You have probably already found many blogs explaining how to make money with affiliate marketing. But first of all, you should be aware that making money online is neither easy nor fast. It never has been, no matter what you have read or what someone has told you trying to sell you a miracle course.
To do affiliate marketing, you first need to create a website where you can post reviews and recommendations about specific products. In these reviews you will include links to other websites where the product is sold. When the user buys the product, the seller will pay you a commission for the sale.
Nowadays there are many affiliate platforms, the most famous one is Amazon, where you can sign up to start this business. If you are passionate about cooking, you could set up a website where you post reviews about different kitchen tools with a link to the product sales page on Amazon.
When your website appears on the first pages of search engines, people will find it and if they go to the Amazon website to buy a product you recommend after reading your article, you will receive a commission on the sale. The amount of income from affiliate marketing depends on the market you have chosen. The higher the sales and the more expensive the products, the greater the earning potential.
To work in affiliate marketing, you first need to create a blog. Nowadays, this is very easy and cheap. The main challenge is to write reviews about different products and place the articles in the search engines. In markets with less competition, your website can also position itself well without you having to do anything, but for markets with more competition and therefore more profitable, SEO work, link building, etc. may be necessary. Once the website is well ranked in the search engines, it is relatively easy to make money with affiliation, but if you want to make good money, you need to invest a lot of effort and a lot of time.
Your earning potential depends on two factors:
- the chosen market (the more expensive this product category is, the higher the commissions you will be recognized for)
- the amount of time (number and quality of written articles) you will spend
How to make money with affiliate marketing?
First you need to create a website, today with platforms like wordpress it is very easy and within everyone’s reach, you can do it yourself, but I advise you to contact a web agency that with a few hundred dollars will set up the website.
You, on the other hand, will have to write analyses, comparisons and product recommendations. Writing the articles will require the most effort from you. You can pay someone to do it, but I advise you to write by yourself, at least initially, to gain knowledge and practice.
The hardest part is getting your website ranked in the search engines. In product niches with less competition, your site may easily appear on the first page of Google, but in more competitive, (and profitable), markets, the competition is much greater and you will need to employ a whole range of SEO strategies (link building, guest posting, etc.) to be ranked in Google.
How much does it cost to create a website?
Make a little money with affiliate marketing is relatively easy, but if you really want to make money you need to spend many hours and time.
So forget all the nonsense you have been told that it’s possible to build this system on a Caribbean beach and work an hour a day. To make decent money with affiliates, you will have to sacrifice a large part of your free time. Only after the initial effort you will be able to reap the rewards, and then you can manage everything under a palm tree by the sea.
Affiliate marketing requires very little initial financial investment and can become completely passive, allowing you to earn revenue even while you sleep. All you need is people to visit your website, click on those Amazon links and buy something. All this happens completely automatically.
The investment for a website could be something like this:
Basic services
- Domain and hosting: $50 – $60/year
- Buy WordPress template: $50
Optional services
- Web agency to set up the website: $500
- Editors to write articles for you: $50
- Link building strategy $300
Make money with affiliate marketing, pros
The economic investment is very small
You only need a website. That means: buying a WordPress template (50 $), even if there are many free ones, but I do not recommend using them because, apart from the existing limitations, you will not even end up being the owner of your website. The domain and hosting, on the other hand, cost about $50/60 per year.
Requires little maintenance
Although initially you will have to spend many hours writing and enriching your website with content, after that you can take it much more comfortably. Apart from the checks required to keep the recommended products up-to-date, not much more is required, and you’ll be able to dedicate yourself to new projects, earning almost automatically with affiliate marketing in the meantime.
Amazon is an unstoppable sales machine
Online sales have soared, especially during this pandemic period, and that makes the affiliate program a real source of revenue. More and more people are shopping online at Amazon, and the website is designed to get people to buy things all the time.
Amazon pays you a commission for everything the customer buys
Another advantage is that not only do you earn from the products you recommend, but you get a commission for everything the customer buys for the duration of the cookie (24 hours). In fact, it is very common to receive commissions on products that have nothing to do with your website, as people often take advantage of the fact that they are on Amazon to buy other products.
Make money with affiliate marketing, cons
The cookie works only for 24 hours
Every time someone clicks on one of your affiliate links, Amazon automatically sets a cookie in their browser. This way, it detects that it is your customer. This is common with all affiliate programs, but in Amazon’s case, the cookie only stays for 24 hours. So if the user buys something after 24 hours, you will not receive any commission.
Other affiliate programs have cookies that are stored for up to a month or even longer. So if the customer prefers to wait a little longer to buy, you will still receive your commission. This is a big disadvantage, but still Amazon is the most profitable affiliate system on the market because it generates a high volume of sales.
