1.
What is the Amazon Affiliate Program?
Amazon 's affiliate program ( Amazon Associates ) allows people to earn money by
delegating sales to the Amazon service.
How the Amazon Affiliate Program Works
When you sign up, Amazon will give you a unique tracking ID that looks something like
this: dyadya_vasya.
You can add code to any Amazon product URL to create an affiliate link.
Example :
amazon.com/dp/B01K1C94E4
→
amazon.com/dp/B01K1C94E4?tag=dyadya_vasya
If someone clicks on your link and buys an item on Amazon within 24 hours, you will be
paid a sales commission.
What's more, people don't have to buy the product you recommend. If you offer them a
kitchen knife and they end up buying a tennis racket, you still get a commission. If they
buy a kitchen knife, a tennis racket and a bunch of other things, a commission will be
charged for all goods.
This is partly why the affiliate program is so popular. Amazon sells hundreds of
thousands of products. It is not unusual that most of the commissions come from
products that you have not even heard of.
How to become an Amazon partner
To become an Amazon partner, follow these steps:
1. Go to the Amazon Associates homepage ;
2. Sign in with your Amazon account;
3. Follow the instructions on the screen.

2.
During registration, Amazon will ask for your website address. You can also link to your
social media profiles here, but you've decided to start an Amazon affiliate website and
are serious about making money with Amazon Associates, right?
What is an Amazon affiliate site?
Amazon affiliate sites promote products for sale on Amazon in their content.
If you've ever Googled something like "best [product category]" or "[product] review",
you've almost certainly come across one of these sites.
Just take a look at the top score for "best coffee grinder":
These people researched the best coffee grinders, summarized their findings in a blog
post, and provided Amazon affiliate links for visitors to click through and buy the
recommended products.
It's a similar story for a query like "aeropress review".
Both of these types of messages are useful for readers because they make life easier
and save time. If you're looking for a new coffee grinder, you won't be able to test
dozens of products on your own. You must rely on research and reviews done by
others.
Why SEO is the Secret to a Successful
Amazon Affiliate Site
Making money from an Amazon affiliate site requires traffic (visitors).
Without traffic, no one will click on your affiliate links, which means no commissions.
There are many ways to get traffic. But most of those who are successful with Amazon
affiliate marketing get the bulk of their traffic through SEO .

3.
And that's why.
If you promote your blog on social media or in a newsletter, you will get a spike in
traffic. Your audience will see your post, but in a day or two traffic will drop to almost
zero. The lifespan of content on most social networks is negligible.
This effect is known as a "splash of hope" followed by a flat line.
SEO has the opposite effect. If you promote your articles on search engines for the
keywords that people search for month after month, your traffic will be stable and even
grow over time.

4.
You can get the same effect using paid advertising, but there are several problems:
 Paid advertising costs money (and most people have more time than money)
 There is paid traffic only when it is paid . As soon as you stop investing, your traffic
drops to zero.
 It's hard to turn a profit as advertising costs eat into your affiliate commissions.
With that in mind, let's see how you can create an Amazon affiliate site that makes
money month after month.
How to Create a Successful Amazon
Affiliate Website
Everyone has their own idea of success.
For some, this is a site that makes $1,000 a month. For others, it may be a more
ambitious goal of $10,000 per month.
Regardless of the goal, the steps to success are the same.

5.
1. Choose a promising niche
2. Find "profitable" keywords
3. Create the "right" content
4. Drive traffic to your website through SEO
5. Get clicks on affiliate links
Choose a promising niche
Have you heard of Wirecutter ?
It is owned by The New York Times and is arguably the most popular Amazon affiliate
site. They have reviews of everything from knife sharpeners to tables. This site has 3.9
million monthly visitors from Google alone.
Many Amazon affiliate marketing newbies see sites like this and try to replicate this
success.
Don't make this mistake.

6.
Authoritative sites with millions of visitors like The Wirecutter are well funded and have
talented SEO professionals who work in teams . Trying to compete will turn into an
uphill battle.
It will be right to look for your niche, with a minimum of competitors, the one that you are
interested in doing.
Find what interests you
Loss of motivation is perhaps the most common reason people fail at affiliate marketing,
so it's important to choose a niche that you'll be interested in pursuing. At first, you will
have to work hard with full enthusiasm!
So, grab a pen and paper, brainstorm and write down all the ideas that come to mind.
You can also draw inspiration from other sources, such as The Wirecutter categories.

