The Ultimate Amazon Affiliate Course

Module 1 – Introduction

Welcome to EasyAzon’s course on creating a thriving Amazon Associate website. Whether you are starting your first website in hopes to begin a life of working for yourself, or you are simply looking for a new way to monetize your website, there will be tips in here to get you going.

When looking for ways to make money online, being an Amazon Associate is one of the simplest ways to get going. Although it’s simple to get going, it’s not always easy to be successful.

We here at EasyAzon strive to make things simple for people trying to build their own websites. Whether that is through creating apps, providing advice through our podcast, or creating courses like this one, we hope to get you going faster, with better success that you would have otherwise.

So if you aren’t familiar with being an Amazon Associate, here’s a little primer.

Being an Amazon Associate is very similar to being a salesman or saleswoman in a store. You want to help customers, or visitors to your website, make purchase decisions and then buy a product. Then you, as the salesman or saleswoman, makes a commission on everything that person buys from Amazon after you sent them there. Except as an Amazon Associate, they don’t buy the product from you, but rather from Amazon.

Amazon uses their associate program to give you links with a specific tracking ID in them so they can tell that you sent the person over to Amazon. Amazon then tracks the person for 24 hours on their site (or 90 days if you use certain features in EasyAzon Pro) and will give you a commission if they buy within the 24 hour window.

This is an extremely easy way to set up a website to make money. However, while the set up is easy, actually succeeding at it takes some work, as putting up content online doesn’t guarantee that people will see or even if they do see it, it doesn’t guarantee that they will click through onto Amazon.

That’s where this guide comes in.

Choosing a website topic, creating content, getting traffic and all that goes into building a successful Amazon Associate website can be overwhelming and seem like too much work. That’s why we put this guide together to walk you through all the steps that go into making a profitable website from Amazon Associate commissions.

Here is a table of contents for you to jump around, based on your level of experience with websites:

Module 2 – Choosing Your Website Topic

Module 3 – Setting Up your Website

Module 4 – WordPress Basics

Module 5 – Setting Up Amazon Associates Accounts

Module 6 – Creating Content for your Amazon Review Site

Module 7 – Getting Traffic to Your Site

Module 8 –Maximizing Your Amazon Associate Earnings

 

Module 2 – Choosing Your Website Topic

Now that you understand the overview of what goes into a successful Amazon Associate website, the first step is typically deciding the topic of your website. There are a few ways to go about this.

Deciding Your Type of Website

When you are looking to build a profitable website, there are two approaches you can begin to take. You can either build an authority website, or a niche website. While there are similarities between both and certainly options in between, choosing one strategy to follow more than the other will help you decide the path and focus of your website.

Authority Websites

Authority websites are focused around bigger topics, and prove to become an authority on the all around topic.

  • More articles (as many as possible)
  • Focus on bigger topic, where pages, not website go for KW rankings
  • Takes longer to build, as bigger topics are generally more competitive
  • Have potential for bigger income than niche sites

Niche Sites

Niche Sites are websites that are based around ranking for a small number of KW’s, perhaps even just one.

  • Focus on small batch of KW’s
  • Take less time to build up
  • Less potential income than authority sites
  • Can build more sites faster

With either site you choose, the way you build them out are very similar. You need to decide on your topic and figure out keywords to write for it. If it’s an authority site, than the topic is most important, and if it’s a niche site, then finding the right keyword is the most important.

If you are looking for a topic to write about, there are few ways you can figure it out.

Keep in mind, for all these ways, it is very helpful to focus on topics and keywords that relate to physical goods, so you can take advantage of being an Amazon Associate.

For example, if you are building a niche website, you’d want your focus keywords to be physical goods, such as Smart Watches. This way, you could create a website to try and rank for “Smart Watches”, “Smart Watch Reviews”, “[Smart watch brand name] review”, etc.

An example of an authority site that would work well for being an Amazon Associate would be something like a hockey website, where you can write about different hockey gear reviews, along with whatever other topics or keywords you get related to hockey.

What do you know?

If you know more about a topic than the average person, then that would be a great website to build out. It doesn’t have to be your “passion” but if you have information that could help the average person learn something, then this would be topic you’d look into building a website about.

What don’t you know, but would like to find out?

Even if you aren’t an expert on a subject, but are very curious about it, then you could use building a website as a way to learn about it. As you do your research and put notes together, simply turn those notes into blog posts. You can focus these posts around certain keywords.

Like Desiderius Erasmus’ said, “In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king.”

If you are learning as you go, you are probably starting to know more than the average person, and can share your findings with them.

What is causing you a problem?

Are you facing a problem that there isn’t a good solution to? Or have a question you can’t find a decent answer to online? That’s a good topic to focus on. This is actually one of the most common ways I’ve seen people decide on successful websites to build.

Once you start looking at these problems and questions as business opportunities, they start to show up more and more (simply because you’re starting to see things this way).

Do your keyword research first

Another way to pick a topic is to simply do your keyword research first. A way to do this could be to scrape a site like Amazon for keywords, by going into a subject on amazon, clicking on a category, then copy and pasting that URL into Google Adwords Keyword Planner.

The Keyword Planner tool will essentially scrape that website for keywords, and give you the monthly search terms to go along with them.

A next step would be to find the competitive rankings for the terms that have enough monthly searches (which depends on what kind of site you’re going for – a niche site, look for 1 kw with a few thousand searches a month, or an authority site is multiple keywords around one topic with any number of searches, but obviously the more the better).

You can sort by searches per month by exporting your results from the Keyword Planner in a .csv to Excel.

To find the competitive rankings, I recommend Mozs Keyword Difficulty tool. Their full services and tools are awesome, but cost $99 a month. If that’s not in your budget right now, they do offer a 30-day free trial, which is plenty of time to test a bunch of keywords.

You can simply copy and paste 20 keywords at a time into Moz’s tool from Excel, then export them in a .csv.

This will give you a list of potential keywords with their ranking difficulties.

To merge the two lists, you’ll want to create a new column on the original Excel sheet called “Ranking Difficulty”. In this new column, you’ll want to do a vlookup to get the ranking difficulties into the proper place. Here is what you should put into the new column to added

=VLOOKUP([location of original KW],[columns including keyword and Moz ranking difficulty],[Column number from the left],FALSE)

That will get bring in the Moz difficulty rankings into the same sheet as the number of searches. Now you will want to do a paste special of the values to make sure they don’t change if you delete the original sheet from Moz.

Now you can analyze which keyword or group of keywords you would like to go after. Remember, it’s important to not only find lower competition, but also higher number of searches. Focusing on physically goods will make being an Amazon Associate much easier.

Module 3 – Setting Up your Website

While setting up a website may seem like a daunting task, it’s actually extremely easy if you know how to do it right.

A quick overview of getting your website set up:

1. Buy a domain name

When it comes buying a domain name, think branding rather than keywords. Google no longer gives favor for websites with keywords in the domain.

2. Buy hosting & a domain name.

I recommend Bluehost or Hostgator (when you buy both at the same time, you’ll get the domain for free).

