It’s actually quite interesting how many people are unaware of how to generate and income online using Amazon. However, Amazon’s rapid growth is due primarily to their affiliate and associates program. In fact, amazon has over 900,000 members in their affiliate program with 40% of their sales through third party associates. A brief summary of their programs are below.
Amazon Associates Program
The Amazon associates program makes it easy to start your e-commerce store online. As an associate, you can either sell products from your warehouse on Amazon’s site or have your entire inventory shipped to Amazon’s warehouse, where they’ll handle all the hard work while taking a small cut from each product sold. This is a great way for you to basically have a totally hands-off store online.
Where to get inventory?
If you sign up for the Amazon associates program, you’ll need your own inventory to sell. To get an inventory, you’ll want to find a wholesaler such as AliBaba or AliExpress. These are great places to find products in bulk for a great price. You can then have them shipped to an Amazon warehouse where Amazon will handle the rest of the physical work afterwards. You’ll still need to manage your inventory and there’ll be a larger upfront costs since you’ll need to buy a large inventory to get started. However, an easier way to make money with Amazon is their Affiliate program.
Amazon Affiliate Program
The Amazon affiliate program is where you promote Amazon’s products and get a commission from anywhere between 4-9% for each customer you refer to them. You can leverage the Amazon affiliate program by creating a reviews site for a specific product. One example of a reviews site would be Pool Heater HQ, which was created by Ken Jenkins with the purpose of providing unbiased pool heater reviews. However, if you don’t have much experience in setting up a website, you can create YouTube videos with a link to the product you’re promoting in the video description instead. YouTube videos are also a great way to get started with the affiliate program because of the fact that YouTube videos rank easier than websites in Google.
Creating the site and driving traffic
If you do plan on creating a reviews site, you’ll want to create a site which has all the information that a buyer would be looking for. This includes having product ratings, pros, cons, and overall product summary. The higher the quality of the overall site, the lower the bounce rate will be for your site and a lower bounce rate means higher sales for you.
Secondly, the primary source you’ll want to obtain traffic from should be SEO, PPC Advertising or Content Marketing.
Search Engine Optimization
If you do plan on driving traffic to your site through SEO, you’ll want to ensure that you create a lot of content on your site. Search engines love sites with a lot of content, and for a high quality affiliate site, it would be a good idea to have atleast 20,000 words site wide. Moreover, you’ll want to be doing outreach to create high quality links to your site. You can do this by manually doing outreach and contacting multiple industry authorities or by hiring an SEO company to perform all the dirty work for you, such as these Ottawa SEO experts.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-Per-Click advertising can be a great option to drive traffic to your reviews site depending on the industry you’re in. You’ll want to first determine the commission per sale, the conversion rate, the cost per click, and then determine whether or not you’ll be able to make a profit for each sale. If you’re not able to make a profit, then you’ll want to focus your efforts on either SEO or content marketing.
Content Marketing
By doing content outreach to many authoritative websites in the industry, you can obtain a fair amount of targeted referral traffic. You can then even get more out of the referral traffic by getting them to opt in a mailing list. As a result, you’ll be able to continue selling to them down the road while also providing them with high quality content.