7.
Check your commission level
The Amazon commission depends on the product category.
Here is a summary by product category :

8.
Product category Commission
Luxury Beauty, Amazon Coins 10.00%
Digital music, physical music, handmade, digital video 5.00%
Paper books, kitchen, car accessories 4.50%
Amazon Fire Tablet Devices, Amazon Kindle Devices, Amazon Fashion for Women,
Men's and Children's Clothing, Apparel, Amazon Cloud Cam Devices, Fire TV Edition Smart TVs,
Amazon Fire TV Devices, Amazon Echo Devices, Ring Devices, Watches, Jewelry, Luggage , shoes,
bags and accessories
4.00%
All other categories 4.00%
Toys, furniture, household goods, interior design, lawn and garden, pet supplies, pantry, headphones,
beauty salon, musical instruments, business and industrial supplies, outdoors, tools, sports, baby products
3.00%
PC , PC components , DVD and Blu-ray 2.50%
TVs, digital video games 2.00%

9.
Product category Commission
Amazon Fresh, Physical Video Games & Consoles, Grocery, Health & Personal Care 1.00%
Gift cards; wireless service plans; alcoholic drinks; subscription Digital Kindle products; food delivery
from the restaurant; Amazon Appstore, Prime Now, Amazon Pay Places, or wardrobe best shopping
0.00%
If any of your ideas fall into the 0% category, cross it off your list. You yourself
understand that it makes no sense to promote such products.
Also, it would not be superfluous to exclude categories with commission rates up to
2%. In order to earn decent money with such a commission, it will take a lot of traffic.
Over the past ten years, Amazon's commission rates have dropped significantly . The
most recent downsizing came in early 2020, and it has led some people to believe that
Amazon affiliate sites are dead. This is not entirely true. There was just less profit.
Check product prices
You will make more money on expensive products with higher margins.
For example, if someone buys a $4,000 PC , the 2.5% ($100) fee will be much higher
than if someone bought new $40 ($1) RAM .
But this does not mean that you should definitely go into an expensive niche.
People are less impulsive when it comes to buying expensive items, which means fewer
clicks will result in sales. This is called the conversion rate.
They say that it is best to make money on goods whose price lies in the range of 30-300
dollars. If you take a product more expensive than $ 300, the number of hits will greatly
decrease. If you take a cheap product, then you have to sell too much of it to make
money, and this is not easy in a highly competitive market.
To get an idea of prices in your niche, search for similar products on Amazon.

10.
Estimate shipping costs
Now that you know a little more about the niche you want to enter, you can use this
information to estimate the amount of traffic on the money pages it will take to reach
your monthly financial goal.
“Money Pages” are pages on your site that contain affiliate links.
With Amazon partner sites, product reviews tend to be the best "money pages". They
list the best products in the category. For example, here is a list of the best robot
vacuum cleaners from The Wirecutter:

11.
These are the most profitable pages because they recommend multiple products and
the people who search for them on Google already have an intent to buy. As a result,
high CTR on affiliate links.
Here is the traffic estimation formula:
Estimated revenue per month / (average product price * commission rate, % *
average affiliate link CTR * average conversion rate)
Let's look at an example.
Let's say you want to sell products in the Coffee category and your goal is $1,000 per
month . You went through the steps above and found out that the average price of an
item is around $40 and the commission for most coffee-related items is 4% .
However, you don't yet know the CTR (percentage of visitors who click on an Amazon
affiliate link) of your posts or the Amazon conversion rate (percentage of clicks that turn
into sales).
So let's be pessimistic and assume a CTR of 10% and a conversion rate of 7.5% .
Let's include this data in the calculation:
1000 / (40 * 4% * 10% * 7.5%) = 83.333
It looks like we need ~83k monthly visits to "money" pages to earn $1,000 per month.
Of course, this is a rough estimate. We considered the most pessimistic scenario. But
the general picture can be understood. 83,000 visits per month is ~ 2800 visits per day.
Assess niche potential
Now that you know how much traffic is needed to make your numbers work, you need
to evaluate if your niche has enough search traffic potential.
Here is an easy way to do it:
Install and activate Ahrefs SEO Toolbar , then search Google:
best [product in your niche] inurl: best