Buying and setting up your hosting will be straight forward. For starting out, just get a shared hosting plan.

3. Install WordPress on your domain

Both of these sites offer one click WordPress installs. You’ll find that in your menu areas. Just click that and get going.

4. Install a theme on our WordPress powered site

After you install WordPress, you can login with your information, then go to appearance, and pick a theme for your website. Starting with a free theme is alright, but I recommend upgrading when you get the chance.

WordPress Plugins to Install

There are a few plugins that I recommend getting set up before getting going:

Yoast SEO

Here is a video of someone walking through the ideal setup for SEO on your site using the Yoast SEO plugin

WordPress Popular Posts

Adds a widget to the sidebar of your popular posts. This gives people a reason to keep clicking through onto articles on your site

Premium Plugins:

BannerZon

Add banners to your website to give extra space to Amazon products and a higher rate to click through

BestSeller Azon

This plugin automatically adds the best sellers for certain categories of Amazon to the bottom of your page.

As we’ll talk about later, just getting people to Amazon is a good step

TableZon

This is an add-on we created specifically for building comparison tables with EasyAzon Pro. Comparison tables are a great way to convert traffic over to Amazon.

EasyAzon Pro (if you don’t have it already)

If you want to get all your money’s worth, EasyAzon Pro’s link localization earns you commission for people outside of your resident country. If you have visitors from other countries and don’t have EasyAzon Pro, you’re pretty much leaving money on the table.

Module 4 – WordPress Basics

The difference between a post and a page:

A post is a webpage that is featured on the blog part of your page. While it is similar to a page in that it will have a permanent URL, the post will be pushed down your website as you publish more posts.

Posts will also be sent to your RSS feed, if you decide to set one up.

Here is our blog, which is run with posts:

BoostWP-Blog

Pages, on the other hand won’t show up on your blog, but rather will just be accessible only through the link.

You can use this link on your homepage to link to pages. This way, visitors can easily get to your link.

setup-wordpress-site

Here’s a link on Pat Flynn’s blog, Smart Passive Income that has a link from his about page to his home page.

Widgets

If you’d like to add some widgets to your theme, such as adding the Popular posts to your sidebar, you’ll want to go into the appearance section, then widgets, then drag them to where you want them.

Menus

You’ll also want to make sure you have a menu to make your site easier to navigate. Here’s how you can change your menu to include certain pages:

Pages every site should have:

Once you have your website set up, there’s a couple pages that you’ll want to set up that will make your website look more official when users visit it. The first would be an “About Us” page.

Another would be a “Contact Us” page. While you might want to just let your website site and not have to deal with being contacted, having a page like this makes you look more official. You can do something like add a contact form, such as the plugin FS Contact Form, or you can put your email on the page.

If you decide to go with the email, make sure it’s not a link, so bots can’t pick it up. Doing something such as example [@] easyazon.com works well.

We’ll get into creating content and different pages relating to being an Amazon Associate in the Creating content below. First, let’s cover how to sign up to be an Amazon Associate

Module 5 – Setting Up Amazon Associates Accounts

Setting up your Amazon Associates Accounts is extremely easy with EasyAzon.

Step 1 – Set Up Your Access Key ID / Secret Access Key

  1. Go to the first tab in EasyAzon Settings
  2. Click: AWS Account Management page
  3. There will be a pop up message
    1. Click: Continue to security credentials
  4. Get to security credentials
  5. Click Access keys
  6. Then click create new access key
  7. Click show access key
  8. Now copy & paste those to EasyAzon
    1. Make sure there are no spaces on either side of the access key
      e.g. No “_xxxxxxxxx_”

Here’s a video to help:

Step 1.5 – Set up For Your Amazon Product API

Depending on how long you’ve been an Amazon Affiliate, you may or may not have already set up your Amazon Product API. This is a simple step that will ensure that everything is working well.

1. Log into your Amazon Associate Account

2. Click on the Product Advertising API tab on the top menu

3. Click Sign up now

4. Follow the sign up directions -> it’s pretty straight forward and instant

Here’s a video to help:

Step 2 – Setting Up Your tracking ID’s

Simply go to the Amazon Associates tab, and click sign up next to each country. You can use your current site for every country.

Here’s a video to help:

Step 3 – Setting Up and Configuring Your EasyAzon Pro Plugin

Here’s a video walking through all the awesome configurations we have for you:

Step 4 – How to Create Amazon Affiliate Links Using EasyAzon Pro

Here’s a video showing how to do so:

 

Now that you are all signed up and know how to insert links and images into your post, let’s get into what kind of content you’ll be creating. After that, we’ll focus on techniques to get traffic to your blog, and then look at strategies to maximize your Amazon earnings.

Module 6 – Creating Content for your Amazon Review Site

When it comes to creating content for a successful Amazon Affiliate site, it is all about giving the user information that Amazon alone couldn’t give them. This means you’ll want to give them reviews, deal posts, best sellers, product comparisons, and more information like that. We’ll get into the specific types of content here in a little.

Where this all begins, however, is with keyword research.

Keyword research is at the basis of most people’s content marketing plan, however, most people don’t execute on their keyword-based plans.

The reason most people fail this execution is because they don’t understand the intentions behind the keyword. This is why Amazon product review sites work so well, because the intention behind someone Googling “[product x] review” means that they are in a purchasing mindset.

To successfully write articles based on keywords, you always need to look for the intention behind the keyword. These are the kind of results that Google will reward, and will make visitors happy they came across your site.

Once you understand the intention behind the keyword. You can then craft your content to answer their intention. Whether it is a full review of a product, or specific information regarding your niche.

The better you answer their question, the better your blog post it.

However, writing to answer their question is not enough now a days. With more people building websites than ever before, you now have competition.

You not only need to answer his or her question, you need to do it better than anyone else. Before we get into the actual creating content and techniques you can use to do this faster and better, let’s look at a good way to do some keyword research.

Keyword Research How-To

We covered how to exactly do keyword research earlier, with looking for a niche to build your website on. You can do this exact same process for finding keywords in your niche to write about.

I personally use SEMRush or Google Adwords to “scrape” websites similar to your niche for keywords. You can do this by Google your topic or main keyword and using the top 5 to 10 sites there and scraping those.

You can also go to Amazon and search for your product categories, and scrape those for keywords. This is a great idea, because these are the searches you want to be ranking for, so you can send people over to the exact product they need from your site.

This will get you a major list of keywords to write about. The more keywords you have, the better.

Next, upload these keywords into Moz Difficulty Checker. This will give you an idea of which ones to prioritize. You want to find the gems that are high searches and low competition.

Once you have all your keywords, their searches and their difficulty, you’ll want to begin to group them into blog posts. A lot of the keywords you come across will be very similar, and it won’t make sense to write two blog posts that are exactly the same. Even though you may not have all the keywords exactly optimized in your blog post, Google now is better at picking up related keywords in posts. If your blog post answers the intentions behind a keyword that isn?t even in your post, Google will reward you for it.

