You must have heard of Amazon’s legendary affiliates program by now. The profits generated by way of product referrals have become increasingly lucrative for affiliate marketers, bloggers and influencers over the last few years. But did you know you can still get a slice of this action as an Amazon FBA seller… with your own products?
In particular, performing promotional coupon giveaways to boost a product’s sales rank is the ideal time to leverage the mighty Amazon Associates Program and claw back profits. Continue reading to learn more about this awesome feature you should definitely consider during your next promotion!
What is the Amazon Associates Program?
Remarkably, Amazon’s affiliate program was one of the first of its kind when it launched back in 1996. It’s fair to say they’ve gained an invaluable amount of experience during this period. Over the last decade, this free to use program has been rapidly expanding functionalities and gaining popularity due to its ease of use and the trust of the Amazon marketplace.
Amazon have developed a simple solution for website owners, online sellers, marketers, or almost anyone who wants to refer a product to Amazon. Individuals the world over can earn money by advertising all manner of products on Amazon. Not only in the US, but all international marketplaces and many affiliated websites are now available under the program.
One of the most common applications seen is by bloggers and website owners. By becoming an Amazon Associate you can easily create affiliate links for products to share or recommend with their audiences. Whenever a visitor travels through the link to buy a product, you, the affiliate coins a commission profit for referring a customer.
In essence, Amazon is incentivizing you monetarily to direct users to Amazon.
Core Benefits for Amazon FBA Sellers:
Ease of Signing Up and Receiving Payments
The Amazon Affiliate Program is robust, dependable and quite straightforward. Once you’ve signed up and provided payment information, you will begin receiving your payments as soon as you have reached the threshold amount (beginning at $100). It’s worth noting that payments are delayed for 2 months (to stop scrupulous individuals abusing the program), but once you garnered enough sales and passed the time delay, it can become a steady stream of monthly income.
With other affiliate programs, you may have to jump through various hoops to sign up, get approved and receive payments. While Amazon does have its own set of requirements, they are not particularly difficult to pass.
Tracking Cookies and Unrelated Purchases
When a visitor clicks through an Amazon affiliate link, a tracking cookie within their browser reports back to Amazon. Both you and Amazon can view vital metrics such as on clicks through and purchases.
Better yet, these cookies are site wide and not restricted to a single product. While they only have a 24-hour limit, during that time frame, you will get a commission from every item bought by that particular visitor. So let’s say you directed them to your own product, then they went on an Amazon shopping spree, you’ll earn profits on every purchased item! Due to the very nature of impulse buying and Amazon’s monstrously vast inventory, being credited for unrelated item purchases is far more common than you might imagine!
Amazon is Incredibly Well Trusted
One of the greatest attractions of the Amazon Affiliates Program is trust in the eyes of consumers. Amazon’s reputation proceeds itself, it is a household name that visitors feel very comfortable purchasing from.
Many visitors won’t think twice about going to Amazon to make a purchase, they almost certainly have an account and credit cards stored ready for quick purchases. Concerns of safe and secure purchases that could lose a sale are virtually nonexistent. You can also target
Excellent Conversion Rates
Amazon is an absolute ninja when it comes to turning visitors into customers. They don’t devote millions of dollars each year into research and optimizing the sales for nothing. As you are well aware, Amazon is a slick money making machine!
No further work is required on your part after directing visitors to Amazon. Otherwise, having a fancy copywriter and graphic designer optimize your product page may be able to boost your conversion rates even higher.
Variable Commission Rates (Typically Up to 10%)
As a whole, the commissions available as an Amazon Affiliate are smaller than that of other companies or affiliate programs. However, all the previous benefits more than make up for the slightly reduced commission percentages.
The exact percentage depends on product categories and can rise depending on the quantity of items you sell. So the more products you can move, the higher the percentage of those sales you’ll receive. You may start out only making 4%, but you can double it to 8% in just a short timeframe if you have good sales numbers.
Lastly, let’s not forget that fact that these commissions apply to site-wide purchases for the cookie duration. If you’re lucky you might get some commissions for unrelated high-ticket items!
Getting Set Up as an Amazon Affiliate
Before signing up for the Amazon Affiliate Program you need to ensure you sign up for the correct marketplace. You will need to set up a specific account for each marketplace of the country you intend to sell through. The process of signing is quite simple, in fact, you can get up and running within the day since there are no third-party approvals needed.
After signing up you’ll be presented with a number of different ways to start promoting your product as an affiliate. Depending on how you decide to advertise, you can choose from varying types of links, widgets, banners and banners. For our Amazon strategy for FBA sellers we only use links
If you are planning to drive visitors from a website to your Amazon product page, there the Amazon Associates Center provides a number of interesting functionalities. You may choose to add compelling content to enhance your site and carefully include affiliate links within. Or perhaps you could try Native Shopping Ads at the bottom of your content.
It doesn’t matter if you have a goal to delight your readers with visual content or if you are trying to maximize your profits, Amazon offers all sorts of tools for you to use for this. You are in control of how much or little saturation these tools have on your site.
Key Features of the Amazon Associates Center include:
- Site Stripe – Enables members of the Amazon Affiliate Program to build links directly from whatever Amazon page they want to promote. This also allows for browsing as a customer to build links with ease
- Product and Text Links – Link to any specific product featured on Endless.com or Amazon.com while also showing a bit of product information. It also allows you to build image and text links, customize text links and image only links to products featured on those two sites.