Commissions are low
Amazon’s commission rates average 8-15%, which is slightly lower than other popular affiliate programs.
A few years ago, commissions were even higher, but there was a cap of $10 per sale. Even if you sold $1,000 worth of product, your commission was still $10. As a result, very few people used Amazon to review expensive products. Now that cap no longer exists, which means you can take advantage of the opportunity to earn by recommending products, even if the cost is high.
Amazon rules
Amazon can change the contract at any time, lower commissions, or even cancel your account if it suspects bad practices (misleading users, etc.). But there’s nothing to worry about. If you do it right and your website is well ranked, there are always other affiliate programs you can use to make money.
Create content
If you want to be ranked in Google search, you need to create better and more useful content than others. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who wants to buy this kind of product. What would he like to know? What features would you like to compare?
In any case, it’s always a good idea to write an article about how to choose the best product. The word “best” attracts a lot of attention, because people want to be sure that they are buying something of high quality. When writing content, there is only one rule: provide something useful to the user. So study the competing websites and think how you can do it better. Do not make the classic mistake of describing only the technical features: Find out and explain what benefits it brings to the user, how it should be used, what advantages it has over the competition and what kind of buyer it is suitable for.
While it may be tempting to pay someone to write your content, especially once you get the hang of it, be careful. If you are going to hire a copywriter, make sure they are not only an expert in copywriting, but also have the willingness and ability to learn about each product in detail.
Once you’ve created your high-quality content, it’s time to add your affiliate links. Until a few years ago, Amazon would review websites before approving their inclusion in the program, but today the process is virtually instantaneous. The first thing you need to do is visit the website and sign up. There are many ways to add links. You can add them directly into text, tables or images. There are also free WordPress plugins, such as the Amazon Affiliate plugin itself, which add various features, such as updated prices or the ability to redirect visitors from other countries to your Amazon store to avoid losing commissions.
In general, they aren’t very helpful, and the only one I recommend and that most affiliates use is AAWP, a payment plugin that lets you create up-to-date lists of top sellers, a feature that converts very well. It also allows you to see the prices of products on Amazon in real time, so you always have them up to date and don’t violate any of the terms of the operating agreement.
Make money with Amazon Affiliates, choose the right product
To check the product potential, you first need to see how it sells on Amazon and what the average price is. As a rule, the more reviews a product has, the more it sells. And if the average price is above $50, it’s a good opportunity for you. So you can first see which are the best selling products on Amazon Bestsellers, and in the categories on the left you can see the 100 best selling products in the last hour.
In this case we go to the Home and Kitchen section because it offers one of the highest commissions, and in a good position we find a microwave oven with over 10,000 reviews. Before proceeding, make sure that this is not the only product that has potential in its category, and by checking other types of microwaves, you can see that there are several models that sell well and have many reviews.
It seems to be a good niche, but the controls are not yet completed. We first need to check what the search volume is for this product. To generate revenue, your website must be visited through search engines.
In other words: If someone searches Google for “microwave oven” or “reviews” of microwaves,” they must find your website. But if no one searches for microwave oven on the Internet, your website will get few hits. Therefore, it is important to know how many people are searching for this keyword on Google. There is a free tool that can help you get an idea of this, and it is called Google Adwords.
It is a service for those who want to advertise on Google. Google informs them about the number of people searching for something specific. If you do not have an account yet, you need to create one. After registering, enter the word “microwave” in the ‘Search for new keywords’ section, and Google will show you a list of words related to yours, along with the number of monthly searches for each of them.
After making sure that this products are sold on Amazon, have a good price and people are searching for them on the Internet, it’s time to check how difficult it’s to place your website among the first results of Google.
It doesn’t matter if a product has very high sales, and it doesn’t matter if there are thousands of searches every day, but if your website doesn’t appear on the first page of Google, you’ll hardly get any visitors. Because, as the saying goes: the second page of Google is the best place to hide a body’.
To find out if it is easy, difficult, or virtually impossible, search for the word you want (e.g., microwave). Usually, on the first page you will find the chains of big stores like Amazon itself or others, and you will also find other websites that use the Amazon affiliate program. And this is a good sign, because it shows that it is possible. Now you need to evaluate the content of these blogs, your competitors.
If their content is nothing special and you are able to provide more useful information, then that’s it. On the other hand, if they are good, you need to work on creating better content and outperforming them.
If you can not find any websites with Amazon partnerships related to your keyword, it could mean one of two things: you have just found an untapped niche, which is great, or those who tried failed because the niche is too complicated.
So if you want to try to make money with affiliate marketing all you have to do is start your project!
Those who are interested in all serious forms of online earning can read the corresponding article.
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