How to Become an Affiliate Marketer for Amazon – 5 Easy Steps

Amazon is the largest marketplace in the world, so it is only natural that people start asking how to become an affiliate marketer for Amazon.  We have racked our brains and have come up with 5 easy steps to getting started and want to share those with you… We will also through in 5 tips to making sure you are successful including some great training and tools that we have used to build up our affiliate marketing business and you can learn how to get started too.

Just to let you know, we have been affiliate marketers ourselves for just over 2 years and we love the fact that we are able to make money online from doing something we love.

Affiliate Marketing is a great business to get started in. It requires little or no start-up costs, is relatively a simple process and there is plenty of opportunities out there.

You will soon learn that whilst Amazon is a great place to get started, there are thousands of affiliate programs out there and if you can succeed with Amazon, the rewards are sometimes better elsewhere.

Having said that, do not discount Amazon’s affiliate program.  It is a well trusted marketplace and is really easy to get started with.

Let’s get cracking with those 5 Steps to getting started as an Amazon Affiliate.

5 Steps to Getting Started as an Amazon Affiliate

The Amazon affiliate program is actually called Amazon Associates and you will not be able to just sign up right away.  Amazon has its brand to consider and would potentially damage that image if they just let anyone sign up and start promoting anything and everything.

This leads us to the fact there are a few steps you need to take before deciding to apply to join their affiliate program.

Step One – What Products Do You Want to Promote?

This is a really important step, what do you actually want to promote?  This may sound odd, but there is a clear strategy you need to follow and if you do not get this clarified now you will find it much harder to actually get anywhere.

You need to consider what product type you want to promote, and then narrow it down to a niche.

Narrow it Down to a Niche

My recommendation would be to focus on a specific niche (a highly targeted segment of the market).

The narrow your niche, the better chance you have of getting started on the right foot.

You niche could be anything:

• Digital Camera Accessories
• Kitten Beds
• Dog Toys
• Beard Trimmers
• Natural Health Supplements for Weight Loss
• CBD Oil
• The list goes on, there is literally thousands to choose from.

This is so important, if you start too broad and target a whole market, the competition is going to be against you.  Targeting a specific niche reduces the amount of competition and gives you a shout.

Two Important Factors to Consider

#1 Choose Something You Are Actually Interested in…

What are you really interested in?  You might like keeping fit, you may like video games, cooking, arts and crafts, healthy eating, music, etc.

It is really important you go with something you love, because you already know the audience you are targeting within that niche.

If I started an affiliate marketing business in anything to do with art, I would really struggle to find content to write, would not know what my audience is really interested in and I would not be able to stay motivated in the slightest about it.

Whilst, Gem who is really creative and into Art could succeed.

If you are going to start a business, you want to start it in something that you love.  People often pick niches because they are chasing the money, but it is the wrong strategy.  Any niche can be profitable if you can stay engaged in it and can help people within that niche.

There is no point starting in a “so-called” profitable niche if you get stuck writing content after 2 weeks.

#2 The Narrower Your Niche, The Better

You can actually use Amazon for this to help too.  You do not want to start too broad, use Amazon’s category section and you will find you are able to drill down into sub-categories and then there are other categories within them too.

Let’s say you are really interested in Pets and wanted to start a business in pets.  If you just targeted pet supplies, you are

up against all people who are in the broad pet supplies market and everyone who is connected to the pet supplies world.

That is what we mean by too broad.  But if you check out the Pet Supplies category on Amazon, you will find that there are absolutely loads of subcategories under a number of different animals from dogs, cats to even some exotic choices too.

You can narrow that down by animal, you can then narrow it down to Dog for example.  There are 17 subcategories within Dog Pet Supplies.

If I selected dog food, I could actually target the Organic Dog Food niche and there would be a huge market for people looking for information on organic dog food for their pets.  People spend a lot of money on their pets, and that is how you narrow down your niche.

You can do this with any interest, spend a few minutes browsing the category section on Amazon and nail a niche for you to target.

Step Two – Create Your Own Website

This is often where people start to question their own ability and walk away because you need to understand HTML and coding to build a website, right?