- These links will be complete with your specific Associate tag, which allows for you to be paid for any qualifying sales that come through these links.
- You can also utilize product reviews as enhancements for these links.
- Banners – Link to categories or promotions on Endless.com or Amazon.com using graphical banners that are stylish.
- There are a wide variety of standard sizes and shapes of these banners available.
- For special promotions like Mother’s Day or Back to School, you can get special graphics.
- These banners are easy to add and use.
- With these banners in place, you are setting yourself up to earn as much as 15% of any sales that are made from them
The number of possibilities for leveraging the Amazon Affiliates Program is staggering. It’s a case of experimentation and seeing what works as different approaches may favor different niches. There is, however, one method that works incredibly well regardless of product type or target audience.
The Secret Sauce: Combining AMZPromoter With Amazon Affiliates
One component of the strategy outlined in our Amazon External Traffic Guide is to use Amazon Affiliate links when you send external traffic to your Amazon product pages. The benefit is twofold, you trigger the Amazon Associates cookie which will give you commissions on product purchases and you will also be able to easily track your purchases through Amazon Associates backend. There is zero downside from using your affiliate link.
When setting up your campaign in AMZPromoter, in the first stage of the wizard (Basic Setup) copy your Amazon Associates link into where it says Product Page URL.
To generate this URL, log into Amazon Associates and click the Product Linking menu followed by the Product Links drop down option.
In the search box copy and paste the ASIN of the product you want to promote and hit ‘Go’.
Your product should appear. Click on the little arrow next to the ‘Get link’ button to the right which should launch a popup. Copy and paste the link into the Product Page URL field in AMZPromoter as mentioned previously.
From here setup AMZPromoter as you would normally. Anyone who claims a coupon from your AMZPromoter campaign and clicks through to Amazon will automatically be cookied and you will receive a commission on every purchase they make.
Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Being Banned
For many online entrepreneurs, the Amazon Affiliate program has become an invaluable method of earning a great income through niche sites and writing. However, there are some things that can turn this experience into a nightmare. Remember, Amazon reserves the right to ban you from their program if they feel you are breaking the rules in any way.
Amazon’s Terms of Service (ToS) is quite extensive and seemingly cryptic and if you break any of their rules, you’ll risk being ejected from the program with zero chances of being reinstated.
So whether you are already an Amazon Affiliate or you are planning on becoming one, knowing what activities raise red flags with Amazon will prevent you from being left out in the cold. Here are a number of the activities that Amazon have taken very seriously lately:
Amazon has prohibited any use of their affiliate links in an “offline manner”
While that might not come right out and say it, this includes links that are used in emails. To avoid this, if you use email campaigns, send people links to your site in the emails and then have links on the site to Amazon.
Shortening/cloaking/hiding the affiliate link is also apt to get you banned
Amazon doesn’t want their audience to be misdirected in any way and they look at this practice as a way to do just that. They simply want to make sure their visitors know what site they are being led to. That being said, if you do feel that the links are too long, Amazon does still give you the option to use their own link shortening service: Amzn.to.
You can’t include links in any eBooks or in any PDF documents
This correlates with the first item on this list. Because these items can be accessed offline, they are not allowed.
You shouldn’t misuse your own affiliate links
This includes using them to make your own personal purchases on Amazon.
You are only allowed one account per marketplace (generally)
They put this rule into effect to limit the amount of spam people see, as well as to make their banners count. If you have already done so or are considering making more than your original account, you can bank on being banned. That being said, sometimes Amazon does make exceptions depending on the scale and nature of the business, so if this is something you want to do, you might try contacting Amazon and ask first.
You can’t use reviews on Amazon as your own
You CAN base your possible endorsement of a product on the reviews for it, but you cannot take them and use them as your own. Aside from being considered plagiarism, this will get you banned from the Amazon Affiliate program quickly
Don’t even think about using affiliate links on sites that contain explicit violence or porn
This is pretty self explanatory.
Manipulation of Amazon cookies is forbidden
Amazon uses cookies to store information for any users who arrive at their site by clicking your links. This information is stored for a full 24 hours and anything purchased in that time period will be credited to you. However, the use of auto-taggers, cookie stuffing, or other forms of click manipulation is strictly prohibited. Aside from being banned from the affiliate program, this mistake could also end with you being sued by Amazon.
Wrapping Up
Now you have all of the pertinent information right at your fingertips, you can begin leveraging the Amazon Associates Program. Using this guide, you should be able to extract the full potential of this ingenious program. Most importantly, by heeding the warnings of Amazon’s ToS, you can make the most of this opportunity without any risk of getting your account banned.
The main takeaway from this article is that the Amazon Affiliates Program can offer benefits to anyone who is sending external traffic to Amazon. Even as a successful Amazon FBA seller, bolstering your revenue using the affiliate program is a no-brainer. All upside without any downside!
If you would like to read more about Amazon’s Associates program you should check out this massive post from Authority Hacker.
So start your free trial of AMZPromoter and sign up for Amazon’s Associates Program, start earning commissions today and grow your Amazon FBA business!