The Amazon Affiliate Program
and how it can earn you extra income

The Amazon Affiliate Program is a great choice if you are looking for an affiliate business opportunity. I should think just about everyone has heard of Amazon, so the name itself lends credibility to your website.

Your first step is to apply to become a member of the affiliate program. You will need to have an active website with enough content, in order to be accepted.

If you need help in getting such a site up and running, you will find the information within the Free Affiliates Master Course a great place to start.

Adding Amazon links to your pages

Once your account has been created, you can link to specific products, categories or special promotions using the codes they provide. These will include your associate tag so that any sales can be credited to your account.

They provide a number of different ways that you can include their products on your pages, including banners, widgets, graphics and good old fashioned text links. You can even set up an A-store, which puts things on auto pilot.

You only earn commission if your visitor clicks on one of your Amazon links and goes on to purchase something during his or her time on their site. If they leave, and then go back later, you won't make any commission on their order. Other affiliate programs have a longer period where the sale still gets credited to your account.

You can login to your Amazon account at any time to see what products have sold and how much you have earned from the transaction. You can even sort the columns of information, to find out what the most popular products were or which ones were most profitable.

The figures are updated daily, not in real time.

What commission can you make?

The Amazon Affiliate Program pays according to your referral rate. This means that the more items shipped, the higher your percentage will be.

The scale starts at 4%, jumps to 6.00% once you have sold between 7 and 30 items, with the top amount offered being 8.5% (but you have to move LARGE numbers of items to reach this level!).

Once you have reached $100 worth of commission Amazon will start paying you. They do work about 3 months in arrears so if you reach that target in January, you won't see the check until April! No good if you are looking for quick ways of earning money!

If you have enough traffic (visitors) to your website then this program can prove profitable, but if your visitor numbers are low, it could take a long time to reach that first target. It took me nearly a year! Of course as your traffic grows so can your income. Two years later, I earn enough for a check every month.

Combined with other ways of earning money on the Internet it can certainly play its part.

How to promote items

You need to put a bit of thought into how to place the links on your site. Just throwing up banners and flashing widgets won't necessarily gain you any sales.

I like to handpick the items I am going to promote, for each page.

I have a site on gluten free cooking and I make suggestions for books on the subject, cooking utensils, lunch boxes, etc, within the text. See that column to the right? I often use that to place graphic links to items that may interest the readers of a page.

It is important to not try to sell, sell, sell! After all Amazon will do that part of the job for you. All you need to do is mention the products in passing. Just let your visitors know what is available, tell them if you have found it useful, but don't insist that they should buy it now!

There is an art to this type of PRE-selling and the free ebook below will help you learn how to write in this manner...

Make Your Content Pre-Sell

If you are looking to build up a number of ways to earn passive income from your website then the Amazon Affiliate Program is certainly one to have a good look at.

You might like to also check out my page on making money with Google Adsense. I currently make ten times from Adsense than I do from Amazon, each month!