Amazon Affiliate Marketing
What is amazon affiliate marketing all about?
Amazon affiliate marketing is nothing but redirecting people to Amazon from your own website and when people convert on Amazon, you get a commission. The commission range varies from 2-10%.
Let’s use an example to understand it better. Suppose, I have a dog and I want to buy a nail clipper for my dog.
What should I do? I go to Google and search “best nail clipper for dogs”. I see this result:
If we break down the Google search, you can see that there are ads at the top of the results and then there are organic search results that Google shows. Generally, Google gives you 10 links on a page to choose from. If you select one of the top 3 results, the chance is 90% that you will land up in an Amazon Affiliate Website.
What’s an Amazon Affiliate Website? The website will try to redirect you to Amazon from their link.
So in this case, you will start seeing nail clipper reviews, tables comparing different nail clippers and there will be links around the content that will ask you to go to Amazon to see today’s price, exclusive deals and etc.
If you click on any of those links to go to Amazon and then buy anything from Amazon within next 24 hours, the website owner that sent you to Amazon will earn 6% as that’s the standard for pet products.
That’s basically what Amazon affiliate marketing is all about. As an affiliate marketer, you simply build a website, you place the website in front of people when they are searching for relevant information and then you simply redirect them to Amazon. Your job is not to convert these traffic into customers. That’s what Amazon will do and as we all know, they do it well. That’s another reason why Amazon affiliate marketing is super popular. When you are an Amazon affiliate marketer, you don’t deal with shady products or services but you only deal with real stuff. Therefore, you can always expect to see great returns based on how many people you send to Amazon from your website.
How Much Can You Earn?
Let’s continue with our hunt for nail clippers. Do you know how many people search this term “best nail clippers for dogs” each month? You can find this data from two places.
One is a Chrome Extension called Keyword Everywhere. This is free and this will immediately show you the search volume of a particular search query on Google in a certain part of the world.
Another solution would be using a software like SEMrush. I recommend Keyword Everywhere as that’s completely free and easy to use.
Now, I did a quick search and found that the query ‘best nail clippers for dogs’ get around 3600 searches a month from USA alone.
Let’s play with that number. Suppose, you have a website about dogs and that website has a page which reviews the top 10 nail clippers on the market at this moment. You are on the first position on Google for this query which means that every month, 3600 people look at your website.
Now please understand that not all 3600 people will click on your link. Some will click on the ads, some will click on the links that are below you on search query and etc.
Let’s assume, you get 30% of 3600 which is roughly around 1080.
So, you now have 1080 people on your website. Once again, not all of them will go to Amazon from your website, right? Let’s say you lose half of them here. Now you are left with 540 people.
Let’s say half of these 540 people actually end up buying something in the next 24 hours from Amazon and each of the purchase is worth $50.
You just helped Amazon to make $27,000. What would be your commission? Even if we be very restrictive, it will be at least
$1620 for you. Now don’t forget, your website is not about dog nail clippers but about dogs in general. You will have articles about dog food, dog collar and etc. All of those pages will send people to Amazon and you will end up making money from all those pages.
Interesting, right?
Niche vs Authority
The affiliate community seems to be divided into two segments when it comes to niche sites and authority websites. Before we dig deep into the concept of these types, let me first explain what they are.
What’s a niche site?
A niche site is basically a very small website that covers a super niche topic and does a good job at covering it from every angle. So if we go back to our dog nail clipper example, a niche site would be creating a 100 page website only about dog nail clippers. You will do individual product reviews on every single nail clipper that is out there, you will talk about dog nail health, you will talk about all the latest things happening in the nail clipping industry but you will never talk about dog food.
You get the idea, right? It is a website that is focused on a super specific topic and it does a good job at covering everything around that particular topic.
What’s an Authority site?
An authority website is basically a broader version of a niche site. In this case, instead of going to build a website that specifically focuses on dog nail clipper, you will build a website about dogs, or animals in general.
You will talk about every product that a dog owner might need or you will talk about every product that every animal might need. That’s what an authority website is. They give you more room to earn money but they take more time to be developed. Obviously, building a website with 10 articles about dog nail clippers is simpler than building a massive website with reviews of all the products that a dog might need.