Not the case in the slightest, nowadays it is really easy to build a website.  You could actually have your own website up and running within a matter of minutes these days and it is free to do in many cases.

Whilst some people will state you do not need a website to do affiliate marketing, it is a much better foundation for your business than social media alone.  It only takes for your chosen social media channel to not be effective with your target audience and you are without any earning potential. You will also find a lot of affiliate programs want to know you have a website as part of the application process.

Does it Have to Cost Money?

I know what you might be thinking, you don’t want to spend money on a website and then find it isn’t for you and you have wasted your money.

Relax, our recommended website builder is SiteRubix and you gain access to TWO free websites with their hosting.  You can get a free website up and running with just a few clicks of your mouse.

(Wait until the end of the post and I will show you the easiest way to get started with all of the tools you need for free)

Choose a Relevant Website Name

You want your website name to be relevant to the niche you have just chosen.  It can be anything you like, as long as it isn’t already taken.  If your niche is organic dog food, you could get creative and go for toporganicdogfood.

Be imaginative and go for a good domain name as this will be your brand name too.

Step Three – Create Content & Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Now, whilst we have a website, we are still not ready to apply for the Amazon Associates program because we need to give them something to review on our website before applying.

They are likely to reject your application if your website has no content on it. So, we need to get into creating content. But what are you going to write about?

You need to write about topics within your chosen niche, if we go back to the organic dog food niche. You could start writing posts such as:

• The Benefits of Feeding Your Dog Organic Food
• Where Does Organic Dog Food Come From?
• Health Benefits of Organic Dog Food

For starters, your posts need to be very specific to people who would already be buying organic dog food or thinking about trying organic dog food and want help understanding the benefits, etc. People are only going to spend more on organic food if there are benefits to their pet.

Just like you were really specific with choosing your niche, you need to write posts that people are searching for, you cannot just randomly write content.  You need to target them with a keyword research tool

Important Step – Use a Keyword Research Tool

A keyword research tool is what you would use to find good keywords to target for your content.  This means you can write content based on searches people are making and makes it more effective when you post your content to the search engines.

I won’t go into too much detail on keyword research here, but ranking your content higher is the key here.

(Again, we will show you the easiest way to get started including keyword research at the end of the post).

You Need Traffic!

The whole aim of any content you write is to get traffic to your website.  No audience, no sales!

Using a keyword research tool and writing a relevant post to get in ranked high in Google is what your aim is.  When people come to your website through a Google search, they can start reading your content and following any advice you offer.

This is called SEO marketing and is a great way of getting free traffic to your website.  Here are the key benefits:

• It is 100% free
• Traffic is Unlimited
• The People who are coming to your website are very targeted, they clicked on it because they are also interested in your niche
• It can last a long time!  If you can rank for an article and people are constantly clicking on it, it can stay top of the search engines for years to come.

There are paid ads, but this is a risky strategy for a beginner and is more for when you are fully established and know what you are doing.

Step Four – Submit Your Application to the Amazon Associates Program

Now that we have a website up and running, we also have some high-quality content that helps people in your niche, it is time to apply for the Amazon Associates Program.

If you already have an amazon account, make sure you are logged in otherwise you are going to need to create an Amazon account.

You will then need to apply for the Amazon Associates account, the information they will ask you for are:

• Account Information – Personal Details
• Website Information – List your website and provide some details around what it is about
• Profile – Complete your profile
• Identity Verification – They may call you to verify your identity.

Please consider your location, we live in the UK and so we applied for the UK Amazon Associates program.  But if you find that your traffic starts to come from the US more you may need to apply for the main Amazon.com program too.

Step Five – Now It’s Time to Promote… Even Though You Might Not Be Approved Yet

Now you need to get started with both high-quality content to improve your traffic numbers and start writing product reviews on the products you want to promote.

The reason, you are now on the clock.  You need traffic to make conversions happen.  You need to make 3 qualifying sales within 6 months to stay in the Amazon Associates program. (They are more lenient in the UK, but the US program will kick you out if you do not make those sales).

