Do you know that you can earn a living as a student by joining Amazon affiliate program? You’ll probably answer this question by saying NO.
What is Amazon Affiliate? Amazon affiliate is one of the most popular affiliate schemes in the world. It is officially called Amazon Associate Program by Amazon.
After joining Amazon affiliate program, you can create links on your Amazon Associate portal; you’ll need to put the links on your website. Any visitor to your website who buys Amazon products by clicking the Amazon links on your website will make you earn referral fees or commission from Amazon.
Amazon affiliate program is arguably the most successful affiliate schemes in the world. You do not need to pay any fees to join this scheme.
Amazon Inc is the largest online retailer in the world. Amazon Inc also has the largest collection of products on earth.
Commissions or referrals fees in Amazon affiliate program ranges from 0%-10% so you should endeavor to choose the niche with good commission payout rates. Below are the payout rates or commission rates for products on Amazon associate program. Please note that these rates are the commission rates as at the date of this article.
- Amazon Gift Cards & Wine – 0%
- Video Games & Video Consoles – 1%
- Televisions – 2%
- PC, PC Components, DVD – 2.5%
- Toys -3%
- Amazon Kindle & Fire Tablets – 4%
- Physical Books, Health & Personal Care, Sports, Kitchen, Automotive, Baby Products – 4.5%
- Digital Music, Grocery, Physical Music, Handmade, Digital Videos – 5%
- Outdoors, Tools – 5.5%
- Headphones, Beauty, Musical Instruments, Business, Industrial Supplies – 6%
- Amazon Echo, Amazon Fire TV – 7%
- Apparel, Jewelry, Luggage, Shoes, Handbags & Accessories, Watches – 7%
- Furniture, Home, Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Pets, Pantry – 8%
- Digital Video Games, Luxury Beauty, Amazon Coins – 10%
- All Other Categories – 4%
Source: www.amazon.com
It is also good to note that when a shopper clicks the affiliate link on your website, the commission accruable to you will be the referral rates on all products bought on Amazon’s website by the shopper not only the product link he clicked on your website.
The Amazon affiliate link cookie lasts for only 24 hours, that is, you will get commission for Amazon’s products you are promoting on your website if the shopper buys the products through your links within 24 hours.
If the shopper puts the products they want to buy through your links on their shopping cart, then the cookie can last for 90 days. That means that you can earn commission if the shoppers come back to their shopping carts to buy the products within 90 days.
Can Nigerians Apply for Amazon Affiliate?
Amazon affiliate program is opened to almost all countries of the world. So far your country is not in the list of countries banned by the US for international trade; you can apply and participate in Amazon associate program.
Yes, Nigerians can apply for Amazon associate program. Some Nigerians have started reaping the benefits of Amazon affiliate program by joining. Some are earning monthly commissions ranging from $500-$2000. There are people including students earning monthly commission of up to $10,000.
How to Apply for Amazon Affiliate Program
The following steps you need to follow to apply for the affiliate program:
Start a blog or website: Under Amazon’s term and conditions, you need a website preferably a blog to start promoting its products.
Go to https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ to join the program. You will be asked to fill in some data about yourself; this may include your name, email address, website details, phone number and address etc.
After providing the above details, you will be asked to provide your tax information, for Nigerians, this is not really needed.
Then you click to join. Boom! You can now start to use product links allocated to you by Amazon on your website, when anyone buys Amazon’s products using these links, you will get paid a commission.
For your Amazon affiliate website or blog to get traffic, so that people can know your website or blog and buy Amazon products through your site, you need to implement the below strategies:
Keyword Research
What are keywords you may ask? Keywords are simply words or phrases people search for on search engines. Keywords define what your website or blog is all about.
To earn well and benefit for Amazon affiliate program, your website or blog must target buy intent long tail keywords.
What are long tail keywords? Long tail keywords are longer keywords with two or more words (phrases), they usually have lesser search traffic but they have a very high conversion rate.