Remember, I told you that there are two segments of people when it comes to niche and authority websites? Here’s why.
One group actually prefers to build a niche site first and then want to turn it into an authority where the other group starts as an ‘authority website’ from the beginning.
Let me explain!
One group will always prefer to create a site around dog nail clippers first and; when they start to see some money, they will turn it into a big website covering other products.
On the other hand, there is another group of people who will start with a massive plan from the very beginning. They will have menu options such as dog food, dog toys, dog accessories & etc. from the first launch and they will cover everything on the go.
This will require more budget from the beginning but this also gives you more chances to explore a wide variety of keywords.
My recommendation: If you have the budget, go for authority. If you don’t have a good budget, start with a niche site and then convert it into an authority.
Getting Payment & Setting Up Payment Methods
If you are living in North America or Europe, this section is not for you. You can ignore this chapter and move to the next one. As I was initially from Bangladesh, I had to face issues with payment methods and I want to make sure that if you are living somewhere in Asia, you don’t have to face the same.
Amazon’s affiliate program will only pay you either directly to your US or European Bank account or as an Amazon gift card which you can then sell in FB groups or forums.
That’s extra work for you. So if you do not have a North American or European bank account, open an account with Payoneer.com.
Payoneer.com will open bank accounts for you all over the world and you can use those accounts to get payment from merchants like Upwork, Amazon & others.
Heads up: Payoneer charges $25/year as a service fee & I don’t have any affiliation with them.
Keyword Research
What is a Keyword?
A keyword is nothing but a word or a phrase of words that people use to search for something on Google.
If I need a cat collar and if I am searching with a term like “best cat collars” or “cat collar reviews” on Google, these are keywords. Internet marketers make it difficult with a lot of weird explanation of what a keyword is, but in it’s core, it is exactly this.
Now, do remember that you might do your Google search using voice too. In general, when we do a search using voice, keywords tend to be longer. Think about it rationally. When you search for a pizza shop around you, you will type something like good pizza shop in LOCATION but if you are doing the same search from mobile using voice, you will say something like “find me a good pizza shop near me that sells bla bla pizza”.
See how the length of a keyword increases? That’s what we call “long tail keyword”. It is important for you as an Amazon affiliate marketer to understand a few terms around keywords.
Long tail Keywords: Keywords that are long in nature (generally 3 or more words)
Money Keywords: Keywords that have buyer intent. When you are building an Amazon affiliate website, you will have to make sure that you are targeting as many money keywords possible.
Let’s use an example. Let’s say you are looking for a trampoline. What keyword should you target now?
You should target a keyword that’s long tail
+ that has buyer intent.
So no, you will not be targeting the keyword “trampoline”. You will never get ranked for that.
You will target keywords like best trampoline, best trampoline 2018, best
trampoline to buy, trampoline reviews in 2018, trampoline to buy and etc.
All these keywords are only searched when people want to buy a trampoline which means that you will have the best chance to convert that traffic on Amazon.
How to Do Your Keyword Research For An Amazon Affiliate Website?
I will try to keep this as simple as possible and believe me or not, it actually is.
Before we dig into keyword research, I will explain what a keyword research is. A keyword research basically means getting a list of keywords that you should target when you are building an affiliate website.
Why is this important?
Because you want to get ranked on Google’s first page.
But but, isn’t that all about SEO?
Yes, but if you do your keyword research right, you will have to spend less sleepless hours when it comes to SEO.
Now, let’s do keyword research for a fictional project.
I will be using two tools only.
Keyword Everywhere (A free Chrome Extension)
Keyword Revealer (A paid keyword research tool that has a free version)
Let’s start by looking at categories that Amazon has. Before we dig into that, make sure that you know about Amazon’s affiliate structure.
I know what you are thinking at this point. Khalid, isn’t it wise to then target only the products that have better commission rates
on Amazon? Let’s create a website around those categories.
To that my answer would be, yes & no.
