Amazon Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Amazon Affiliate Marketing

Unless you have been living in a cave for the past 25 years, you will undoubtedly have heard of the rise of the online retail phenomenon known as Amazon. Started in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, Amazon's success has not only led to him to becoming the richest person in the world, but it has also created several other millionaires, and produced large incomes for many others.

These incomes are primarily from sales of products from the Amazon Affiliate Marketing platform. Entrepreneurs who sell products on Amazon benefit from both Amazon's popularity amongst online shoppers, and also their logistics in terms of warehousing, distribution and shipping services. But you do not have to be a product vendor to make money from Amazon, as affiliate marketers can also generate huge incomes promoting products which subsequently get sold via Amazon's website.

Amazon Associates

The Amazon affiliate marketing program is called 'Amazon Associates' and is free to join. You do need to fill out an application form and then wait for approval before you can start. Normally this approval is automatic although there can be circumstances in which your application could be rejected. One of the main reasons is that you do not yet have a website or that the website you have built lacks content.

Once you have been approved you are then able to start promoting Amazon products, but this raises another question in respect of which category of product you are going to promote. If you have already chosen a niche and built a website, it could well be that the goods for sale within that category doesn't pay as much as others.

Categories and Fees

When you earn money from promoting products sold on Amazon you get paid a commission, which Amazon calls a 'fee.' This fee is calculated as a percentage of the product’s retail selling price. Where it gets slightly more complicated is that there isn't a flat fee across the whole of the Amazon affiliate marketing program for every product. Instead, they have a fee schedule which identifies what percentage each product category pays.

·Some of the examples are as follows:

·Video game consoles: 1%

·Toys: 3%

·Sports, kitchen, health and personal care, books: 4.5%

·Outdoor, tools: 5.5%

·Business and industrial suppliesand beauty: 6%

·Watches, jewelry, handbags, apparel: 7%

·Lawn and garden, pet products, baby: 8%

·Private label fashion, luxury beauty: 10%

You will notice that the highest fee paid is 10% which, if you have researched affiliate marketing, may seem very low, especially when you consider some digital products pay out up to 75% commissions. What you need to bear in mind is that digital products have virtually no fulfilment cost, plus the profit margin on digital products is much higher than physical ones.

It may be tempting to start off building your Amazon affiliate business around those fee percentages which are the highest, and while it is perfectly OK to do that, you might want to pause to think for a moment and ask yourself a couple of questions. Are those categories and products with higher fees in a niche which you have a genuine interest in? Can you produce enough content on those subjects? What about the level of competition and how easy or not will it be to break into the market?

For example, luxury beauty paying 10% is tempting, but if you know nothing about it, it's going to be harder for you to get up and running not knowing the keywords and buzzwords are within that niche. It will be even harder for you to create content too. If you love animals and pets, you might be wiser to choose the pet niche and know that it still generates a reasonable 8% fee.

Your First Amazon Affiliate Marketing Website

Another choice you will have to make is how you are going to approach getting your Amazon affiliate marketing website built. Without a website, you have nowhere to send your potential customers, and there's the small matter of your Amazon Associates application, which needs to have a website with a reasonable amount of content on it.

You have several options, the first of which is to build it all yourself if you have the technical know-how and plenty of time available to build it. It's probably safe to assume that most of you reading this are not web design experts so what are the alternatives?

One is to outsource the building of your affiliate site. Websites like Upwork.com have loads of skilled freelancers who can do all sorts of work for you including writing content, creating graphics, and of course website design. You post the work you want done, and then freelancers will submit proposals to you which include the estimated time it will take them, and how much their fee is going to be.

While this is a good route to follow, it is not without its fair share of risks and potential problems. You may have to manage the work of three or four different people, there can be language barriers as many freelancers are based in Africa and Asia, which also brings the issue of time differences. It can also take longer than first expected, especially if part of the website building process is waiting for the work of another.

A Better Solution

By far the quickest and easiest way to get started as an Amazon affiliate marketer is to purchase a website which is already completed, and ready to go. These websites can be product or category-specific, which allows you totally focus your marketing efforts to generate results.

One of the best places to get a complete website from is Human Proof Designs. They can provide you with a full website, which has been pre-researched to ensure the niche is profitable, has content included which includes highly searched keywords, on-page SEO, to help your website rank on search engines, and each one comes with comprehensive training so that you maximize your profits.

Just think, that rather than having the hassle of either building it yourself or outsourcing it and hoping for the best, you can have a complete affiliate website all set up and ready to start making you money. Best of all you choose your product category, so whether you want to sell ski goggles or frying pans, you can be doing so within a matter of hours.

Amazon Affiliate Marketing