When it comes to affiliate marketing, Amazon is perhaps the best-known company in the world. Almost everyone who has a website has, at some point, made use of the Amazon Associates Affiliate Program.
This program is, just like Google AdSense, a gateway into the wider world of making money online.
Today, a lot of online marketers dismiss Amazon associates as being a waste of time; competition is fierce and most people head straight to Amazon to make purchases these days, so it is hard to make money using Amazon associates.
However, there are some people who still manage to earn money with Amazon. What is their secret?
Affiliate Marketing Amazon Associates for Communities
One way that you can earn money through Amazon Associates is by using it within your online community. If you run a club, sports team, society, or other tightly-knit community, set up a website for them and use affiliate links to recommend products.
This works well for tightly-knit communities because the users of the website already know and trust each other, and will happily click on affiliate links. In fact, it is one of the few cases where people are happy to see such links.
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Depending on the size of the community and the type of products you are marketing, this can create a sustainable income.
For example, if you run an online community for enthusiasts who like Radio Controlled Cars, then link to good deals on batteries, fuel, glow plugs, and other spare parts, you are likely to get a lot of people ordering those consumable products. Those frequent purchases of low value consumable items will quickly mount up.
Review Sites
Review sites are another good way to take advantage of affiliate marketing Amazon products. However, you should not rely exclusively on Amazon. Instead of just linking to Amazon, use a combination of Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Play.com, or other sites that sell the same kind of product.
This will help you to put forward the appearance of someone who cares about helping consumers to get the best deal. Instead of being a “reviewer for money,” you are also offering price comparison services.
Social Media
Amazon offers a decent selection of product feed tools that you can use in conjunction with your affiliate link. Use these to Tweet about deals, and post interesting product links to your social media profiles.
If you choose only the most high quality deals, you could attract a lot of click-throughs and conversions. Try to limit your Amazon affiliate tweets to just one or two per day, however, and make sure that you continue to post high-quality, engagement focused content as well.
The golden ratio appears to be 12-15 engagement related social media posts to each promotional post that you make.
Affiliate Marketing Amazon – Choosing The Right Category
Amazon offers different amounts of commission for different product categories. It can be tempting to chase the highest value categories, but you should note that one of the reasons that these categories offer so much commission is because they do not convert as well as other products. Basing your online marketing strategy on promoting the highest paying products is one sure-fire way to drive yourself mad. Try to stick to products that you know something about, in niches that you will enjoy working in. This will help you to build a lifelong income, and reduce the chances of burning out.
Automation
There are some products out there such as “Amazon autobloggers” that will automate the process of posting Amazon products with your affiliate link, including an image of the product and some reviews taken from Amazon themselves. If you use these products in the right way, they can be quite effective as a time-saving tool. Simply auto-blogging Amazon reviews without changing them will quickly get your site hit with a duplicate content penalty from Google, so I would not recommend this.
However, if you use these tools to populate draft posts, and then customize them with a few paragraphs of text you have written yourself, then you can avoid penalties. Intersperse these product posts with more interesting posts and you will quickly build up a nice database of content for your blog.