12.
For example, in the coffee niche, our search might be:
The parameter inurl:bestrestricts search results to pages with the word "best" in
the URL . You will see why this is important in the next step.
Look for search results for a niche site that gets at least the amount of traffic you need.
The key word is "niche". You should ignore any major general sites such as Forbes,
The Wirecutter or The Guardian in your search results. Yes, they may have tons of
traffic, but that's not what you're looking for. If you don't find any niche sites, try looking
for another product.
Here is an article that matches our search:

13.
Be sure to look at domain-level traffic, not page-level traffic!
The example site receives approximately 210,000 visitors from searches in the US
alone, and you can tell from the domain name that this site specializes in coffee.
However, we don't know how much of this traffic goes to the money pages. If most of
your traffic goes to blog posts, that doesn't bode well.
Fortunately, there is a way to better understand the traffic of such pages using Ahrefs
Site Explorer .
Just paste a domain, navigate to the Most Popular Pages report , add the word "best"
to the "Include" filter, and select "URLs" from the "Any Target" dropdown . You should
get a filtered report of product messages.

14.
At the top of the filtered report, you'll see the total estimated monthly traffic to all pages.

15.
In our case, this is 107,714.
We previously estimated traffic for $1,000 potential earnings as 83,000 monthly
visitors. This niche, in principle, meets our potential requirements for traffic.
Rate the competition
It makes no sense to enter a niche where you will be competing to achieve a goal for
many years. It is better to work hard to find those niches that you can promote
on SEO without much difficulty.
SEO is a hard game. It is necessary to take into account many ranking factors and rely
on promotion experience . For Google, one of the most important ranking factors is the
number of quality backlinks to your website pages.
Google is explicit about the importance of backlinks on their page about search
algorithms .

16.
There is a clear correlation between the number of backlinks from unique sites (referring
domains) to a page and its search traffic. Ahrefs has analyzed more than one billion
web pages on this topic .

17.
So before you close the filtered report by first pages from the previous step, take a look
at the RDs column. It shows the number of linking domains per page.
If you see pages with regular traffic that few domains link to, this is a sign of a non-
competitive theme.
Looking at the report for homegrounds.com, we see a lot of these pages:

18.
Analysis of the link mass of wareable.com shows an inverse relationship. Almost every
page has links from dozens or hundreds of referring domains. This goes to show that
many sites in this niche are hard nuts to crack.

19.
You have two options in this case:
1. Work deeper into the niche. Instead of promoting ordinary watches, you can focus
only on smart watches or fitness trackers. If the niche is still too broad, it's worth
tweaking to narrow it down to products like smartwatches for kids.
2. Choose a different niche. If deep tuning doesn't interest you, drop the idea and repeat
the steps above for another niche.
Find the right keywords
It's harder to find a niche with potential, while collecting keywords is relatively easy.
To speed up the collection of keywords, export the filtered Most Popular Pages report
from the previous step. The report file will give you enough information to keep you busy
for months.
If you want to go deeper into the strategy and find more keywords, do the following:
1. Go to Ahrefs keyword explorer ;
2. Enter a few "seed" keywords related to the niche and its products (separated by
commas);
3. Navigate to the All Keywords report.
This is how it might look if you need to enter the coffee niche:

20.
Most likely, in the report you will see hundreds of thousands of keywords, among them
there will be a lot of garbage. Now we need to use the built-in filters to find the 3 types
of keywords we need.
We collect keywords with collections
Keywords like “best coffee machine”, “best coffee grinder” tend to bring in a lot of
money from Amazon affiliate sites.
So, we want to find product review keywords that have traffic potential and are not too
hard to rank for.
To do this, add 3 filters:

21.
 Enable: "best"
 Keyword Difficulty ( KD ) : <= 10
 Volume: >= 500
Feel free to experiment with the settings. For different niches, the optimal search
settings will differ.
You should see a list of relevant, low-competition keywords sorted by number of
searches per month.