This is good. It saves you time and avoids you getting slapped with a Google penalty for duplicate content.

So at this point, you should have grouped the keywords together under one specific blog post topic, know all their searches and difficulty. Now comes the actual content creation.

Creating content – Do you put in time or money?

There’s really two ways to create content for your Amazon site. The first is to sit down and begin writing and creating. This takes time and effort.

The other way is to put in money. You can easily outsource the writing of your content. While this will take time at the beginning, it can pretty much go on autopilot once you have it set up.

If you are looking to outsource your writing, you’ll need to find a freelance writer.

The top places to look would be Odesk, Elance, or Textbroker.

When looking for a writer, you will want to make sure that this person is able to meet the standards that you need for your site. If the writer you hire doesn’t write great English, you’ll spend too much time editing and reworking the work they send you to be viable.

What I recommend are picking a couple blog posts, and finding writers to test out with one blog post. If they are able to get you writing that you approve of, then you can move on to hiring them.

The cost for this really depends on your hire. There are writers from the Philippines who charge as low as $3.33 an hour, but have great English skills.

Take time with your hiring process. Finding the right fit early one will save you tons of headache and time down the road.

Once you have found your writer, you can create a workflow so that everything goes as smoothly as possible for you and your writer.

An example of this would be to send the writer guidelines for how you want to post to be written (which I’ll cover below), the topic and keyword for that topic, and research you’ve done. You can also hire the writer to do the research as well, but you’ll want to make sure they know what kind of standard is needed for this. Remember, you need to answer the intention of the keyword better than everyone else online.

After sending them the above stuff, you could then have them send you drafts for you to look over, edit (hopefully minimally), and then upload to your WordPress site to format and publish or schedule.

With this, you could grow your site while spending very little time actually on it.

Guidelines for creating good content

If you want to rank well in Google, you’re going to want to follow some principles and practices when it comes to creating your blog post.

First, is looking at the intention behind the keyword. You need to answer this as thoroughly as possible, and then some.

To get a good sense of how to answer it, search for the keyword yourself and see what the top ranking posts are doing.

Are they answering in lists’ Are they using lots of images? Do they have videos? How long are their posts?

These are questions you’ll want to ask and answer about your competition. If you see everyone is using lists, then that means lists work. Then you’ll want to ask how many items are there in their list? Could you double that?

An example is if someone has a post that says, “5 ways to budget better”, could you create a blog post that is “10 ways to create a better budget?”

If you notice the people ranking high aren’t using videos, then maybe you should if it’d help answer the intention behind the keyword better.

The more images and videos you use, the better, as long as they help provide the information the visitor is looking for.

You want your post to be easier to read, have better information, and explain that information better than the rest of your competition.

When creating content, you want it to be as easy to read as possible. This means:

  • Using shorter paragraphs
  • Organizing with h2 headers
  • Using Bullet points where applicable
  • Keeping the writing simple

3 Types of Content

There are 3 types of content that you’ll want to focus on when building out your Amazon site.

The first is general information articles.

These can be keyword inspired. If you have keywords where people are seeking out information about the niche you are in, or products in it, then these articles will give them that information.

While these won’t be your biggest money-makers, they will certainly help get people to your website and establish you as an authority in the niche. If someone is looking for information about your niche, finds the answer on your site, they will likely come back to you when they are looking for information further down the sales funnel.

With content like this, it certainly helps if the niche you are in is more complicated, like electronics. Someone won’t Google “How does a baseball bat work”, but there are plenty of keyword searches for “How does a 3D TV work”.

The more complicated the niche, the more potential there is for general information articles.

Product review articles

These articles are the moneymaking articles. While it is good to get all 3 kinds of articles out, you’ll want to focus a little more heavily on the product review articles.

The keywords you’ll want to look for with these ones are ones that look like “Best [product]”, “Top [product]” or “[product] Reviews”.

The reason these are so good is that it means someone is looking to purchase that product, so they are searching for what is the best one out there. If you are able to get into the 1 to 3 spot on Google for those keywords, you’ll be sure to be bringing in money with them.

These articles will take a lot of research to create, because you want them to be the best review articles online. That’s the only way you’ll be able to create a long lasting money source with them.

Another feature you’ll want to add to these reviews are product comparison tables. These tables are very high converting on traffic and offer an advantage over other reviewers, since they most likely won’t have them.

These tables are typically hard to create and take a lot of time, but we created an add on to our plugin, EasyAzon Pro that makes it extremely easy to create these kinds of tables.

Deal Articles

Deal articles are a great post to put out weekly, and they’re extremely easy to put together. You can simply go to the Amazon, search through your niche and find the products with the biggest discounts

These are great to send out in emails weekly as well. Everyone likes to find deals on products, so if you are able to deliver deals right to their inbox about a niche that they are interested in, then you are likely to get a good amount of click throughs onto Amazon.

Since these aren’t reviews, you don’t need to spend a ton of time describing the products. You can give 1 to 2 sentences about them, possibly reference a review, and then add a link to Amazon that says, “Click here for more information”.

Often times, just getting them over to Amazon is enough to make some commissions. Whether it’s from the product you advertised or another.

Content Conclusion

So there you have it. When it comes to creating content, it doesn’t have to be complicated. While it takes a lot of work to create great content, you don’t need to struggle to come up with ideas.

Simply follow the formula:

1. Do Keyword Research

2. Organize Keywords and sort for priority

3. Research the topic based keyword

4. See what your competition is doing

5. Write a post that beats out your competition in every way

This will take time and you won’t see instant results from a lot of it. It takes some time for Google to start ranking your articles and for people to join your mailing list so you can notify them of new posts.

But if this were extremely easy and you started raking in money right away, everyone would be doing it.

Module 7 – Getting Traffic to Your Site

Getting traffic to your site will probably be the hardest part about building any type of website. Simply putting up content, no matter how great, does not guarantee people will find it.

Getting your initial traffic, or as we like to say, getting past your friends and family traffic, is always a big jump, as well as a great feeling of accomplishment once you do.

There are two ways to start your traffic getting campaign. You can either do inbound marketing or outbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is where people are coming to your site. You aren’t necessarily going out to get them. This would be things like blog posts.

Outbound marketing is where you are going out to get customers, such as advertising.

Since we are starting a niche Amazon review site and outbound marketing isn’t always the most viable option to start out with, let’s begin by looking at inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing

The main aspect of inbound marketing that we are focusing on it blog posts. The 3 types of content we were talking about earlier are all blog posts that we will be putting out, and hopefully have people coming to them in search of information and answers to their questions.

Let’s take a look at how we can take advantage of SEO here in 2017:

Getting people to come to your content actually begins with creating the content. I don’t need to beat a dead horse about creating awesome content. That is what is getting rewarded today in Google. They aren’t perfect at it, but they are getting better and better at deciphering good and bad content.

Moving away from creating awesome content, there are some other factors you’ll want to take into account when writing your posts.

