How To Become An Amazon Affiliate – Like We Did!
Benefits of Being An Amazon Affiliate
We became an Amazon Affiliate to earn a commission on the Amazon products we were already linking on our website. Afterward, we started to earn real money that has totaled nearly $500 so far from our affiliate sales!
That’s just us starting off! It’s nowhere near what other sites are making with their affiliate sales.
Websites like ThisIsWhyImBroke.com, an Amazon Affiliate example on our 50 Successful Amazon Affiliate Examples list were making $50,000 a month from affiliate sales! It’s now likely a lot more as they’ve only gotten larger.
In 2015 the websites The Wirecutter and The Sweet Homemade a combined $1.5 Million in e-commerce sales. There is a lot of potential here!
You Need A Website
Amazon doesn’t want you to add Amazon product links in social media accounts or in email links. They want their links to be a natural part of your website, so you NEED a website.
Not a third-party platform like blogger or anything. Those third-party sites have their own rules that restrict how you can use your own content. Plus they will plaster your website with ads to generate themselves money off your own content. You should have your own website you control.
Luckily setting up a website nowadays is incredibly easy, cheap and still remains one of the best ways to make extra money for you. Our guide to Starting Your Own WordPress Blog/Website was built for people wanting to make extra money blogging.
Our recommendation is to start your website/blog sooner rather than later (here are 106 website ideas). The longer your blog exists, the more preferred treatment it’ll receive from Google as an established blog.
How To Become An Amazon Affiliate – Approval Process
The approval process on how to become an amazon affiliate is pretty straight forward, which they call “Amazon Associates”. We’ll run through the sign-up form to give you an idea of what it looks like!
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CLICK SIGN UP
First, go to the Amazon Associate Homepage and click “Sign Up”. You’ll be asked to either sign in with your existing account (that’s what we did) or Create An Account.
For us, as an existing Amazon member, I used my same account. No information crossed over, they just use your account to identify you.
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ACCOUNT INFORMATION
This asks for general information about you or your business. It’s your name, address, and telephone number.
Basically, Amazon Associates isn’t available in every country, so they want to begin by verifying your location is in an approved area.
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WEBSITE AND MOBILE APP LIST
Amazon would like to know which website is yours. This is where you enter your website name. They’ll review your site to verify the content matches their guidelines. Add them here (yes, you can have multiple websites under your Amazon Associates account).
When you enter a website, they will ask you to confirm that none of your websites are geared toward children under 13. You will not be eligible to display banners, widgets, special links, or other ads from Amazon Associates if your site has a kid focus (cartoons, kid toys, etc.).
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PROFILE
This is where you tell Amazon a little more about your website. You’ll provide a website description, what type of items you’re planning on promoting, how you currently drive traffic to your site, and how you currently market and monetize your website.
You’ll end with “You Agree to the Terms and Conditions of the Associate’s Program Operating Agreement“. We linked to it here in case you want to read it beforehand.
They want to know you’re a legit company and how you plan to use their affiliate program. This is all understandable.
If you’re wondering about that first question “What is your preferred Associates Store ID”. All your affiliate links will have a unique identifier in them to identify you. These are typically the name of your business in some variation. Depending on what you enter.
Here is what our unique Associate’s Store ID looks like. This is displayed in the URL anytime you click on an Amazon link from a website associated with Amazon Associates.
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START USING ASSOCIATES CENTRAL
That’s it! You can start right away while they are reviewing your application.You may notice they added some numbers or changed your Associates Store ID slightly. This is just because it has to be unique.You can enter your payment and tax information at this point, or wait till after you made a couple of sales. You want to try to make some sales soon though. They state that if you don’t make a sale in 180 days, they’ll deactivate your account and you’ll have to reactivate it. Honestly, though, it’s not that difficult to reactivate your Amazon Associates account.
It’s really nice that they let you start right away! The process on how to become an Amazon Affiliate is really easy.
Now Explore & Create Some Links
At this point you have access to the entire Amazon Associates interface, so let’s give you a quick peek to what this looks like.
On the main dashboard the most important metric is the “Earnings Overview” this graph represents how many times people have clicked on your links and the commissions you’ve earned so far.
