For anyone starting out making money online, AdSense monetization and Affiliate Marketing are two of the easiest for beginners and a staple for more advanced website owners. A popular affiliate network and a favourite at MonetizePros is Amazon Associates.
If you’re not already an Amazon Associate here are some key advantages of Amazon over other affiliate programs:
- Amazon is an established brand and a lot of people already have an account and shop there.
- It has a tiered commission structured so scaling is already in place.
- Amazon is a stable and established companyso there are no concerns about not being paid commissions.
- The approval process isvery straightforward.
- If you want to sell your website in the future, there are a wide range of buyers who are interested in websites monetized in this way.
Click here to read our full Amazon Associates review.
Below are 5 tips on how to make more affiliate income with Amazon Associates:
-
Monetize Your International Traffic
As an affiliate marketer it is quite easy to leave money on the table when you are only concerned with your domestic market. A look at your Google Analytics data will show you which countries your visitors are coming from. The traffic might be small but over time it can add a nice supplement to your current commission earnings.
There are plugins that, depending on where your reader is located, will change your Amazon links to the respective Amazon website e.g. Amazon.ca or Amazon.co.uk. If you are running a WordPress website one solution is GeoRiot which is free up to 1000 clicks per month and $10 for 10,000.
You will need to sign up to each individual Amazon Associates for each country that they offer the program as you will get a unique affiliate link for each. There are currently 12 Amazon Associates programs in operation:
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Germany
- France
- Japan
- Canada
- China
- Italy
- Spain
- India
- Brazil
- Mexico
Tip: For earnings not your domestic country, you will be paid by cheque. To avoid paying bank fees for cashing foreign cheques regularly, increase your minimum payout threshold.
-
Reduce Your Bounce Rate and Drop Your Cookie
Ever heard of the Zero Moment of Truth? The ZMOT was a study commissioned by Google to investigate how shoppers make buying decisions. The study found that the average shopper looked at nearly double the amount of information sources compared to over a year ago. The implication here is that shoppers are doing way more online research than they used to and using a variety of sources.
How does this affect you and your affiliate income? Amazon cookies only last 24 hours and if a customer clicks a different link your cookie will be replaced. With customers looking at more sources the likelihood of this happening is increasing.
You need to give potential customers no reason to go elsewhere. This means producing exceptional content that provides everything they need. If you do product reviews, include a list of alternatives (with affiliate links too!). Comparison tables with each product’s features do quite well in conveying this information. It also helps a reader make a buying decision while on your site and increases the chances of commissions for you.
-
Make Money With Authority Websites
High authority websites can be leveraged to make additional income. YouTube is an example of one of these. Do you notice when you search on Google, a lot of the top results are YouTube videos? You could produce a short ‘how to video’ and include a link to your onsite longer review (with affiliate links) in the first line of the YouTube video description.
Rather than relying solely on the authority and rankings of your own website, you can increase your traffic to your money pages using large sites like YouTube.
-
Consider Conversion Rate Optimization
Most Amazon Associates see a conversion rate of between 5-10% but the top associates have conversions of over 20%. There are a lot of factors that can affect your conversion rate and one of those is how targeted your traffic is. If you owned a generic fitness site, your sales would be quite varied and conversion rates lower. If you owned a site that was gymballs.com and all your organic traffic was from “cheap gym balls” searches, your conversion rates would be higher.
This doesn’t mean that you can forget about conversion rate optimization. There are two conversation rates that you should think about:
- Make sure you are sending the right people to the right products. You should link directly to a product listing rather than Amazon generally or a search page. This should increase your conversions. Pay close attention to what products people buy through direct and what falls under “other” orders. It might be that you need to switch your product recommendation to different product.
- You will also need to consider your on-site conversion rates. For example, using Amazon colours and button types can act as a trust signal and also signals to the reader the next step in their buyer journey. Using star ratings on your product reviews can also embed the idea of shopping at Amazon.
-
Move Readers Over to Amazon Quickly
The average Amazon associate earns commission on a 60/40 split between a customer buying a product through a direct link and another item on Amazon. This means that roughly 40% of your Amazon earnings are through unintentional product referrals.
The two main points here are:
- You need to get readers clicking your Amazon affiliate links so that your cookie is dropped.
- Amazon have such a huge array of products that you can earn commission off anything they sell.
The sooner a reader moves over to Amazon, the more chance you can earn commission on your recommendation or on anything they might buy.
Final Thoughts
Amazon is here to stay and building and growing a website monetized through Amazon affiliate links is a safe-bet when it comes to making money online. The business model has been proven so if you haven’t already tried Amazon Associates, you should start now. If you have, try implementing the advice above and let us know how much it improves your earnings.