Keyword Optimization

This is becoming less and less important with every Google update, because they are becoming better at their semantic readings of text. This means that exact match keywords in your post aren’t weighted as heavily as they used to be.

If you are able to write content that answers the intention behind the keywords, Google will start to pick up on that. However, they aren’t perfect at it yet and so optimizing for a specific keyword is still good practice.

It is best to try and include it in the URL of your post, the fist paragraph, as well as in a subheading (H2) near the top of the post.

The important part of all this is to make sure that you are writing in a language that humans understand. Your visitors’ understanding comes before writing for search engines. This means ridiculously stuff your articles with the keyword you’re optimizing for won’t work like it used to.

I like to use the Yoast SEO plugin as a good tool to help guide my keyword optimization. While the number of exact keywords put into your article is becoming less important, it’s still good to have something to measure where you are at and to keep track of which posts are targeting what keywords.

So now that your website is not only set up for a good SEO structure, but you are creating awesome content that is ready to rank well in Google, it’s time to look into at a major topic of discussion in the SEO world? Link building.

What is Link Building?

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your page. This is essentially search engine’s ways of seeing what your brand authority is.

If other websites are using you as a reference, then that probably means you have something important to say.

Besides creating awesome content, link building is probably the most influential factor when it comes to SEO. However, not all links are created equal.

When it comes to link building in 2017, quality over quantity is the name of the game. Not only will having a bunch of crappy, low authority sites not help your rank at all, it could even hurt you down the road.

Google does not weigh all links the same. A link is worth more if:

1. It comes from a higher authority site (you can check domain authority with Mozbar)

2. It comes from a site related to your niche

These are extremely important factors when it comes to your link building campaign. You can no longer set up a bunch of low authority sites and just link back to your site. While techniques like that worked in the past, they are no longer working now.

The mixture of links pointing back to your site is called your “link profile”. You want this link profile to be full of high authority sites that are related to the topic you write on.

So now let’s look at some ways to get links in 2017.

White Hat Link Building

While grey hat and black hat link building is still working in some aspects, if you want to fully “Google-proof” your website, you’ll want to stick with completely white hat tactics when it comes to building links back to your website.

There are a few techniques that you will want to start working on. These aren’t quick fixes, but they are also completely white hat and will allow your website to thrive with every Google update

Note: Not all of these tactics will work for every site. Treat this like a buffet, pick the ones that look good to you and give them a try. The bigger your site grows, the more pulling off all of these becomes a possibility.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is a great way to start getting readers to your blog. While Matt Cutts head of web spam at Google said guest posting is dead as a way to link build, he was referring to how people used to do it.

People would write on any site that would let them, and overly optimize their anchor text (the actual text on the page that is hyperlinked) directed back at their site. These kind of guest posting links aren’t high quality.

To get higher quality links from guest posting, you’ll need to start building relationships. While being an online entrepreneur may sound like you work for yourself and don’t need anyone’s help, that’s completely wrong.

Building a solid foundation of other website owners and people in your niche is essential to getting great guest posting opportunities.

A great example of this is Neil Patel. Neil is the founder of KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg, along with running the blog QuickSprout.com along with doing marketing consulting. Neil writes an immense amount of blog posts, but a lot of them don’t end up on his own websites.

He is constantly writing for Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, TechCrunch, Mashable, Business Insider, Moz, and Geekwire. While he doesn’t always link back to his site in these articles, he does find a way to do so most of the time.

Not only does he get links from this, but he gets more eyes on his work, more exposure and promotion for his social media accounts, which then in turn gets him more people to promote his personal blog posts to. It is a practice that is continuously growing his blog reader audience, not only through link building and SEO, but through readers discovering him on other sites and growing his social media presence.

You’ll want to start building these relationships right away. There are several things you’ll want to do when it comes to starting these relationships, but they all focus around providing value.

This is how all relationships evolve in our lives. You want to provide value to those around you, and for this, they will come to enjoy being around you and well as providing value right back.

When it comes to building relationships online, it’s pretty easy to get started, especially since not many people online are actually providing good value. Just look at social media and blog commenting.

So what you will want to do, is to find high authority blogs that are similar to the topic you are in. These can be direct competitors, or niches that are close but not exactly competitors.

An easy way to do this is’to Google some terms like:

  • Your Niche “guest post”
  • Your Niche “write for us”
  • Your Niche “guest article”
  • Your Niche “guest post opportunities”
  • Your Niche “this is a guest post by”
  • Your Niche “want to write for”
  • Your Niche “submit blog post”
  • Your Niche “contribute to our site”
  • Your Niche “submit post”
  • Your Niche “submit an article”

Once you have started to create a list of these websites, you’ll want to start getting noticed by the webmaster and writer of these websites. Remember, you don’t build a relationship with a website, you build it with the people running the site. Whether it’s the writers or the webmaster, you want to start building your personal network of influential people.

The way to get noticed by these people is to start providing as much value as possible. This can come in the form of intelligent blog posts, engaging with them on social media, providing them with information that you think they would find helpful, and many more.

The best way to go about this is to start off slowly, with a few blog posts and interacting with them on social media. This is how relationships tend to start in the offline world, so following this protocol certainly helps online.

You don’t want to just spend one week commenting a massive amount on their blog and then asking them for something. You need to build a real relationship with these people. If you don’t, they’ll see through the superficial nature of your attempts.

After you’ve caught their attention by providing them value, you can then move to contacting them in different ways, such as finding them on LinkedIn or getting their email address.

Reaching out to them over time, after providing them value, will raise your chances of actually landing a guest post on their site.

If you are able to:

1. Provide them value

2. Prove you will write them an awesome post (by having great content on your site)

3. Be completely authentic in building the relationship

Then you will have a much better possibility at landing a guest post on their site.

Most often, you will be able to link back to your website in your profile at the bottom of the post, along with possibly in the middle of the post if you need to reference one of your articles back on your own site.

If you are able to continuously do this with higher authority sites, not only will you continue to get good links back to your blog, but also you will start to build a network of people that can help you in the future. Also, their readers will come across you as well, which can send them over to your site to gain even more readers.

A good rule of thumb is to save some of your best articles for other sites, especially when starting out. This will actually get you more visitors, since you’ll be writing awesome content to an existing audience.

Asking for Links

While the title maybe straight forward, the strategies for this are a little more complicated. Simply emailing webmasters and asking them to link to your blog for no particular reason won’t work one bit.

You want to give the webmaster a solid reason to link to your blog, and looking at these reasons will give us some strategies that you can use to start getting some links to your blog.

Money

Let’s get this one out of the way first. Yes, you can still buy links. Google doesn’t want you to do this, but on a surface level, they can’t really tell if you send someone $50 via PayPal for them to link to your blog.

If the website linking to you is high authority and related for your niche, overall it will look like a natural link if done right, and the text isn’t over optimized for your keyword.

However, I would avoid this. While purchasing links still does work (on some major companies still do this), they can tend to come to light at some points. If you are buying links from a website, how do you know they are selling backlinks to other people. Google looks for unnatural linking to and from websites.