In the graph above you can see there are an average 10 Amazon Associate links clicked on every day, but no affiliate sales in the last 30 days. It happens…
Fastest Way to create an Amazon Affiliate Link.
While the Amazon Associates interface has some nice tools, it’s not the quickest way to create Amazon Links for your affiliate account. The quickest way to build an affiliate link is while you sign in to your Amazon Associates account, go directly to the product page you want.
You’ll notice a new thin toolbar at the top of your Amazon product pages. Amazon SiteStripe is a mini toolbar that’s easy and excellent at creating affiliate links for your Amazon Associates Account.
You may notice that I circled some of the gibberish in the URL.
This is the item number, the unique identifier Amazon uses to identify its products. Typically when you go to an Amazon product page, you’ll see a really long URL. That’s basically all useless. You can delete all that extra stuff after the item number and it’ll be the same page. Removing all that extra stuff is a clean way to build your Amazon links.
That’s it for how to become an Amazon Affiliate, you have a link you can add to your site and start making money!
Careful, Your Amazon Affiliate Will Be Deactivated If…
Amazon is known to deactivate accounts without warning and making it terribly difficult to reactivate your account. To avoid this, follow these well-known rules of the Amazon Associates program.
- Don’t use your own affiliate links to make personal purchases
- Don’t use affiliate links in emails, social media, eBooks, or anything except your personal website or YouTube channel.
- Avoid using any kind of link shortening like Bitly. Amazon links can be long and that’s ok. Amazon has its own link shortener service like in the image above. It works great!
- Simply don’t ask people to click your links to support you or offer incentives for clicking your links.
- You can’t use Amazon’s trademark. You may be working with them but you do not have permission.
- Amazon is constantly adjusting their price so if your website doesn’t include the latest price. It’s considered false advertising and breaks their terms of service. It’s safer to avoid mentioning the price altogether.
We can all admit that the Amazon Associates program has many rules so be careful. We’ve personally found it best to play it safe and only add Amazon Associates text links to our blog.
How Successful Bloggers Make The Most Money With Amazon
We’ve been fortunate to collaborate with many successful bloggers with Amazon Associates accounts. While most of their success involves building a great website, we’ll share some of the great tips they’ve offered.
- From Day 1 Build An Email List – As a website owner, your email list is the most valuable thing you own because you can notify your readers about new posts. Unlike social media which will limit your announcements, email lists reach your entire audience.
Most bloggers use ConvertKit as their email service, it’s made for bloggers and incredibly easy to use. This will give you the tools to add email signups on your website, manage all your email subscribers and let you send out creative emails to your audience. Use this ConvertKit Referral Code to use the service for free until you exceed 1,000 email subscribers.
- Create Posts People Are Already Searching For – Before you spend hours writing 20 blog posts, find out what people are currently searching for on Google. There are tools like SEMrush that let you type in your blog idea keywords like “Southern Wyoming Fly Fishing” and it’ll return with how many people search for that term on the internet every month and the number of other articles on the subject.
The trick is to find popular keywords that have low competition. Use this referral for a free trial of SEMrush to discover the perfect keywords for some future blog post ideas. This will help you build popular posts, which attract more people and more people equals more affiliate revenue.
- Promote Great Posts – Sometimes you put in a lot of work for a great post with some perfect affiliate links but no one visits your site. Consider some of the many great and cheap promotion opportunities on Fiverr. It’s a hub of SEO specialists, social media promoters, and copywriting gurus who will help you out for as little as $5.
Good Luck Future Amazon Associates!
Affiliate Marketing continues to be one of the best ways to make money. Yet, Amazon is only one popular affiliate program, here are the 108 best affiliate programs to consider when building your website. There is no limit to the number of programs you can join.
Glad this gave you a little insight into how to become an Amazon Affiliate! Please share this page with your friends who you think should join the Amazon Associates program and sign-up for our email list below for future updates to the program!
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
Fantastic overview and step by step process on how to get started as an Amazon affiliate. Thanks for laying it out so nicely.
Glad we can help! The screenshots were a bit of a pain to get, but I know seeing what the application process looks like is really nice to plan for.
Great article, as who doesn’t like Amazon! Thanks for sharing.
Loved this post you made things very easy to learn.