Don’t forget! When you send someone on Amazon, you get a commission on whatever that person buys in next 24 hours. Even if you send someone to Amazon from your video game site (that has a 1% rate), that person might end up buying pet products in next 24 hours which will give you 8% commission.
See? You just want to send people to Amazon, don’t worry much about product categories. However, if you can stick to the 4% or above, that’s very good.
Let’s divide our keyword research phase into different steps.
Step 1: Finding the category
If you are not passionate or at least a bit knowledgeable about the product category, avoid that category. Keyword research comes later but if you don’t like the topic,
your site will go nowhere. I have built sites around topics that I like and topics that I had no idea about. I really know how it works out, trust me.
Let’s say, we selected the Pet Category. I have two cats and a dog. I really like ‘em and I understand this market a bit.
So we are done with selecting a category.
Step 2: Research the Category to Find Products On Amazon
See, now we can go to a niche route by choosing only a category from one of these 6 and can then expand within that category, right?
Let’s do that.
I will select Cats. I will click on that cute cat. Here’s what I got.
See? Amazon already told me what menu items or categories I can work with. If I build an authority site around cats, I should select all of them.
If I want to go niche, I can select cat beds & blankets for now. Let’s do that.
Now we have a category for our website to start with.
It has beds and blankets for cats.
I am assuming that you already installed the keyword everywhere by now.
Let’s get into the action.
After you have installed Keyword Everywhere & did the settings, if you do a Google search, the plugin will show you monthly search volume data. Let’s try a search with the keyword “best cat beds”. Here’s what I got.
We can clearly see that around 720 people search with this exact keyword every month from USA. Let’s try a few variations:
Cat bed reviews: 10/month
Best cat bed for kittens: 20/month Best cat bed for older cats: 30/month
These are the keyword variations that you should incorporate when you are writing an article about ‘best cat beds’.
Now, before you jump into action and start writing your content, there’s one step left. We have to make sure that the keyword we are targeting has potential to get ranked on Google.
We will use Keyword Revealer for this. Using KR is pretty simple and I recommend trying the free version first before paying anything.
A quick research on best cat beds using Keyword Revealer gives me this data set.
I have always loved Keyword Revealer because it gives you exactly what you need when it comes to Amazon Affiliate Marketing.
So, what can we extract from this screenshot? These are the current keywords that are ranked on Google. We can see their backlink number, the domain authority of those websites, the page authority, and a few other elements.
I recommend targeting keywords that have an average domain authority of 30, and an average external link count of around 30. Do not worry too much about other details as they can be easily manipulated.
As we can clearly see that our target keyword meets all the requirement, we can conclude that we have successfully validated the keyword.
You should continue doing this for as many keywords as you can, at least your main keywords of the site.
Before we move on to the next chapter, it is important that we talk about the different types of keywords out there.
Bonus Chapter: Different Types of Keywords
Let’s continue with our analogy that we are building a website around cat products. We now know a topic which is cat beds. We can build a niche site which only talks about cat beds or we can go a bit broader and target different cat topics.
Before doing all those, let’s know about the three types of keywords.
Big Money Keywords: These are big keywords (with a search volume of around 700-7000/month) that you write in depth articles about on your website. In our case, it is “best cat beds”. We can later on also select other money keywords such as “best cat toys”, “best cat food” and etc.
Here’s a big money keyword based article around golf:
https://honestgolfers.com/best-golf- rangefinder-reviews/
As you can see, the webmaster targeted the keyword “best golf rangefinder” in this article.
Individual Money Keywords: Individual money keywords are small keywords (search volume around 10-1000/month) that only talk about a certain product.
Instead of talking about the overall cat bed market and reviewing 10 cat beds in one article, we will, in this case, talk about a specific cat bed. The search volume will be low but the competition will be even lower.
Here’s an example of an individual money keyword article in golf niche:
https://honestgolfers.com/bushnell-tour- z6-review-guide/
The webmaster targeted the keyword “bushnell tour z6 review” in this article.
Info Keywords: When you build a website around a topic, you do not only do product reviews, you do more than that. That’s where the info keywords come in.
I recommend that you always keep a ratio of 70% informative content + 30% money content on your website; means- if you are posting 3 product review type articles, you should post 7 purely informative articles on your website.