So you may pay some good money for a link to a high authority website, but if that website gets slapped with a Google penalty for unnatural linking, your money will be lost down the drain.

There’s better ways to get links to your site that will “Google-proof” your website. If you want to experiment with buying links, go for it, but we don’t recommend it.

Now there are completely legit ways money can get you links.

While exchanging money for links may at first seem like it’s just buying links, there are ways to get links with money in completely white hat ways.

Sponsorships

An example of this sponsorships. If you can find a company or event that needs a sponsorship related to your niche and you can provide that for them, most likely they’ll link back to your site while thanking their sponsors.

You could set a Google Alert for “Sponsorship opportunities” along with your niche or phrases around your niche. A Google search would provide you some results as well.

Another white hat way to get links back to your site is to buy listings with sites like BBB, Truste, and PR.com. You can even find sites within your niche similar to these.

You can also look for local sites around your area that link to local businesses. While our websites are online and aren’t technically local, you do need an address to run your business. You can look for local business directories, chamber of commerce, forums and local business blogs.

As you can see here, there’s a nice follow link back to the listed websites:

link-building

You’ll want to make sure that whatever program you are signing up for has follow links. The SEOQuake plugin is an easy way to see what are follow links and what are no follow links.

If don’t know what follow / no follow links are, they are simply two kinds of links. The follow link will count towards you Google ranking, or pass on the “link juice” from one page to another. No follow links don’t help with SEO.

Promoted content

This isn’t exactly a link building technique, but I wanted to include it here anyways, because it can help with links.

If you pay to promote your content, whether that is featured posts, social media or bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, then you are more likely to get more people to see your content, which can lead to more links.

In the last couple years with Google, it has appeared that social shares of your content have been one of the highest correlated factors when it comes to rankings. However, as Google has even said themselves, they aren’t using social shares for SEO rankings.

The SEO industry’s speculation between this high correlation of social shares and rankings is that it is likely that if your content gets shared a lot, there’s a lot more of a chance that people are going to link to it.

So while promoted content isn’t exactly a link building strategy, it can eventually lead to more links. Since it’s hard to track the return on paying for promoted content to links, this may not be your first go to strategy.

However, paying for promoted content will get your content in front of more people, whether that directly leads to links or not, that’s a positive outcome for your site.

Now that we’ve look at black hat and white hat ways money can get you links, let’s look at the next reason a webmaster would want to link to your website.

Friendship / Business Relationships

Definitely use this one sparingly.

This is certainly a grey hat tactic, it is leaning more towards black hat in the eyes of Google, because you technically aren’t earning the link. Simply asking for someone to link to your site because you have a good relationship could make the relationship sour. Especially if you aren’t adding anything else to the value proposition.

Other things you could add to the value proposition for this would be a link for a link, or if you know you have great content that the other person would enjoy.

This tactic of simply asking a buddy to link to your site can work, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s better to save asking people you have good relationships with for something more than just a link, such as letting your guest post or teaming up with them on a bigger project that will link to your site.

Ego Bait

This is actually a really great way to get links, and can work with the other tactics here as well.

Reference other people’s work

One way to pull this off really well is to create content that references other people’s works, which gets their attention and can possibly get them to link back to you if they have an appropriate place to do so.

If you are using someone’s work as a reference, or perhaps reviewing something they do, like their blog, book or podcast, then they may reference back to you as an example of their work. Perhaps, if you’re review is really positive, you can even say you’ll be used as a testimonial on their website. This will often times get you a link to your website.

Blog Roll

Another ego bait tactic is to create a “blog roll” where you list on the sidebar of your website other “top blogs” in your niche. Once you do this, you can reach out to the webmasters of the sites and let them know about it. You’d want to let them know you appreciate their site, think they are doing good work, and could then possibly pitch a guest post or collaboration on some work.

Doing someone a favor and building a positive image of him or her will make him or her more likely to help you.

If you want to get systematic about it, you can create the blog roll, then continuously replace sites with new ones if you don’t get a link from them. This strategy won’t fit for everyone, because it’s a little inauthentic due to the true intentions behind the blog roll, but if building links is your main need, then it’s a possibility.

“Best of” Badges

If pulled off well, this can be a great link-building move. If you can create a post that shows the best blogs in your industry, and create a badge for being in it, the people will inclined to post the badge on your blog.

The blog will naturally need to link back to your post.

To execute this properly, you’d want to hire a third party to come up with the results of the post.

Here’s an example of “Adage Power 150” pulling this off perfectly:

badge-link-bait

Instead of a daily update, you could do this once a year, and make it an annual event, consistently getting new links back to your blog from people either referencing your list, or putting their “best of” badges on their websites.

Everyone likes to be recognized for things they are doing well. If you can give them a badge to show off, that’s even better.

Now let’s look at one of the last, and possibly most effective ways to get links back to your site.

Website Content

Once again create awesome content!

Don’t worry, that’s not the whole strategy, but this strategy begins with your ability to create content that is great and other people are proud to share.

There are a couple strategies that you can pair up with your awesome content to get consistent backlinks to your website.

Broken Links

Broken links is a strategy that involves searching people’s websites for links that are no longer working.

This will happen if someone links to a website, and then either that website or specific page gets taken down, or the link URL gets changed.

When you find a broken link that is referencing a webpage similar to your niche, you have found the perfect broken link.

Once you have found this broken link, you can do one of two things:

1. You can create the content that would be the perfect reference to what the article was intentionally referencing. This may take some assuming, but it is possible.

Or

2. You can use an article you already have that would be a great reference in replacement of that link.

Both of these will work well.

Once you have the replacement content, you’ll want to notify the webmaster about the broken link.

You can tell him / her that you really like their website, think they are doing great work, and that you were reading through the specific article with the broken link and found that the link was broken.

You can then offer them your content as a replacement, giving them a little summary of why it’s the perfect fix for their broken link.

This is a high converting link building campaign. Not only are you giving the webmaster a compliment, you are also giving him / her help.

They get an ego boost and fix a broken link and you get yourself a backlink.

To find backlinks, you can use a program called “Integrity“for Mac or Xenu’s Link Sleuth for PC which will search websites for bad links. You can simply open that up, toss in some high authority websites from around your niche and find broken links in them.

Since we are a WordPress plugin website, let me show you an example of how this would work for us:

1. I’ll use the WordPress page on Wikipedia (Wikipedia reference links are no follow – so this is just an example)

2. Set the right settings

3. Check out the links

It looks like there is a broken list referencing a survey that most WordPress websites aren’t very secure.

What I could simply do now is create a survey, send it out to our email list, social media, and put it on our blog and try to get a lot of people to answer some simple questions about the security measures they take on their website.

After putting that all together, I would have a great piece of content that could be used to replace that bad link on Wikipedia, which is a high authority domain and is a page on WordPress.

Another way to find bad links is if you come across a resource page on a site around your niche. I like the extension plugin Check My Links, which will go through a website really fast and look for bad links.

amazon-associate-link-building

Doing this on reference sites may not find links as easy, but it’s a nice practice to have while going along because you may never know where you find a bad link.