Buy intent keywords otherwise called commercial long tail keywords are long tail keywords that people search for when they are ready to make purchases. In most cases, people with their credit cards in hand are those who search for these types of keywords.
Some examples of buy intent long tail keywords include BUY, DISCOUNT, REVIEW, DEAL, AFFORDABLE, CHEAP, DOWNLOAD and SHIPPING etc.
To get the appropriate buy intent long tail keyword to use to write review articles on your website or blog, you must follow the below steps:
You must first choose the niche you want to play in. You should narrow down the niche. For example, if you are interested in promoting automobile related products on Amazon, you can decide to narrow down your niche to heavy duty grease remover or transmission cooler. Small sub-niches are easier to target than a very huge niche like cars or automobiles.
Target a buy intent long tail keyword with low average keyword competitiveness ratings. This means that you should target long tail keywords with buy, cheap, affordable and reviews etc added to them. These long tail keywords should have average keyword competitive (KC) ratings of less than 30. This will make it easy for you to rank your articles on the first page of Google. Targeting keywords with KC of about 30 may be too difficult, time wasting and expensive for you to target. You can use www.longtailpro.com to search for keywords with low KC.
You should also check the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) of all websites currently ranking using the buy intent long tail keyword you have chosen. If most of the websites have DA and PA less than 30, then you are good to go, you can target this keyword and rank.
The long tail keyword you have chosen must have a monthly search volume of above 500, above 800 is better though.
Prices of Amazon products in your niche must be above $40; this will make your commission substantial. However, if the monthly search volume of the buy intent long tail keyword chosen is high, price of Amazon products may not be that important.
Domain Name
It is very important you choose the right domain name. Domain name with .com extension is better in my opinion as it is very easy to remember.
Keyword rich domain names are not that important for search engine optimization. You are advised to choose domain names of not more than three words, one or two words are better.
There should be no hyphens between the names combination you use. For example, do not use this domain name www.ogbeija-gthod.com.
Domains with words that can be easily remembered are better.
Go to www.namecheap.com to search for your chosen domain names. Choose the domain name, pay for registration and also pay for hosting.
Siteground is the one of the fastest web host in the world. Website speed is one of Google’s ranking factors; you may want to choose Siteground as your website host.
Now, you are ready to go!
Once, you get the control panel details, install WordPress and start designing your website, upload your articles or blog posts, insert Amazon affiliate product links in the posts and start promoting Amazon’s products.
Buying aged domain names is also a good way to make your website and keyword rank on Google at a faster rate. However, you should be very careful not to buy heavily spammed domain name, this will negatively impact your SEO and rankings.
To buy spam free aged domain name, please contact us.
Contents
Your Amazon affiliate website or blog should have a pretty basic structure, the home page, category page, Amazon disclaimer and privacy policy and contact us page.
Your home page should have a pillar article. The article should review 5 or more Amazon products in your niche. This article must target your chosen buy intent long tail keyword. Examples of this type of articles are best baby shoes in 2018, 5 best sofas, and 10 gear nob reviews etc.
The home page article or post should have at least 2,000 words; writing up to 5,000 words is not bad. Articles with lots of words and good structure rank better than thin articles, long articles can also rank for more keywords aside the targeted keywords.
Your home page should have more than 4 images, please note that the images should be copyright free. You should also optimize the images as heavy images can slow down your site and lead to SEO problems. Videos, infographics and audios etc. can also be used.
Clickable comparison tables should be after the first paragraph of the home page article. This will make people who cannot read the long article to know the features of the products you are reviewing. There are several plugins on WordPress that can be used to design comparison tables. Product images with Amazon product links should be embedded in the article so people who click them will be redirected to Amazon’s website.
In the categories section of your Amazon product review website or blog, you should have individual Amazon product review articles, general niche information articles and other articles related to the website. The length of the articles can range between 800-1500 words. Google compensates websites with articles whose lengths are above 500 words. However, it should be noted that long articles full of garbage and bad structure will be punished by search engines.
You can use Amazon images for your product review articles, the images should have the product link and they must be clickable.