22.
Now, it's important to note that keyword competition ( KD ) will only give an
approximation of ranking difficulty. And the monthly search volume will only give you a
rough idea of the topic's potential traffic.
Now we need to go through the report, analyze the keywords one by one and save what
we found useful.
Don't worry if there are thousands of keywords there. You don't need to analyze them
all. It is enough to take 20-50 good keys to start.
So what's the process?
Before we get into the technical stuff, it's important to understand that you need to use
common sense when searching for keywords. Taking the keyword “best coffee grinder”
makes sense, because it is used to search for a product that Amazon sells. If the
keyword is not related to the topic of buying goods on Amazon, for example, "the best
coffee in Los Angeles", it should be removed from the selection.
For keywords that make sense, click the SERP button to see current page rankings on
Google.
Then follow this flowchart:

23.
Before we go any further, we need to briefly explain the concept of domain ranking.

24.
Domain Rating ( DR ) measures a site's authority based on a backlink profile: from 0 to
100 points. The higher the number, the more authoritative the site.
It's important to pay attention to this because we're looking for keywords that we can
fault a new or relatively new site with low "authority". If there are sites with a low level of
authority in the ranking of sites, this is a good sign. It will be easier to move forward.
Here is an example of a good keyword:

25.
The highlighted page has four referring domains, receives several hundred
US searches per month, and is on a low domain ranking ( DR ) themed website .
Here's a not-so-good example:

26.
While there are pages in the results with multiple linking domains on low-authority niche
websites, none of them get any traffic.
Here's how you can add a keyword to your keyword list when you find one:
Continue until you have a list of at least 20-50 keywords.
We collect keywords with product reviews
Examples of keywords for a review: “aeropress review”, “baratza Virtuoso coffee grinder
review”.
Although there is variation from niche to niche, keywords like these rarely have the
same potential as collection keywords. You will probably only find a few helpful reviews.
Then why collect keywords with reviews?
Two main reasons:
1. They often have a lot of potential even if the traffic potential is low.
2. Product reviews can improve SEO for collections (more on this later).
To find these keywords, add these filters to the All Keywords report:
 Enable: "overview"
 CD : <= 10

27.
 Volume: >= 200
Here's what we see for our coffee example:

28.
Not all of these are review type keywords, but you can easily identify them.
Review the flowchart above and add the selected keys to the new list.
We collect informational keywords in blogs
Most Amazon affiliate sites do more than just post "money" messages. They also
publish blog posts and other informational content.
Just look at homegrounds.co:

29.
They have an entire section of their site dedicated to helpful brewing guides.
There are several reasons why it is useful to analyze blogs, and we will talk about this
later. For now, we want to find informational keywords to use in blogs and guides.
To find such keywords, add these filters to the All Keywords report:
 Include: who, what, when, where, why, how, guidance, tutorial, ideas, tips
 Volume: >= 500
Look for topics closely related to the products you review in product reviews.
For example, if your niche is coffee, then queries like “how to use a French press” and
“how to make coffee” make sense because you will almost certainly be looking at
French presses and coffee machines.

30.
Add 20-50 keywords to your list and keep moving forward.
Create the right kind of content
So, you have chosen a domain, created a website. It's time to start writing and
publishing content.
In this section, we will talk about how to create 3 types of content:
1. Reviews
2. Product reviews
3. Blog Posts
Let's start with the important.
Reviews
Follow these four steps:
1. Find out what products to include in the collection.
2. Find out what is important to people.
3. Find out which products are the best.
4. Write about it.
Decide which items to include
A selection lists multiple products, but how do you know which products you want to
view?
Here are some ways.
1. Look at Amazon.
Let's face it, Amazon is pretty good at recommending the best products. Just look at the
results for "coffee grinder":

31.
They all have hundreds or thousands of reviews and none of them are rated below four
stars.
So, a good way to get an idea of the items you might want to purchase is to simply
search for it on Amazon.
2. Look at the most popular pages.
Searching on Amazon is a good starting point, but it can be overwhelming. Another
good tactic is to look for common inclusions among the most popular pages.
For example, three of the top results for "best coffee grinder" mention the Baratza
Encore cone crusher as one of the best:

32.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is worth considering in a review.