A third tactic for finding bad links is to stay up to date on big companies around your niche going out of business, or websites going down.

If you know of a major website or business that is no longer operating, you can check their website for backlinks to see who has linked to them. You can do this with hrefs or Open Site Explorer very easily.

open-site-explorer

Then you can investigate the sites linking to them, and see if there are any links you could replace with more relevant content.

Now let’s look at the last way we’ll discuss for getting some good links in 2017

The Skyscraper Technique

This is a technique made famous by Brian Dean of Backlinko (if you want more back linking tactics, Brian’s the man to go to).

This technique involves creating awesome content (like always), and then doing a Google search to find the top content around the keyword you are targeting.

If you honestly created your content better than everyone else ranking for that keyword, then you could do an hrefs or open site explorer search on the top websites to see who is linking to them.

Once you find who is linking to them, you can then contact the webmaster, letting them know that your content is either more up to date or extensive then the content they are linking to.

You don’t want to ask to replace the link, but rather propose that you would be a good reference to add into to their post.

If you want exact scripts on what to email these webmasters, Brian has them in his Skyscraper Technique Guide here.

So that is what we have for asking for links. You’ll want to make sure you keep track of which websites you are contacting, whether or not you got links and when you did it. This way you can avoid overbearing websites with multiple requests for links.

Asking for links is about being savvy and understanding what you are giving of value to the webmaster you are contacting.

Break News Topics Related to Your Niche

This strategy here is a bit more involved that the other ones, in that you actually need to be near the event that you need to write about.

You can’t really break news related to your niche if you get the news off another website.

What you can do, however, is attend conferences and events related to your niche and write about them as you are there. This way, if there are any major happenings, you can be the first one to put them online.

You can use social media for real time updates, but you’ll want to be one of the first people to get a the news onto your site, so when others reference it, they’ll be linking to your website, since that’s where it originated at.

So that’s enough on link building and SEO in 2017. Now let’s look at other ways to get traffic to your site.

Social Media

When starting out with an Amazon review website, it’s good to get your social media accounts set up, but they shouldn’t be a main focus for you.

If you’re busy on social media, then that means you aren’t spending time creating content or working on SEO. Content and SEO are the keys to building an Amazon review site that makes money while you sleep.

However, it is good to eventually move some focus to social media. Depending on your niche, you’ll want to consider which social media platforms are best for you.

You’ll want to decide where people who buy the products you are reviewing hang out. Are they on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, YouTube or Pinterest? This really depends on your site.

If you site is very visual based, which great pictures, such as a cooking site, then you’ll want to make sure you are taking advantage of Pinterest.

With reviewing anything, videos are a great way to capture attention, are great in blog posts and will drive continuous traffic from YouTube.

Since social media isn’t the biggest factor in creating an Amazon Affiliate site, I won’t be including tactics to gain followers and more shares.

Blog / Forum Commenting

This tactic used to be a link-building tactic, but now most forums and blog comments have no follow links. This is perfectly fine, because they don’t hold much weight in SEO anyways.

However, if you can go to blogs and forums that your ideal visitors are already hanging out at and establish yourself as an authority, then you can start to drive people to your website.

Answering people’s questions, and linking back to your site appropriately, either in your bio or referencing some of your work, will establish you and your website as an authority in the niche.

This is a more active form of generating traffic, but it’s a great way to go from the “friends and family” traffic to real traffic.

Good places to look for are forums in your niche, sites like Quora, Reddit, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, and basically anywhere your ideal visitors are already at.

A good strategy to have for this is to block out 10 to 20 minutes a day, or every couple of days where you simply visit the list of sites you’ve collected and comment or post in them. The more intelligent the posts and better you answer people’s questions, the more of an authority people will see you as.

Advertising

The last way we’ll talk about getting traffic to your niche site is advertising. This doesn’t often work for most niche sites, since you’re profit per visitor may not be that high, since you aren’t selling anything directly, but getting commissions from Amazon.

However, if you notice that your income per visitor is pretty good, and then it would be something worth experimenting with.

To find out your income per visitor, take your last month’s website profit and divide it by the number of unique visitors your website received. That will give you an idea of your profit per visitor, which you can then compare with how much it would cost to get a visitor using advertising.

If you come out positive, give it a try!

I would start with Google Pay Per Click or Facebook ads.

Since most Amazon Affiliate sites would use advertising, I won’t cover those in depth here.

So those are the ways we have to get more traffic to your websites.

I recommend using a combination of all of them, but primarily focusing on content creation and link building when you are starting out. Focusing on SEO traffic will build a solid, continuous stream of users to your site on a daily basis, and that’s where the passive income is at.

So now that you know how to set up your website and start getting traffic to it, let’s look at the tips and strategies that will maximize your Amazon Affiliate website.

Module 8 -Maximizing Your Amazon Associate Earnings

1. Create a mailing list

This is something I am constantly telling people to do, and it’s one of the easiest ways to improve any website, no matter the website’s goal.

While ideally, a good Amazon Affiliate site will be relying on organic traffic, since it’s free and passive once going. However, if something happens to your rankings on the search engines, having people’s email addresses is one way to have maintained a “safety net”.

No matter what happens, you will be able to still reach an audience if you took the time to build an email list.

Also, some of the other tips in this guide depend on having an email list, which we’ll get into later. It’s much easier to convert people if you are putting an email in their inbox rather than them coming across your site via Google.

A couple tips for building your email list:

Offer a “freebie”

This should be something related to your niche that is worth the trade off of someone’s email. Although we call these freebies, they actually cost the “price” of someone giving you their email address

This could consist of a free course, a free report, a video series, or anything enticing enough to grab someone’s attention, along with their email address

Put opt-in forms in as many places as possible (without being annoying)

  • A bar at the top of your blog advertising your free report
  • At the bottom of posts
    • If someone read your entire post, chances are they enjoyed what you wrote, offer them a chance to stay in touch
  • On the sidebar
  • Possibly even a pop-up

niche-site-more-leads

Run a contest

This has to be done in a specific way, because you don’t want a bunk of junk emails in your list. They will hurt your delivery rate and bounce rate down the road.

To do this right, you’ll want to pick a great prize that would be wanted by people in your niche. So a $200 gift certificate to Amazon wouldn?t be good, because everybody in the world would want that.

You don’t want to dilute your list.

An example of a good one would be if you were running a baseball gear review site to use something like a baseball bat, batter’s gloves, or anything along those lines.

To take a contest to the next level, it helps if the contestants themselves want to share your contest. To pull this off, you’ll want to offer every contestant 1 to 3 extra entries for everyone they refer to your contest. While this is very doable manually, it’s much easier if you find a piece of software to do this.

If you would like to make this easier, you can check out our WordPress plugin called Contest Boost, which does this, but feel more than welcome to Google “Contest Plugins” or “Contest Software” to find different items.