Your content or articles should have good images; the articles must be unique and free of plagiarism. Never copy other people’s articles and pass them off as yours on your blog. You will be harming your website by doing this as no SEO juice will be passed to this article. The articles may never rank on any search engine.
Videos and infographics are also very good for your Amazon products’ review websites or blog.
Content is king, content is money.
If you cannot write unique articles yourself, you can outsource to freelance writers, however you should be careful outsourcing to cheap writers that will write poor articles for you. We can write well researched product review articles for you.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a technique or strategy used to increase a website’s visibility in Search Engine’s Result Page (SERP).
On Page Optimisation
On page optimization is the type of SEO strategy used on websites so that the websites and keywords chosen will rank well on search engines like Google. Examples of on page optimization you can use include:
- Your website pages or the pages you want to target on your website must be indexable.
- Title tags should have your targeted keywords with good grammatical structure, no spelling errors.
- Your H tags should contain your targeted keyword.
- You should use a lot of Latent Semantic Index (LSI) keywords in your article. LSI keywords are similar keywords to your targeted keywords.
- The keyword density in your articles should not be more than 1.5%, do not do keyword stuffing.
- Your website should load within 2 seconds; the speed of your website is one of Google’s ranking factors.
- Endeavour to practise internal linking i.e. link similar articles on your website.
- Make outbound links to authority websites or websites and pages with high domain and page authority.
- Images should have keyword embedded Alt tags, also do not use images with intellectual property rights.
- Avoid writing duplicate contents or articles.
- Your URL permalink should have your targeted keyword.
- All your articles should have social sharing buttons (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc).
- Your website should pass mobile friendly test.
- Your website should rock SSL/HTTPS.
- Do not over optimize with keyword rich anchor text.
- Posting articles frequently on your website, this makes your website fresh.
- You may use the silo structure or topical SEO for your website.
- Do not flood your website with advertisement and links, this can negatively impact your website’s ranking.
- Your articles or posts should be more than 500 words. Google rewards good content with good word count.
Off Page Optimisation
Off page optimisation revolves round getting backlinks to your website. Checklist for off page optimization includes:
- Backlinks (do-follow and no follow)
- Guest posting
- Social media marketing
- Forum posting
- PR submission
- Citations etc.
With SEO techniques, you can make your articles rank in the first page of top search engine’s like Google. It is a known fact that if your articles or blog posts do not show as one of the top three results on the first page of Google or other top search engines, you may not record any sales. Your efforts in building the website and writing the articles may be futile.
How to Receive Payments from Amazon
To get commission from Amazon, you need a payment processor preferably a US or UK bank account. For those participating in Amazon affiliate program, you can open a bank account with Payoneer. Payoneer will give you a US or UK bank account where Amazon can pay your commission.
Payoneer will give you a debit card which you can use to withdraw your money from any Automated Teller Machine (ATM) in Nigeria.
You should note that anybody can open a Payoneer bank account in Nigeria. Payoneer will ask you to send a copy of your proof of address through the web.
Success Stories of Amazon Affiliate Program
There are several examples of people making a living from participating in Amazon affiliate program. It is not too difficult to start earning $500 – $1,000 monthly after a few months of starting an Amazon products review website, so far you do all what is required of you.
The owner of Problogger has earned over $500,000 since he started promoting Amazon products through his blogs.
David McSweeney rose from earning $0 promoting Amazon products through his website to $3,934 per month within six months.
There are several instances of people flipping their websites after earning Amazon commissions for few months. If your blog earns $500 per month through Amazon Affiliate Program, you can sell your website at 10-15 times of your monthly earnings, in this case, $5,000-$7,500.
Are these success stories only for those living abroad? No, there are several people including students in Nigeria making good money from Amazon affiliate program every month. Mr Ogunde (not real name) was fired from his banking job; he now earns $2,500 from two websites promoting Amazon’s products every month.
Are you a student frantically looking to earn money through Amazon affiliate? This note can be a game changer for you. You can also hit us up if you need any clarifications about Amazon affiliate program.