Eager to get started as an Affiliate Marketer on Amazon but desperate to understand how to make your first sale? With this beginner’s guide to Amazon Affiliate Marketing, your first sale is just around the corner.
This comprehensive guide to Amazon Affiliate Marketing has all the ins and outs any beginner needs to know to hit the ground running toward success. Getting started is one thing, but sustaining success is another.
Keep reading to gather the crucial details about how to fast-track your success on Amazon as an Affiliate Marketer and how to maintain engagement via niche-friendly marketing strategies.
Table of Contents
Beginner’s Guide to Amazon Affiliate Marketing
In simple terms, being an Affiliate Marketer on Amazon is a means of monetizing a website or blog with affiliate links or codes. When a visitor is attracted to affiliate links enough to click on and purchase a product, a commission is granted to the marketer affiliated with the custom link.
It is currently free for domain owners to register, and becoming an Amazon Affiliate Marketer isn’t a complicated process. It’s three simple steps, actually:
- Sign up or register
- Wait for approval (this is often immediate)
- Start placing Amazon Affiliate links on your website or blog
What’s better is that there’s a plugin for that! A WordPress plugin, of course. Users interested in trying their hand at Amazon Affiliate Marketing need only install the AAWP plugin on their WordPress backend.
Then you’re ready to make your first sale. It only takes one affiliate sale to earn passive income, so what are you waiting for?
How Amazon Affiliation Works
When approved, website owners can begin to place links created on the Amazon Affiliate account. Each link generated is given a unique Associate ID. This is how the platform correctly tracks and awards commissions.
Naturally, most folks wonder how much money can be made as an Amazon Affiliate Marketer. It’s a logical question considering it is a worthy marketing angle that requires time and methodical application.
The earning potential of an Amazon Affiliate Marketer varies depending on the products selected, the marketing strategies implemented, and the commission rate. A commission rate is the percentage of commission attached to each Amazon product. This rate is typically between 5-20% of a product price.
It’s worth noting that commission earnings can be on the low side at the start of this venture. But with consistency and strategy, those earnings can and will increase over time. Amazon does, however, provide an organized inventory of commission rates per product category. This list clearly shows that specific product offerings are referred to as ‘high-commission products’.
Examples of these high-commission products fall in the smart-tech, games, beauty, and books categories. That’s not to discount those low-commission products. Products sold to and for niches not as popular stand to make an impressive turnover as the popularity of that niche increases.
Review these facts as part of assembling niche-friendly content, which we will provide more detail about in later sections.
Make Your First Sale as an Amazon Affiliate
We promised to break down exactly how to make your first sale in this beginner’s guide to Amazon Affiliate Marketing. Now is the time to grab a pen and paper or ready a blank Google Doc to take notes. Each section of this thorough outline moving forward is a critical element to know to make your first sale and find affiliate marketing success on Amazon.
- Customer journey mapping
- Creating engaging content
- Deciding your niche
- Keyword researching
- Understanding article formatting
- Decoding cookie(s) strips
Firstly, though, the important thing is that you learn to manage and customize links to your advantage. There are plenty of options available for both of these things. But the best way to manage and market customized links is with ClickWhale PRO. Take those curated Amazon Affiliate links and categorize them in the ClickWhale —also available as a free plugin for WordPress— interface for easier tracking, marketing, and management.
Have a Podcast or create video content outside of the WordPress platform? No problem! Take advantage of the ClickWhale PRO link page building tool and curate a unique web link housing all of the Amazon Affiliate codes or links you want your audience to know about. Your audience, afterall, is the most important element of success when it comes to affiliate marketing.
Customer Journey Mapping
To be a successful affiliate marketer, with Amazon or otherwise, means understanding the customer journey. A customer’s journey is how customers interact with brands from the moment of discovery to the follow-up after purchase.
A customer’s journey is outlined in five basic steps:
- Awareness
- Research/Consideration
- Purchase/Conversion
- Retention/Loyalty
- Advocacy
Most brands will create what is referred to as a customer journey map that lays out the step-by-step interactions of customers on a website. This map delivers valuable insight into the customer’s thought process, but most importantly, how you (or the brand) can optimize that experience —all of this is to motivate purchases (or clicks).
Below is an example graph of this process.
There are several free tools available online to help deepen this understanding while on your Amazon Affiliate Marketing journey. Learning how to optimize the five pillars of the digital customer journey early on will bode well for long-term Affiliate Marketing success.