33.
Find out what matters to people
To create a useful product overview, you first need to know which product attributes are
important to buyers.
Here are some ways to understand it.
1. Look at reviews on Amazon
Look at several products and check reviews. Soon you will begin to understand things
that are important to buyers.
For example, seconds after viewing the review below, it becomes clear that coarse
grinding, ease of cleaning, and portability are important factors when choosing a manual
coffee grinder:

34.
If you don't want to go through every review, check the tags in the "Read reviews that
are mentioned" section.
Amazon pulls them from reviews and they often point to things that a lot of people care
about.
2. Look at the most popular pages
Browse the most popular pages and look for commonalities.
For example, both of these grinder reviews talk about grind consistency:

35.
3. Run a Content Gap Analysis
Content gap analysis shows the keywords that pages rank for.
Doing this for some of the top ranking pages for your target keyword will give you a
deeper understanding of what people want to know.
Paste some of the most popular URLs into Ahrefs' Content Break Tool to perform the
analysis .
If we do this for the top three pages for “best coffee grinder,” we see that they rank for
keywords related to grinder types: manual grinder, manual grinder, electric grinder , etc.

36.
It can be seen that people are looking for the best coffee grinder by type of coffee:
espresso, french press , etc.

37.
Build quality and materials are also important.

38.
You need to take this into account when writing a post, as well as when researching or
testing a product.
Find out which products are the best
Most people who open Amazon affiliate sites don't test the products
themselves. Instead, they research products online and earn points from other reviews.
While you can go this route, it's not what we recommend for several reasons:
1. Product testing helps you stand out from the crowd , create expert content, and
make life easier when it comes to link building.
2. The internet is full of affiliate posts that take points from other articles and are rarely
helpful to seekers.
So, if you want to create a really useful site with a long lifespan, it is worth considering
the products in great detail.
Here are some ideas to reduce costs:
 Start with cheap products. Testing ten $500 coffee machines won't be cheap, but ten
$30 grinders will do. Look through the list of keywords and start with inexpensive
products.
 Sell them as soon as you're done. After you have made a review, list the product on
Avito, eBay, etc. Even if you lose 25% of the purchase price, you will end up spending
not so much on truly unique and useful content.
 Request reviews from manufacturers. Don't disregard this advice, especially if you're
new and don't have a reputation.
Write about the product
A product review is not like a regular blog post. You have to give people information that
they can immediately use in practice. In the case of a review, this is a winning option.
Create a message list using the inverted pyramid format.
View messages
Most of the recommendations above for product reviews also apply to individual
reviews. You need to know what people care about and want to know, and you need to
research the product thoroughly.

39.
In this case, as a rule, it is best to prepare both separate collections and reviews.
Why? When you create a product post, you are essentially viewing multiple products at
once. Collections summarize information about each product, rather than delving into
details.
But the thing is, you have to research the products to create a selection, so you might
as well post that research in a separate review.
Here are a few other reasons why this approach makes sense:
 Reviews are subjective . Let's say you're browsing one coffee grinder. If you don't
research or test it along with other similar products, how do you know how good or bad
it is? You can easily give a product five stars, only to realize that it is quite poor
compared to other similarly priced products on the market.
 Potential traffic growth. Posting individual product reviews that are related to the
published product review can help you rank in search. More on this in the next section.
 Easier to format/template. Product research will show you what people really care
about. You can use this knowledge to create a template for peer reviewed posts.
Let's focus on this last point.
If you've created a compilation of the best coffee grinders, you already know that grind
consistency and ease of use are attributes that people care about.
Knowing this makes it easy to template the review style for all products in that
category. Just use these things as subheadings and give each product 1-5 points for
each item.
See these two posts .
Since you are using a consistent format for each review and have already done your
research when creating the collection, it shouldn't take too long to create these posts.
Blog Posts
Writing good blog posts is a completely different story. It's easy to find plenty of tutorials
on the internet on how to write blog posts.
Drive traffic to your website through SEO

40.
SEO is not rocket science, but it's not an easy industry either. If you describe in detail
the promotion mechanisms, the volume of one article is not enough. Let's go over some
important principles.
Let's talk about two important aspects and then put together some SEO tutorials from
the blog.
Creation of content hubs
Content hubs are interconnected collections of content on a similar topic.
They consist of three parts:
1. Hub page/pillar content: A high-level guide to a broad topic.
2. Subpages/cluster content. These are detailed guides on major topics.
3. Hyperlinks: They connect the hub page and subpages. The hub page links to all
subpages, and each subpage links back to the hub.

