche
3. Create a Blog
4. Sign up with Amazon Affiliate program
5. How to use Amazon Affiliate Links
6. Start Promotion and Make Money

Let’s discuss these one by one, starting with this brief introduction.

1. Introduction to the Amazon Affiliate Program 

Amazon Affiliate Program is an easy way to get started with affiliate marketing as it is free to use, highly recommended by everyone, and provides a decent commission on every sale. And most importantly, all the products are Amazon verified! All you have to do is to get yourself registered as an affiliate, get a URL, paste it anywhere (YouTube channel, Website, Blog site), provide a catchy promotional content for your viewers to get notice of it, and as soon as anyone clicks on that URL and makes a purchase, you earn a referral amount from Amazon. It’s that simple! But, to keep it simple, here are some prerequisites:

• You must have a trustworthy audience that shows trust in you
• The place where you are posting the affiliate links, much be occupied with a bunch of potential audiences.
• You must have used that product which you are going to promote as only then, you can promote it effectively.

If you have done all this, you are good to go!

2. Select your Niche

Choosing an appropriate niche for affiliate marketing is one of those important things to be kept in the checklist as choosing a niche with without much potential can leave you searching for the expected results even after putting in hundreds of hours of consistent efforts. Even a moderate success at the starting can boost up your faith in affiliate marketing but again, choosing a niche is the king. So, in this section, I’ll walk you through the tactics involved while choosing a profitable niche. So, let’s keep going.

• Find inspiration from your hobbies

The best thing about choosing a niche in relation to your hobbies is your familiarity with the topic. If you are familiar with the topic, you are more likely to enjoy your writing and ultimately, will have fresh content in your mind. Also, you will have to spend less time doing research and it will make the writing task less stressful. For example, if I am interested in cooking, I am more likely to choose a particular cuisine as my niche. Along with this, there should be a competition within your niche, as it would indicate that a generous amount of audience is interested in that niche. In my case, I would choose Indian Cuisine as it has both, large fan base and is of my interest.

Note: Here, cooking is a wide field, so choosing a particular cuisine of your interest is suggested.

• Go for fields with less competition 

According to a saying, “less-known niches have a smaller audience base but are equally easier to rank for” i.e. it is easier to find an audience for niches that are not so well-known. For a better understanding, let’s continue with the cooking example. Through a quick Google search, I came to know that there are 1000+ bloggers who are focusing on Indian Cuisine in their blogs. So, to rank my site higher, I must have to choose a particular cuisine under Indian cuisine that would attract a more new audience in a short time.

So, less competitive niches are best for generating a fresh audience.

• Target a niche with depth

It is also worth understanding that as a blogger, you can’t afford to stand with a handful of topics. While choosing a niche, keep in mind or form a list of all the topics you can write upon. For example, in my case, Indian cuisine under cooking has a number of topics to write on and I believe that I will not face any situation like a shortage of topics at any point in time.

Note: An important thing to remember, the more topics you will have to write, the more you will keep your audience engaged to your site.

3. Create a Blog

Now, you must have decided your niche. So, now its time to create a website or a blog wherein we can promote the products. It is not necessary to practice affiliate marketing over a blog only, one can also do it over a YouTube channel, or an application. The first and the last condition is the engagement of the audience over your chosen platform to make it convincing to Amazon (Amazon only approves those affiliates who have sounding traffic). You must have a potential audience who trusts you and are willing to make purchases on the basis of your promotions. Only then, you can succeed in affiliate marketing. Moreover, you should have a clear understanding behind creating a website, the audience you are going to target and what strategies you would employ to gather sounding traffic. And all this is possible only with quality content on your blog.

Note: It is advisable to have commanding traffic on your chosen platform beforehand to make it easy for new viewers to come and join.

4. Sign up with the Amazon Affiliate Program 

In this section, I will elaborate on each and every step you need to follow to have your Amazon Affiliate Program sign up done. 

Visit the official website of Amazon Associates and click on Join for Free. The following screen will appear.

(Source: www.fitsmallbusiness.com)

After clicking onto the rightmost option of Join for free, you will be taken to the signup window as shown below where you have to provide account details as asked.

(Source: www.blog.hubspot.com)

Now, for the further registration process, you need to have the below-mentioned things ready.

• A standard Amazon shopping account.
• An active website or a blog as you will have to produce the URL of your site during the registration process. You can place 50 affiliate links under a single account.
• A general idea of your site’s content that you have to fill in the profile section. Include what type of content you provide on your site, what types of goods you can promote via links, etc. Refer to the below attached image to know what exactly Amazon wants to know.

(Source: www.fitsmallbusiness.com)

Now, you will have to elaborate on how you will drive traffic to your site and you can choose from the many options provided in the drop-down list as shown below.

(Source: www.blog.hubspot.com)

In the next step, you will have to enter your phone number in order to receive a call from Amazon to get your account verified. For this, click on the Call Me know button.

(Source: www.blog.hubspot.com)

Now, you will be brought to the page where you have to enter your payment and TAX details (you can add it on the spot or later on). Now, you can start creating your affiliates link. 

(Source: www.blog.hubspot.com)

This image displays your performance dashboard where all the information regarding monthly clicks, your earnings, etc. are displayed. So, start building links and start earning.

Note: In order to remain in the program, you have to produce at least 3 sales from your affiliate link within the first 6-months of signup. Failing to do so can lead to your termination from the program. Also, Amazon Affiliates algorithm can easily detect whether the sale has been made by your family member or not. The sales made by your family members are not counted as per AA’s policy.

5. How to use Amazon Affiliate’s Links

Creating affiliates links is merely a simple job. The real task starts when you have to copy-paste the links on your preferred social media platforms like YouTube channel, your own app, website, etc. But, for sharing that, there are certain guidelines one has to follow in order to properly use the Amazon Affiliate links. Those guidelines are listed below and are mandatory to be obeyed by the affiliate at every point of time.

• Don’t use links to buy products for your own use as Amazon sophisticated algorithm can catch those types of activities.
• You can use special links on your site which permit precise tracking of the activities on the link.

Moreover, you can also install the Amazon Associates Site Stripe browser extension which makes the task of inserting an affiliate link into your content a cup of tea. There are 5 types of links you can make use of to monetize your content.

• Image Links
• Text Links
• Featured Products Affiliate Links
• Native Shopping Ad Affiliate Links
• Banner Ad Affiliate Links

All these kinds of link have their own pros and cons.

6. Start Promotion and Make Money

So far, we have understood the true meaning of Affiliate Marketing and how to create our account along with the proper usage of an affiliate link. Now, you are ready to promote the Amazon products through your link onto your apps, sites, blogs, and YouTube channel. The simplest way of doing so is:

• Prepare a short promotional material for promoting the product which must include its pros and key highlights.
• In case of your channel, you can show how to use that product so people can feel more motivated towards that product.
• You can also promote the links on your Instagram account (for that, you must have a decent fan following).

So, in these ways, you can promote the products and make them reach a larger audience. Once, anyone clicks on your link, a cookie is dropped which tracks the clicker and makes sure that the clicker makes a successful purchase from your link only. And, on the basis of the sales made by you, you get a fixed commission from Amazon. For a quick reference, I am attaching an image which shows the percent of commission you will earn on different categories of product available.

(Source: www.fitsmallbusiness.com)

So, I hope this post will help you in becoming a successful Amazon Affiliate Marketer in the future.