The map is a clear display of what the website content is delivering vs. what you hope is being delivered to visitors. Additionally, an end-to-end experience of this capacity increases competitive edge and promotes customer loyalty and retention.
How can prioritizing end-to-end user experiences help you make your first sale as an Amazon Affiliate? A memorable user experience incorporates the right products, the correct marketing verbiage, and qualitative and consistent content.
Creating Engaging Content
Besides active links, curated content is the bread and butter of affiliate marketing. Published content drives a niche’s desire to purchase by providing well-marketed vernacular that speaks directly to the targeted audience. We explain this a bit later in the section detailing how to find the proper niche.
Creating niche-specific content, however, can be tedious, but it is a necessary evil for affiliate marketing success. As a result, it is a recommendation to strategize content creation and assembly by continuously providing intriguing content promoting niche-relevant products. How do you assemble quality content for your niche? We’re glad you asked! Here are some solid suggestions:
Research the Search Volume of a Topic
Too often, when it comes to content creation, creators default to curating content they think or want their audience to be interested in. Unfortunately, that’s an outdated and backward approach because it’s what the user wants to learn.
It all comes down to keyword research. The details of how best to embrace this process to help make your first sale as an Amazon Affiliate Marketer are outlined in a later section. But begin by searching out keywords on competitive websites. Assemble these findings and topics into a list to input into a keyword search tool to calculate the search volume.
Based on those results, elect to compete with existing websites for ranking in the same keywords or attempt to rank higher than a few low-ranking websites sporting those keywords. Either way, the content you know your audience is hunting for can now be found on your website, too.
Create Authoritative Content Related to Your Niche
This includes covering events, breaking news, and everything in between about your niche. The more you can speak to your industry with authority, the stronger the possibility of a better SEO ranking. How so? Because your users/visitors will come to know your voice as an authority on the topic and seek you out for this specific data. Work affiliate products into this authoritative tone and in time, these affiliations will convert into sales.
Embrace Spontaneity
Stay abreast of the niche industry on social media platforms other than those you participate in. Why? Polarizing topics happen, sometimes overnight, and these topics tend to hit social media first. The more polarizing, the more engagement it can warrant. Bandwagonning then can become a great marketing strategy for extending reach.
Deciding Your Niche
Finding the niche to market affiliate links or products to is an important step to learning how to make your first sale as an Amazon Affiliate. Anyone can get online, market, and sell products to the masses. But rest assured they’ve marketed these products to a niche that is demanding of it first.
This beginner’s guide is a stickler for choosing a niche based on existing and personal expertise. Why? Because then, the marketing message is full of vocabulary that speaks directly to the audience making the purchases.
Sure, plenty of businesses have made it by blindly searching for the most profitable niches for affiliate marketing. In fact, the top five niches trending for 2023 are all over the buying spectrum:
- Technology
- Health & Fitness
- Fashion & Beauty
- Pet Care
- Travel
Should your expertise be in one of the above niches, you’re in luck. If your niche isn’t part of the top five above, you’re not down and out. However, you do have your work cut out for you to attract the buyer you’re after. To help you get started picking the niche that suits you:
- Take into consideration your hobbies, passions, and interests.
- Search for gaps in content for the decided niche and identify your unique selling point therein.
- Research the active sources of traffic for that niche and document the potential income stream for affiliate marketing within that niche.
With the niche decided, it’s time to target them with highly searched keywords.
The Value of Keyword Research
Because this is a beginner’s guide, allow us to start by explaining that keywords are phrases (or words) an audience uses to search for information on a topic. One might have searched for the phrase ‘A beginner’s guide to Amazon Affiliate Marketing’ to find themselves reading this helpful blog. Keywords work just like that!
Why are keywords part of what it takes to make your first sale as an Amazon Affiliate? To put it bluntly, understanding keywords helps you better understand your niche. Keywords reveal what your niche is searching for, how often, and where they retrieve the data they came for.
Armed with this info, affiliate marketers can stay abreast of competitor rankings. And as a result, strive to keep themselves relevant and near the top of search results to keep the traffic of your niche navigating to your website vs. any other.
How do you find keywords for your niche as a beginner? We’re glad you asked! There are a ton of helpful tools available to assist you. The most common tools are, of course, the free tools.