41.
For Amazon affiliate sites, a good tactic is to create content hubs where the selection is
the hub page and the product reviews are the subpages.
There are several major benefits in terms of SEO .
First, they lead to more internal keyword links between your money pages. Since
Google uses the link's internal anchor text to help understand what pages are about,
this can help improve rankings.
Secondly, all pages in the hub benefit from backlinks to each other due to PageRank .
How to do a relink?
1. Select a product review;
2. Refer to individual product reviews for said products;
3. Refer to a selection of these reviews
Let's say you wanted to create an information hub around a selection of the "best coffee
grinders". If you have already written reviews for some of the products mentioned in the
list, just follow the link to them on the hub page and vice versa.
Here is a real example:
One item on this best coffee grinder list is the Baratza Virtuoso Plus.

42.
In the short description there is a link to a full review of this product.

43.
In the product overview , they link back to the selection.
If you do this for all products in the collection, then you will have a hub.
Link building
Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors in Google. They are the basis of
the ranking algorithm, and numerous independent studies have found a strong
correlation between the number of backlinks from unique sites and search traffic.
For Amazon partner sites, you can create links directly to "money" pages, such as
collections and reviews.
There are many ways to do this. Here is one of the ideas.
The product overview is dedicated to a specific type of product. It can be coffee
grinders, desktops, Wi-Fi routers , etc. Think about the purpose of your product and ask
yourself how does it help people?
Here are some examples:
 Coffee grinder -> helps people make better coffee.
 Desktop -> helps to be healthier for people who work from home .
 Wi-Fi Router -> Helps people to enjoy secure internet connection.
Now that you've identified a product benefit, look for blog posts about achieving that
benefit that also mention your product. You can then offer a link to your product to help
your readers choose the best one.
Let's explain with an example.
Let's Google "how to stay healthy while working from home". Almost all SERPs are blog
posts with tips.

44.
But we don't know if they mention desktop usage or not, so let's use the Google search
operator to include results that mention desktop.

45.
9.4 million results.
Here is just one of them:

46.
While this article recommends a specific table model, readers will undoubtedly benefit
from being able to choose. It would be helpful if the post linked to a list of the best
standing tables like this one .
Hence, it would make sense for us to compare our top tables for inclusion in this article.
The letter might look something like this:
Hey [name]!
Just stumbled across your guide to keeping fit on how to be a healthy remote worker.
Loved the desktop advice and I agree that Jarvis is a great option. However, I
spent XX hours testing XX desktops and found that the Jarvis is actually quite
expensive, and that [the other model] is almost as good for less.
Perhaps it would be worth including my comparison to give readers an extra choice?
[link]
Thank you,
[name]
If you send dozens of such emails, one of the recipients will definitely respond and post
some high-quality links to collections of your products.
This is just one of the ideas. You may use others.
Want to create links directly to "money" pages?
Then create blog posts and other useful content on related topics, and then use the
Middleman technique to jump-start new pages.
Quick Clicks
If you want to make money on Amazon, given the 24-hour cookie lifespan, optimize
your content for fast clicks.
We won't go into too much detail because conversion rate optimization is not something
you should focus on at the start.
Here are some more valuable tips:

47.
 Post the recommendation table as early as possible. List of recommendation tables
and links to the most recommended products in the collections. They should be at the
top of the post because you want people to be able to quickly find the information they
came to.
 Use prominent links to Amazon . Buttons that stand out from your site design are
usually the best.
 Give people a reason to trust you. The sooner you can do this, the better. The
Wirecutter approach is probably the gold standard. Just take a look at any of their intros.
When you start getting traffic to your site, then you will already think about what else
can be improved and improved.
Final Thoughts
Building an Amazon affiliate site is still a great way to make money from affiliate
marketing despite recent commission cuts.
However, once you get a decent amount of traffic, it's worth looking into other affiliate
programs that may offer higher commissions on the same products. Even though
Amazon usually has high commission rates, it is often possible to increase profits by
joining other affiliate programs due to the higher rates.
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