15 Hot Tips on How to Make the Most Money as an Amazon Associate

These are my top 15 affiliate marketing tips on how to make the most money as an Amazon Associate. Many of these are probably new to you.

These tips could set you apart from your market niche competition.

Don't be left in the dark!

The first thing I want to say is that the market niche that you choose is the absolute most important decision you can make before you go to the trouble of building a website and writing the articles.

You can use HubPages to test out suspected niches.  Be patient though.

My favorite is to target product focused niches and keywords.

It is easiest to make money using the Amazon Associates affiliate program if your website visitors are looking for a specific product that your website discusses. It's usually much more difficult to use some random personal blog and convert the clicks from the product links to something being bought.  Especially if the visitor are not actively looking for something to buy.

A quality product review related to your product niche is a great way to get higher click thru rates (CTR) and increased sales.

The review should be thorough and well-written by you.

They should also be honest, as you want to gain the trust and respect of your visitors.

You can try to contact the manufacturer's marketing team and see if they would send you a demo unit of the product to review.

A very large percentage of my Amazon Associate income comes from plain text links sprinkled inside the text of a blog post or article.

Visitors tend to trust what they read in the body of the content on a web page more so than any advertisement.

This one sounds simple enough, but don't worry, it is simple.

The more you sell with Amazon, the higher the commission percentage.

This means more money for you, because with each tier increase you get a incrementally higher percentage. Simple.

During the holiday months, especially leading up to December, I will typically hit around the 7 1/2% or 8% mark.

This is double the 4% rate you start with each month for shipping only 1 - 6 items per month.

One technique that I like to use is to pick lower competition niches in which the items are not very expensive, so your competitors may not be interested.

But you ARE interested in these niches.

You want to be in these niches because it may be easy to sell these products in large quantities.

This allows you to reach the next payout tiers, which mean a higher percentage of commission for you.

My other niche websites that sell the more expensive products at much higher prices ($XXX - $X,XXX) which are sold less often, but at a higher sales commission for you.

Use the Amazon tracking codes option. It allows you to see what site or efforts are working best. Couple this with Google Analytics and you can a lot of powerful information.

How it works is; by default Amazon assigns you one tracking ID, such as YOURTRACKINGCODE-20. You can then select which one you use when you create the links.  *You can click on the text link below if you want to have a further explanation from Amazon.

However, you can create additional Amazon tracking Codes; up to a total of 100.

Use at least one Amazon tracking code for each site in which you are using Amazon Associates affiliate codes, widgets, and static text and ads.

The Amazon Associates Site Strip is a fantastic tool that you can use as you search for products or pages on Amazon.

It features:

• Link to this page
  
• Add to aStore
• Add to Twitter
• Add to Widget

For example, you can easily submit a product link to your followers on Twitter, which then could turn into a sales commission, if they buy something from Amazon.

Create a product comparison table for the products within your niche in order to allow your visitors to sort by various features.

This is a great way to get some additional sales!

I like to use Wordpress for my blogs and so I like to use the Wordpress Table Reloaded plugin to create my grid or table.

You can create columns of information about the products and in the final column I use a buy now button so people can click and be linked to the product page on Amazon, which of course includes your Amazon Associates code. ;)

You can do this by offering some type of freebie, such as a "Buyers Guide", "Special Deals", a newsletter, or some other type of information in which they may have an interest.

If they are kept in touch with you by being on your email list, receiving newsletters and other information, then you will have an ongoing crowd of people that may visit your site over and over.

Amazon has a bestsellers page which is at Amazon.com/bestsellers, where you can look for your respective niche category. I usually list the top 5 or top 10 products.

One of the great things to do is to publish a "Bestsellers List" and just mention the currently trending bestsellers.

Amazon provides you with the list of top sellers, which are also most likely for your readers would buy too! Very cool!

A great way to mention products that are now on sale more frequently on your blog or website, one of the best ways that I have found is to just do a "Weekly Deals" post.

In other words, what I would do is publish a blog post every week with the best deals in the niche.

Depending on how often you publish blog posts, you could do it more or less often.

If you don't already know, Carousel Widgets are interactive and typically display 5 to 10 products in a rotating banner.

I have found that the dynamic Amazon carousel widgets are almost 3 times better than the static Amazon banner ads. Even Google Adsense has outperformed, in terms of the click-through rate (CTR)!

I suggest using a combination of static and dynamic ads.

You can create the Amazon carousel banner widgets inside your Amazon Associates account.

You can then post them on Blogger or your own website.

The Amazon aStore looked promising when they first arrived on the scene a few years ago.

They are free to set up and you can incorporate them into a website, but unfortunately they have routinely underperformed.

Building a fully functioning Amazon Associate storefront is fantastic!

You can build an entire site around or including an Amazon Associate store by using a script. Most of these scripts cost money, but you "get what you pay for" with many things in life. There is a really handy comparison of Amazon store scripts that are available to use.

Or, you could skip right to my favorite; Fresh Store Builder.

The customer using your site adds products into a shopping cart, then goes to check out, thereby the shopping cart transfers everything directly to Amazon, where the customer can pay for it. Completely secure. You don't ship anything. But you do get a commission on the sales. :)

I am making a lot more money via my sites with Amazon stores integrated into them than I would be without.

Jay Abraham presents an innovative method of using Amazon for copywriting.

There are a lot of ideas here. There is the idea of using titles to determine the best phrasing and terms. There is another on finding and analyzing empathy though polarization of opinions about a product.

There are a lot of ideas in these free videos, including the one to the right.

Abraham recommends that you refer to the top 100 selling books on Amazon, in your niche, and use Amazon's well-designed and monitored reviews to guide you through writing your copy.

You cannot copyright a title, so this is really just good food for thought.

Jay Abraham recommends that you make two lists; one with comments from the positive reviews section, and another from the negative reviews section. Both sides are usually reviews that are very sincere, spontaneous, honest, and hear-felt AND highly informative, as to what people in the particular niche want badly or are frustrated or unhappy.

I even see possibilities of expanding this method beyond Abraham's use. For instance, if you need to come up with persona ideas for a persona-based presell campaign, you can get great stuff in these reviews. Some personas almost jump off the page at you. These are real personas that are already in the customer base, not ones you imagine might work.

Also, Amazon is not the only place to seek sincere polarized, heartfelt reviews from readers. Epinions is another. You could do a search for reviews on Google or Yahoo and use searches such as:

• "customer reviews" "keyword term"
• "reader reviews" "keyword term"
• "client reviews" "keyword term"
• "member reviews" "keyword term"

Any visitors that are diverted to Amazon via your link could buy something!

Between you or Amazon, who do you think will do a better job selling?

Amazon spends tens of millions of dollars every year to improve the way they get people to convert to buying something.

When you send someone to Amazon you get a percentage (a commission) of anything that they buy for the next 24 hours (30 days if they added an item to their cart).

Now get out there!