Free Keyword Research Tools
There truly are dozens of these available with another dozen easily in the works. But here is a brief list of free tools to assist beginners with finding keywords:
- UberSuggest
- Google Keyword Planner
- HubSpot
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
The last suggestion is a fan favorite and widely trusted tool for keyword management. This is because, within Ahrefs, users can perform website audits, generate keywords, manage analytics, and check rankings inclusively. Pretty amazing, right? Grab the How To breakdown of this amazing tool and start generating high-ranking keywords as soon as possible.
Now that you know how to find the keywords your niche is hunting for, let us help you understand topical authority. It goes hand-in-hand with keywords, so it’s the perfect place to mention it. The bottom line is that topical authority is earned with quality content.
This content is measured as a result of how trusted you are by your niche. If the content you consistently produce is original and speaks as an authority on the topic, then it will ultimately warrant more traffic flow. More traffic flow means higher rankings in search engines.
Understanding Article Formatting
This isn’t about structuring an article to publish about Affiliate Marketing. Instead, it’s strategically placing products within written articles or web copy. The truth is that article formatting includes positioning affiliate products or links in a way that warrants clicks. And in the world of affiliate marketing, clicks can equal purchases, and purchases can equal income.
For example, by frontloading a webpage or blog post with affiliate links without any marketing copy or structure, visitors can find the content before them confusing. What’s more, users will more than likely not revisit the website considering the vast amounts of data available to them on the World Wide Web.
On the contrary, websites that provide engaging copy and visuals that draw a visitor in are likely to receive repeat visits. And when visitors are coming back, then that means you have them baited on the sales hook.
This beginner’s guide to Amazon Affiliate Marketing doesn’t include a template for article formatting, our apologies. But the reality is that any one template wouldn’t work across the board. All of this is niche-related and dependent upon industry, afterall. The important thing for beginners to remember is that a solid grasp of article formatting is crucial to making your first sale and to overall success in affiliate marketing.
Decoding Cookie(s) Scripts
Cookies are small text pieces automatically sent to a browser by a website. Cookies act like memory banks, remembering a visitor each time they revisit the website.
Each time a visitor elects to accept the cookies presented on a webpage, the website installs what is referred to as cookie scripts onto the device that accessed and accepted the cookies as presented. A cookie script is a code a website implements into its source code to manage cookie and end-user controls.
Each cookie script is stored within a browser allowing it to be retrieved for analytics at a later date. It may sound invasive, but it is a legal expectation of most websites. Why is this helpful for affiliate marketers?
The unique identifier within the web browser alerts the server that the user is returning to the website. Any affiliate marketer wants to know this information. Specifically which webpage or website the user finds intriguing enough to return to time and again. This way, affiliate links can be added to this popular webpage or site to further the possibility for affiliate earnings.
Regarding Amazon Affiliate Marketing, cookie scripts act in the same capacity. Each Amazon Affiliate cookie attaches itself to a web browser for a full 24 hours after it is clicked by a visitor. That way —should the visitor return to the affiliate link within that timeframe— the purchasing credit is awarded to the Amazon Affiliate.
Pros and Cons of Amazon Affiliate Marketing
Like anything in life, there are two sides to every coin. That is to say that there are pros and cons to doing anything. When it comes to making money as an Amazon Affiliate Marketer, the same rules apply.
The easiest pro is the sheer size of the platform. It’s arguably the number one retailer globally with over three billion available items for purchase. This means that generating sales isn’t a tough business.
The downside, or cons, is that commission rates vary depending on the product and niche. If your chosen niche falls into the category of products with the lowest commission rate, it can be a struggle to see high returns. But remember that these untouched niches have powerful potential for earning growth over time. There are also a hefty amount of rules and guidelines affiliates are beholden to, so be sure to read those terms and conditions well.
Ready to Make Your First Sale as an Amazon Affiliate Marketer?
After this thorough beginner’s guide to Amazon Affiliate Marketing, you should be rearing to get started. Even more excited to make your first sale as an Amazon Affiliate Marketer.
The hardest part is getting started, but now that you know how you can get out of your own way and start earning income with affiliate marketing. Set yourself up for success by leaning on the free plugin resources mentioned in this beginner’s guide: Ahrefs, ClickWhale, and AAWP, as refreshers. And remember that there are always helpful educational sites like HubSpot Academy providing information that you can take on at your own pace. And that’s just a starting point!