I bet you're here because you want to know how to make money from home. After all, who doesn't?
Well… I'm going to tell you a secret – it's easier than you think!
If it wasn't easy, this site wouldn't exist – and I wouldn't be writing this article right now…
I'll get straight to the point:
You can make a lot of money by promoting Amazon products as an affiliate. Many people have been able to quit their day jobs thanks to that little trick!
That being said, let me first tell you why most bloggers fail at making money with Amazon. Maybe then the following technique will make more sense? Before we begin though, please keep in mind that the earnings shown below are not necessarily your earnings with this method. The more time you dedicate to it, the more money you will make… So let's get started!
1) Most bloggers promote products they don't sell themselves.
What does this mean? Well, most people who write about affiliate marketing usually use an example of how someone could promote a certain product themselves. For instance, I often hear "If you had your website about cooking recipes and wrote a cookbook review which included links to buy the book at Amazon, then you would earn X% commission on every sale". Do you see what I'm getting at? They're talking about their OWN experience promoting THAT PRODUCT! Now there is nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't scale very well. That is, once you run out of friends and family members who would like to buy that particular product for themselves or as a gift, you're stuck unless you want to start cold calling random people on the phone (not recommended).
2) They put all their eggs into one basket.
This means that they promote only ONE product – usually, the one they wrote about in their blog post – and make money from anyone who clicks on an affiliate link inside of it. For example, if all your friends and family read your review about "The best cookbook ever: recipes for beginners" and nobody else reads your blog, then it's practically impossible to consistently earn money with affiliate links because… Well, you have no traffic, do you?
3) They don't have a list.
At the end of the day making money online is just like everything else in life – it's all about relationships. When you build trust with your readers they are more likely to click on an ad or buy something from you instead of somebody else; even if you make less money per sale! If they never hear from you again though, they won't hesitate to use Google or Bing to find somebody new to take your place… Especially if there happens to be some other blogger talking about how great product X is (which leads me nicely into my next point…)
4) There are too many bloggers publishing content every single day.
This means that unless people can FIND your blog post, they won't even think about clicking on an affiliate link to buy the product you're trying to promote. Even if they do though, there are hundreds of other bloggers trying to sell the same thing! To make things worse, many bloggers are simply copying one another's content without really adding any new information… If I got paid for every "cut and paste" article I read online… *cough* Anyway, point being – if your content is not unique it will be much harder for people to remember who wrote what in the first place. And if nobody can remember who you are or why they should click on your links… well it doesn't take a genius to figure out where this is going 😉
5) They don't ask anyone to buy anything!
This is one of the biggest mistakes I used to make as well. I made a blog post about how great product X was and then just sat back and waited for people to buy it… The problem with this approach is that you need to take your readers by the hand and bring them from point A – reading your review – all the way down to point B – buying product X . If nobody reads your blog, there won't be any sales so you will earn exactly $0 per month (or even less if Amazon decides they no longer want to work with affiliates for that particular country).
Fortunately, there's a pretty straightforward solution that solves all these problems at once: Make more than 1 blog post each day, on different products! This way you don't have to rely on anyone's product for all your income, but can still earn commissions whenever new people join your list and click through to the associated product page(s). Now that's not to say that "the sky is the limit" or anything like that. You still need to put some work into it – especially if you want a successful blog – but there is no magic involved 🙂
When I first started using this approach myself I made a few mistakes though:
1) I was putting all my time into writing blog posts instead of building a list. As a result, although I was publishing more than 1 review per day there were very few affiliate sales from readers who joined my list (about 10-20 per month on average). This meant that I had to rely on one or two best-selling products each month, which isn't very sustainable.
2) Although it is crucial to write about different products all the time, this doesn't mean that you should be publishing completely unrelated articles 200% of the time! You see, there are two main "types" of blog posts: Unrelated – When you publish an article without mentioning any affiliate links at all; maybe because the product simply doesn't fit with your website's niche or because you just forgot/ran out of time…