Things to Consider When Promoting

There are loads of different ways to incorporate your affiliate links, but if you put too many affiliate links all over the place it will annoy Google.  Google does not like it, as it is not offering quality content to its users.

Our suggestion is that you create central posts that include your affiliate links, typically product reviews and then you write posts that point your readers to your product reviews.

That way, your affiliate links are organised and not placed everywhere and makes for a great user experience on your blog website.

Weren’t Approved?  Find Out What to Do

First off, if you get reject it is not the end of the world.  It just means that you content is still lacking enough valuable content.

Amazon, just like Google is looking for unique content that provides valuable information and helps people make purchasing decisions.  If you are just regurgitating the same information Amazon provides, then that is not unique.

Share your experiences, give your opinions on different aspects of the product.  Research and see what others have experienced with that product and definitely do not even consider copy and pasting someone else’s content.  Put it into your own words, duplicate content has a heavy penalty from Google which will affect your ability to rank.

If you do get rejected, just carry on writing content and in my opinion wait until you are getting some traffic before you reapply.  There is no time-limit on re-applying, my only suggestion is wait until you are getting some traffic.

5 Tips for Success

#1 Choose a Niche in a subject you like, enjoy and can easily spend time talking about or writing about.

#2 Focus on Quality content.  One high-quality post will have much more value than 5 low-quality posts.  Make sure you are thoroughly explaining your points.

#3 Provide Real Value to Your Audience.  People are looking for help and are expecting to find that when they type in a search in Google.  Focus on understanding the questions you are trying to answer and give awesome answers to them.  Focus on the person you are helping and not trying to focus on rankings alone

#4 Write as Though you are Chatting to a Friend. We often don’t talk formally, so blogging is no different.  Writing in a conversational style will have more an impact than an article that looks like an assignment for work or school.

#5 Don’t Fill Your Website with Affiliate Links. If you place them everywhere, you move from someone who is helping people to someone who is selling to people.  Often, that leads to people thinking that and being put off your blog.  Keep it smart and centralise them in product reviews with helpful articles that lead people to your product reviews.

If you can put these tips into action, along with effective keyword research you will find you will be on a very effective path to a profitable affiliate marketing business online.

Get the Right Training & Tools for Free

At this point, I want to suggest you are going to want some formal training when it comes to affiliate marketing.  You could go out and try and get this all right on your own, but you will probably waste a lot of time building up your website, creating content and finding that you are not quite getting it right.

In addition to this, you are going to need some important tools to get started too, such as a platform to build your website on and a keyword research tool to get ranked in the search engines.

Our Suggestion is Wealthy Affiliate!

Wealthy Affiliate is a training platform focusing on Affiliate Marketing, which also provides all of the tools necessary to get started – it provides a website builder and a keyword research tool like we mentioned above.

Put simply, it provides an ‘all-inclusive’ type deal where everything that you may need to get started with an affiliate marketing business is included.

You will also find extensive training all elements of starting an affiliate marketing business, including how to build your website, how to gain that all-important traffic, how to create engaging content and also how to complete keyword research and picking the right keywords for your posts.

You will not need to go anywhere else, which makes it a great place for someone just starting out.

The best thing about it is that they have a free starter membership where you can get started without even putting any credit card details in.  No limited time trial, but a totally free membership option.

You will gain access to:

• Affiliate Marketing Training
• Affiliate Marketing Tools
• Join a Community of Experts
• Instant Support

Gem and I recommend Wealthy Affiliate, because we were fortunate to find them back in 2016 and we are now making money online because of their training, tools and support.

You can create your own free account with Wealthy Affiliate and get started with the button below:

If you would like to learn more about Wealthy Affiliate, check out our full Wealthy Affiliate review.

You could create a free starter account and give it a ‘test drive’ That way you will know if it is what you want and if affiliate marketing is for you.

Whichever way you decide to go, we wish you like on your affiliate marketing journey.  Affiliate Marketing can be very lucrative, but just remember you will need to have patience and it will definitely not make you rich quickly.

There is absolutely loads for you to learn.

If you have any questions, please write them in the comments below and we will come back to you as soon as we can.