This can be done manually, so don’t think running a contest requires buying software

Set up Autoresponders

This can be done in a day, but you should set up autoresponders to your list once it starts to get built. This can be to your best info on your website, that you think is essential readings for your niche.

Anything that provides the people signing up value and builds trust with them is great to put in autoresponders. After building a trusting relationship with them, you can begin to send them to some of your “money” pages.

But remember, a good relationship comes first. You don’t want to take the time to build an email list only for them to unsubscribe in the first week because of your autoresponders.

2. Deal Posts

These posts are really good moneymakers to have on your site. You can do these daily or weekly. I prefer weekly, because it is less work and gets similar results as daily deal posts.

This is as simple as going onto Amazon, see the current best sellers or what is advertised as deals and create a blog post featuring them. If you can do this on the same day every week it’ll train your audience to check in at that point to see what the best deals of the week are.

This is also a time when an email list comes in handy. You can email them a weekly or monthly update on deals in your niche, and send them to your deals page.

Tip: You will want to segment these deal lists to send to people who have already gone through your autoresponders. Doing this means you are only sending these emails to people who you have built relationships with. This will keep your email list happy and not feeling spammed.

This is relatively easy to do in most email services.

3. Product Comparison Tables

For me these have been great converting pages and very appealing to visitors on my sites. Making things visually easy to comprehend it great for conversions.

This is especially helpful if the niche you are in is complicated and technical. Giving the reader information and making their choice easier of which product they want to buy gives you a higher chance of sending them to Amazon and getting your commission.

To build a product comparison table in a matter of minutes, we now are selling an extension to EasyAzon Pro called TableZon.

If you’d like a free way to create tables, you can do it in TablePress. It takes much longer and doesn’t have the same features as TableZon, but it’s free.

4. Write a lot of Product Reviews

These are the biggest money making blog posts for Amazon Affiliate sites. Especially if you are able to get them higher in the rankings for search engines. If you are able to write a great review for a product, including images and telling the user how much value the product actually has, you’ll be more likely to send people to Amazon.

The reason I like product reviews is because visitors on this page tend to be in a “buying mindset”. What this means is that they have already decided they want to buy the product, they aren’t just sure what one.

An example of this with the Baseball Gear website is to look at the difference between these posts.

Two good articles to write for this site focused on baseball mitts would be:

1. Children’s Baseball Mitt Reviews

Or

2. How to Break in a Baseball Mitt

Both of these would be good articles to bring traffic to your website, however, just looking at the title I can tell you which one would convert higher visitors into buyers on Amazon.

The baseball mitt review would make you more money. People going to that article need a children’ baseball mitt, but are unsure of which one to get. If you can provide a great review of the top selling children’s mitts (check Amazon’s best seller pages), then you can help them decide, send them to Amazon to purchase and get your commission.

Other “review” like keywords and posts you should look for are ones with the adjectives “best” or “top”, such as The Best Baseball Bats of 2017 or The Top 10 Baseball Gloves on the Market Now.

5. Holiday Specials

Writing posts for holidays is a great way to get people’s attention and the commission on the gifts they are probably going to buy anyways.

The obvious holidays that come to mind are around Christmas, where buying across all niches usually spikes. If you can send out a Black Friday and / or a Cyber Monday email with a related posts, then you’ll have a way higher chance of converting on that day.

You can even do posts for Christmas Ornaments. I kid you not, I’ve seen this work in pretty small niches. Something like “The Top 25 Baseball Christmas Ornaments for Your Tree” is a strategy that truly works.

The best part is that since it’s Christmas time, chances are that the person you send to Amazon won’t just buy an ornament. Since Amazon gives you commission on everything the person buys that you sent over, you have a good chance of picking up commissions from items beyond the Christmas Ornaments.

6. Event Focused Posts / Emails

This tip is similar to the one above, but usually isn’t implemented as much as the holiday specials. Sending timely emails, even beyond the holidays is a great way to increase sales.

Keeping with the baseball example, if you were to do a simple Google search for when does little league / high school / college baseball season start, you’d find a good time for when parents and players are looking to buy new gear.

If someone knows they will need to buy themselves or their kids new baseball cleats before the new season, how do you think they’d respond to an email a week or 2 before season starts title”The Best Baseball Gear for The Upcoming Season”

This is making their lives easier, especially if you are reviewing and recommending the best gear on Amazon.

You can also do big media events for your niche. Whether it’s a conference, a TV show, or something along that nature. An example of this for Baseball would be sending out timely emails during the World Series. Perhaps gear to support either team.

7. Focus on Small, Lower Price Products to Get Higher Commissions

This is a strategy that I love because of how Amazon’s commission system works

You start at a lower commission rate, then the more you sell the higher your commission rate becomes. While selling big ticket items is awesome and will make you more money than smaller items, using smaller, inexpensive items is a great way to sell more products overall.

Your commission rate gets restarted every month with Amazon, so you’ll want to have consistent high volume sales to raise your rate. However, once you do raise your rate, you get that commission rates on every product sold that month, even ones before you got your higher commission.

For example, say you sold 150 items at the start of the month, but by the end of the month you sold 300. For those first 150 items, you’d get a bump in commissions to match your end of the month commission rate.

Even a small jump in commission rates can make a big difference, especially if it’s a sustainable strategy that is getting you high commission rates every month.

Strategies to get these higher commission rates with small items are to use a few techniques. I’ll stick with the baseball examples here.

One strategy is to stick with the review posts for these. This can be hard though, because people don’t have search for reviews on purchases that are less than $5. These posts will still draw in visitors and make you money, so I recommend doing them anyways.

A good way to find these are to go to Amazon, search baseball, then filter by 4 stars and up and sort by price: lowest to highest. This will give you some good ideas of inexpensive items to write about on your blog.

Another strategy you can use is to add “Add on” items at the bottom of your posts. This is similar to what Amazon itself does to sell more.

For example, if with a post on baseball mitts, you could include a little section at the bottom where you show the #1 best selling baseball mitt oil on Amazon. If people are buying a new glove, they’ll want to break it in, and you need baseball mitt oil to do that properly.

It’s making their life easier by showing them the best oil to get.

A third strategy you could use to sell small items and get higher commission rates is to do “how-to” posts and videos. Sticking with the baseball oil, if you were to do a post and a YouTube video where you walk people through how to break in a mitt and then recommend the best selling mitt oil on Amazon, that’s a good way to move some volume.

If the video and post are good, then the person already sees you as an authority on breaking in mitts. It’s a logical step for them to buy the $1.75 baseball mitt oil that you recommend.

There are examples like that in every niche. It may take a little thinking and some research on Amazon, but it’ll be worth it if it helps you go from the lowest 4% to the highest 8.5% commission rate even if the extra volume of small items doesn’t add a lot of direct income.

8. Buy Now Buttons

Using properly placed buy now buttons on your website can make a huge impact. If you write a great review for an item, and someone is looking to buy that item, placing a buy now button makes it all that easier for them.

[easyazon_cta align=”none” identifier=”B001PKWA5C” key=”wide-orange” locale=”US” tag=”aphideg-20″]

A few good places to put these are under reviews, whether they are in a list on a blog post or in a comparison table.