If we build a site around cat product reviews, info contents can be like ‘how to feed a cat’, ‘how to bathe a cat’, ‘how to clean a cat bed’ and etc.
Some people do extensive keyword research for informative content too but I don’t think it is important. You will get ranked for long tail keywords automatically when you write info content & it helps your site look super cool too.
Content
I have divided this chapter in two parts, one is sourcing content & the other is tips for you if you want to write content yourself.
Let’s start with the first one which is sourcing.
Sourcing Content
Most affiliate marketers (I would say 90%) do not write their own content for the site. They outsource it.
There are a lot of benefits when it comes to outsourcing content. First, if you are not a good writer, it is probably a better option to outsource. Content plays a vital role in ranking your website and eventually earning from it so it is recommended not trying to game content creation.
When you outsource content creation, you are allowing yourself to grow faster. That’s another big benefit. Being able to add one article a week on your website and 5 articles/week on your website are very different.
However, if you do not have the budget and if you want to write your own content (maybe you are a good writer and you love the topic that the site is about), that’s great too.
I recommend that if you are a good writer, you should write the first 10 articles of your website. This will give you a clear picture about the industry and it will also help you to negotiate and assist writers if you decide to outsource it later on.
My recommendation when it comes to content outsourcing would be basic. There are freelance marketplaces like Iwriter.com, Upwork.com & Hirewriters.com where you can go to hire writers.
If you really want to save money on long term, I would recommend hiring a fulltime writer on a monthly deal (40,000 words/month for $600 for example). This has worked very well for me over the years.
All the marketplaces I mentioned have positive reviews in the industry and I am pretty certain that you will have good experience with all of these options. If you are choosing a freelance marketplace, make sure to take proper interview of the writer and manually check every piece of content (by reading it and by using a tool like Copyscape). My personal experience tells me that writers always perform great in the first two weeks and then they start to be lazy. Therefore, it is important that you check every piece of content before publishing it on site.
Tips If You Are The Writer
I am not a good writer myself so it is slightly weird for me to give someone writing tips. However, as I have been in this game for long enough & I know what works & what does not, you can trust my words. Let’s go ahead with the tips:
Don’t worry about keywords. Keyword density, keyword mentions on the first paragraph and all those things used to matter a lot up until 2017. They do not mean much in the era of 2018 and beyond. Write naturally and try to write as if you are talking to someone. This will give you the best returns.
Write in small paragraphs and give all the important information first. As writers, we try to limit ourselves by deciding that the article has to be 5000 words for example. Yes, you want the article to be as long as possible but do not fluff around just to make that happen.
Give affiliate links in text as well as with buttons. Buttons with texts like “Click Here to See Today’s Price on Amazon” works great but so does the in text links on top of a regular word. Experiment with different types.
Use proper headings, sub headings and think of every piece of your content as a book. Google likes it a lot when you structure your content in a proper way. The structure helps Google to identify different parts of the content and as we now have Google snippets & Position zeros, it is important that you try to target those sections.
Do your research & no, don’t only read 3 other reviews. When I say research, I mean that you should read all the reviews of that particular product on Amazon, you should watch all the videos available of that product and you should read every previous review related to that product. If possible, you should buy that product and test it yourself before writing your piece of content. I know most affiliates don’t buy the products to review them which is fine, but make sure that you are doing a proper secondary research.
I know it is difficult but it is for your own benefit. Don’t rush to get a number. The number can be a word count that you are trying to achieve or a goal that you have in terms of the number of articles published on a week. This reduces quality.
This point will contradict with the last one but I am sure, you will understand. Try to have a clear goal in terms of content production. For example, decide to publish 50 piece of content every month and stick to
The plan, don’t be lazy and you will be able to make it happen.
Setting Up Your Website
Buying Your Domain & Hosting
I am sure most of already know how to setup a website. I would still go through the steps as I want this to be a massive guide touching everything related to Amazon Affiliate Marketing.
