Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliate marketing program. With Amazon Associates, you can make money by referring customers to Amazon.com. It can be as simple as putting a link on your site. Then, when your readers click the link, go to Amazon and buy something, you get paid.
Affiliate marketing doesn’t have to be difficult. Too often, marketers try to talk about how complicated it is to male sales with certain programs, and the fact of the matter is that it can be easy, if you know what affiliate network to join and how to use it to your advantage. If you have a website, any type of site, you have a platform to be successful with affiliate marketing. One of the easier platforms to work with is an option that comes from the powerhouse site Amazon. Amazon Associates is one of the best options that you can sign up for, and if you are not a member yet, you should look into it. Here are 3 reasons you should become a member.
It Is 100% Free To Join
The first major reason is simple, it’s 100% free. There’s no fees, there’s no hurdles to jump through, and there’s nothing special that you have to do in order to get signed on. Some companies require you to have a certain number of hits, and followers in order to join them. That’s not the case for Amazon. They will look at your site to see if there is content, and that the content doesn’t violate their terms of service (e.g., hate speech), but the bar for approval is pretty low. If you have 1 visitor or 100,000, you can join in on the money making venture. Once you fill out the appropriate forms, and you are approved, you will gain access to a database of products that you can promote aggressively, or passively, and make up to 10% on sales.
You Just Get People To Amazon and Make Money
Many affiliate networks require you to send hundreds of thousands of hits to their site before you get a small commission or even a sale. However, with Amazon, all you need to do is recommend items that are in line with your site, and people will browse and possibly buy. The mighty ecommerce site already has millions of customers, and it’s a trusted brand. When you link to them from your page, the chances of getting someone to browse and buy is exponentially greater than selling an eBook or random affiliate product for another marketing site.
Unlimited Product Potential
Pick a niche to work in, any niche, and you will find that Amazon has products for you to promote. Let’s say that you’re working within a blog about rocket science. You only discuss the most technical of things, and you casually link people to the books on science in this arena. Your readers will be able to connect with the books, download them to their tablets, Kindle, or even buy the paperback within one click. You get a commission from that niche. Even micro-niches like shoelaces, have marketers that are cashing in and Amazon pays them handsomely. The potential for promoting products is immense, and unlike any other solution that you will find on the web.
And here is the really cool part: You get paid when your customers buy, even if they buy something in addition to or instead of the item you linked to. I make a lot of sales of items that I didn’t link to: everything from mechanical pencils to powdered peanut butter to fur covered handcuffs! (Note: If you are one of the people who bought those items, I don’t know who you are, I just know that those are some of the products purchased by my site visitors.) Get customers to click on an Associates link on your site, and Amazon will do their best to sell them something—even if it isn’t the product you linked to.
In the end, out of all affiliate networking opportunities that you can join, none of them have the branding and commercial appeal that Amazon has. Even if someone doesn’t buy the item you promoted, you may find that they click through to the site and buy other things, giving you a commission no matter what. You’ll be surprised how powerful being an Amazon Associates member truly is.