What works even better is if you use buy now buttons similar to the ones we see on Amazon. These catch the visitor’s eye because they are using to clicking that button when they want something.

This isn’t being spammy or overselling, but simply making it easier for the visitor to buy the product you recommended to them.

EasyAzon Pro makes it easy to put but now buttons in your post, and they are linked using EasyAzon, so you get all the benefits of EasyAzon Pro links.

9. Multiple Text Links Within the Content

I like to use as many text links as possible, without being overbearing. They have to make sense in their placement in the text.

You also want to make sure that these links are blue and underlined. Once again, we are trained that blue and underlined means link. For example, look at this:

If you are going to buy a baseball glove for you kid’s upcoming season, you should definitely get the Rawlings Players Series 10.5-inch Youth Baseball Glove

That looks like a link. You might even have clicked on it thinking it was a link. We are trained to think that blue and underlined is a link. While other colors may work, why would you change something we are already trained to know?

So now that you are going to use blue, underlined text as your links, it’s important to place them in relevant places in your text.

Good places to put them are:

  • The title of the product
  • The price of the product
  • Referring to different sizes, colors, or options of the product
  • When using a curiosity gap
  • “See Full Specs Here”
  • “Read all the Reviews here”
  • “See other options” – a link to a search page on Amazon

The more links in the proper places, the higher chance you have to send someone to Amazon.

Just remember, don’t be overbearing or annoying with your link placement.

10. Use Different Tracking ID’s to Measure

When it comes to doing anything successfully, there’s going to be some trial, error, learning and customization that goes into it.

The problem is, if you only are using one tracking ID from Amazon, you won’t really be able to see what’s working and what’s not.

Amazon allows you to get different tracking ID’s for one account. What I’d recommend doing is using different ones for different kinds of placement. One ID for text in the post, another for images, another for email, another for videos, etc.

This way, you can do more of what works and not waste your time on things that don’t convert.

For example, if you have a bunch of blog posts and a couple videos and are using different tracking ID’s, you can see which ones are contributing better to your income. Maybe you notice your videos are driving a lot of sales. That will give you the information you need to decide to focus a bit more on videos.

If you aren’t tracking, you won’t be able to make intelligent decisions that’ll grow your income. If you are experimenting with techniques, use new codes to see which ones stick and which don?t.

11. Best Seller Posts

These are different than the Deals or Sales posts I talked about earlier, but can be done in a similar fashion. If you’d do a monthly best seller’s post, and send out an email with it, it?s more, relevant content that will help your visitors make decisions.

It’s also extremely easy to put together. Simply look at Amazon’s bestseller list for your niche, write up a bit about each item. You can add a “See more” or “Check out the reviews” links at the bottom, along with a Buy Now button.

To simply add in the best sellers of a certain category, we created the extension BestSeller Azon. You can add 1 to 10 of the best selling items for a category to your post in less than a minute. You can check out more about it here.

Simple and effective.

12. Use an Amazon Link Creator Plugin

This will make your life a lot easier. There are WordPress plugins that will allow you to create links directly within your WordPress post.

If you’re reading this guide that means you already are! Good work!

13. Get Commissions on Non-American Traffic

To pull off this tip, you’ll need EasyAzon Pro, which offers localizing links so that people from different countries go to their local Amazon websites.

This is important because if you send someone from Germany to the U.S. Amazon store, then they go to Amazon.de (the Amazon site for Germany) you lose that commission. However, if you use a plugin that allows you to localize links, then when someone clicks on your affiliate link, they will be sent to their own country’s store and you will get the commission for that sale.

This is a game changer if you have either a large amount of traffic and any non-U.S. based traffic or if you have any traffic and a good chunk of it is from outside the U.S.

A quick thing I recommend doing is checking your Google Analytics and seeing the percentage of traffic that comes from outside the U.S. and then use this formula to figure out how quickly EasyAzon Pro would pay for itself:

“Monthly Amazon Earnings” x “Percentage of traffic from outside the U.S.” = “How much money you’d be making with localized links.”

An example would be if you are making $100 per month with Amazon, and you’re non-U.S. traffic is 25% of your total traffic:

$100 x .25 = $25

14. Add Additional Monetization Strategies to Your Site

Another way to make money on your website is to add more ways to make money. While this seems like a simple idea, it’s not until you dive into some of the options that you realize the potential your “Amazon Affiliate” site could have outside of Amazon.

If you feel you’ve maxed out your Amazon Affiliate potential, or even better, have hired someone to do all the content writing for you, along with the repeatable steps like the weekly deals and monthly best sellers emails, and now find yourself with more time on your hands, then I’d recommend either starting a new Amazon Affiliate site (wash, rinse repeat!) or growing your site into a bigger beast.

Some examples of things that you could add to your site are affiliates through affiliate networks.

You could check sites like click bank or commission junction to see if they have any products related to your niche that you would vouch for on your website. You want to make sure you are finding good products. One bad product sent out in an email could ruin your email list’s trust with you.

So take your time, ask the creators to test out the products for free, and then create promotions for them on your site.

With the baseball example, you can find training regiments, diet plans or even sports psychology programs through these affiliate networks.

Some of the best ways to promote affiliate products are:

  • Case Studies
    • You use the product and track your experience with it
  • Video reviews
  • Webinars
    • I have found that webinars are some of the highest converting ways to sell things
  • Even a simple email

If you are managing a lot of different affiliate links on your website, our plugin, BetterLinks would be extremely helpful. You can check out the free version here.

You want to grow relationships with these people, because another way to make money on your site is to create your own product.

If you check through affiliate networks, and say find a couple good products to promote, but notice a gap in the market for a certain area, you could create the product (or outsource the creation).

This is when relationships with the affiliates help, because they can promote your product for you.

Creating your own products takes more work, but also has the highest returns because you get to keep more of the profits.

Another way to monetize your site is to use the eBay affiliate program. You could split your site up between Amazon Affiliate based articles and eBay articles, where you can show the best deals for used items, along with the latest deals going on.

More content, more deals and more ways for you to make money.

If you are interested in expanding onto eBay, make sure to check out our plugin EasyBay, which is essentially EasyAzon for eBay.

Another easy way to possibly add income to your site is through ad networks.

There are different ad networks to check out, and depending on what niche you are in will depend on which sites to use.

A universal one however is AdSense by Google. It’s easy to sign up for, and easy to implement if you use this free plugin on your site called Quick AdSense.

I’d test this though. The ads can definitely add a new way to make money on your site, but you certainly don’t want them to deter people from your site.

A good way to test this out would be to put them on your site and track your earnings. For the most part, you should see more money coming in overall.

15. Get Started Today

This tip is to get started right now!

I have been working online long enough to know that people tend to consume more than they tend to do.

One of the best ways to make more money online in any fashion is to get started today. If you start your Amazon Affiliate website or implement these strategies today, compared to 6 months from now, which do you think you’ll make the most money with?

Easy answer.