When it comes to buying domain and hosting, I rely on brands that we all know, primarily Namecheap & Siteground. My personal website, Khalidfarhan.com is hosted with Siteground and the business site that I used to run, Passivejournal.com is hosted with Namecheap. They both are brilliant when it comes to support & price.
I strongly recommend you to avoid going with sites like GoDaddy as they have a crazy renewal policy. You might be delighted to see their $1/first year domain deals but trust me, the renewal will cost you $15/year from the 2nd year onwards. You do not want that to happen.
Affiliate websites in general do not receive a ton of traffic. So my recommendation would be staying with a smaller hosting package. You can always upgrade if you see traffic hike later on.
Going Live With Your Site
There’s again two different school of thoughts when it comes to going live with a website. Some think that designing a site first and then adding up content is a wise option where some think that they should create content first and then start designing the website.
In reality, it doesn’t matter. However, I always create a batch of content first before designing a site.
Simply install WordPress on your hosting and go live with the site. In 2018, it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to go live with a site. Make sure that you have SSL installed as Google has made it pretty clear that they will not rank new websites if they don’t have SSL.
Choosing The Theme
Historically, affiliate sites have always had magazine style WordPress themes and they work fine too. However, it is up to you on what type of theme you are interested in using.
You can buy theme from places like Themeforest.com, Studiopress.com or MyThemeShop. They all have great variety of options and you will surely get something that is within your “topic” of interest.
Make sure that the theme is mobile friendly. When I say mobile friendly, I don’t mean that the theme is responsive on mobile. Obviously, that is a must but you need to also make sure that the theme has a pleasant view on mobile. People should not have to crawl thousands of times to visit different sections of your website.
Plugins You Need
Once again, this will vary depending on what type of theme you are using on your website. Some themes come with a set of plugins and sometimes, functions are in built in a theme. However, I am going to give you a list of plugins or features that you should have on your website.
What are those features?
Social Share Options: If your theme doesn’t come with this default option, make sure that you are using an additional plugin to enable social share buttons on your website.
HTTPS Redirect: Make sure that you are redirecting everyone to the HTTPS version of your website. That’s very important.
There are different plugins that will do this trick. I use Really Simple SSL plugin.
Amazon Associate Link Builder: This plugin will allow you to pull data from Amazon with a few clicks. The plugin is super simple and it works like a charm.
Yoast SEO: There are a few different plugins that do the same thing. I prefer Yoast SEO as it is simple and effective. This will help you with your SEO.
W3 Total Cache: Once again, there are a few different plugins that do the same thing. I use W3 Total Cache as it is the easiest to operate. A cache plugin basically stores the cache on a user’s browser so that when he/she loads your website again, it loads faster.
Bonus Tips…1
When you are done building your website, make sure that you are testing it with a few different tools.
GTMetrix: This tool will give you the load speed of your website. The loading speed of a site should always be within 3 seconds. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to rank, there’s something wrong and you need to fix it. GTMetrix will also tell you what’s wrong which makes it easier for you to fix.
Google’s Mobile Readability Test: Again, this tool will re-verity if your website is a good fit for mobile devices. Google is a mobile first search engine now and you definitely want to make sure that the site is looking fine on cellphone.
Bonus Tips ….2
It is now time to add your website to Google Analytics & Google Webmaster. They both are free tools and with a quick YouTube search, you will know how to add these codes on your WordPress site.
Don’t forget to add all versions of your website with Google Webmaster. Basically, Analytics will give you ideas about your traffic and Webmaster will tell you the ranking, links and a few other key metrics. They both are extremely important to have from the very beginning. Don’t neglect them.
Creating Your Affiliate Account
I would recommend that you create your Amazon affiliate account and get the links at this stage. Creating affiliate account is super simple.
Visit affiliate-program.amazon.com & sign up. It is even easier if you already got an Amazon account. Make sure that you are putting all information perfectly (your address is important). Tick the box that says you are not targeting an audience who is under 13 & you are done.
Now you will get affiliate links. Get your product links and place them on articles. Get inspiration from your competitor websites. See how they are placing links. Most sites do these three link strategies:
Links in Image
Button Links
Contextual Links
Written by Khalid Farhan
Digital Marketer, SEO Expert