How to make money from home with the Amazon Affiliate Program (Amazon Associates) in 2024

Wasabi Team
Wasabi Team

If you are starting in the world of SEO, you surely read at some point that Amazon Associates is an excellent option to start making money from home. It is true, but you have to know how to do it.

So this time, we will give you the keys to make money with Amazon Affiliate.

🤔 What is Amazon Associates and how does it work?

Amazon Affiliate Program

“Amazon Associates” is Amazon’s affiliate platform. So we have to explain what Amazon is and what an affiliate platform is.

There is little to explain about Amazon: it is the largest online store globally. As a result, everyone who needs to buy something goes to Amazon.

Now, what is an affiliate platform? It is a platform that allows users like you to promote their products in exchange for a commission.

That is to say, when we participate in the Amazon affiliate platform, what we do is promote Amazon products. Then, if we sell them, we receive a commission ranging from 1% to 11%, depending on sales and product categories.

It is straightforward to use Amazon Associates. Once you have your account (which we explain in the next section), you can create and get Amazon Affiliate links or advertising banners and place them on your website.

When a person clicks on that link, they are redirected to Amazon’s website. Therefore a “cookie” is placed to indicate you were the one who sent them to the website. Thus, Amazon knows that it was thanks to you and pays a commission if they make the purchase.

An effortless mechanism that allows you to earn money with your website without making any initial investment. Not bad at all, right?

🔒 How to become an Amazon Affiliate?

Signing up for Amazon Associates is very simple. The steps you must follow are the following:

  1. Sign up on the Amazon Associates website: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
  2. Register the websites you want to monetize with Amazon Associates.
  3. Wait for the Amazon team’s approval.

It does not get easier than that.

Of course, you should keep a few things in mind:

  • To sign up with Amazon Associates and request a payment, you must be of legal age.
  • For the website to be approved, you must comply with the content policy of Amazon Associates and also have a few published pages with good content on all of them. They will not approve a low-quality website.

But hey, if you have a minimally decent website, Amazon will not play hard to let you in. Google AdSense is a bit more complex matter lately. However, Amazon still lets many websites go by without looking at them that much.

Also, although this is against Amazon policies, once one of your websites has been approved, you can use your affiliate codes on as many websites as you want, even if you have not registered them on the platform.

✅ Advantages of monetizing with Amazon Affiliates

Now, why monetize with Amazon Associates instead of another system? What are the advantages offered by the program? They are not a few. Let’s look at them:

  1. Good commissions: It is good to bet on Amazon Associates because their commissions are outstanding compared to other monetization platforms. Earning 10 cents for a click on AdSense is not the same as making €10 for a sale on Amazon. You get more money with fewer visits.
  2. Great variety of topics: Amazon is a huge store, so it will be effortless for you to find all kinds of products and niches, which will allow you to dedicate yourself to the topics you like the most while doing your work more bearable and straightforward.
  3. Growing niches: One of the good things about Amazon is that it is very well structured into categories, subcategories, and product types. Thus, you will be able to create websites that grow over time. For example, you can start by selling baby bottles, then baby-feeding-related things, then things for babies in general, etc. Then, as you earn money, you can make your website grow to earn even more money.
  4. Good prospects for the future: Although many people think that Amazon will end up removing commissions from its affiliate program, the truth is that this is unlikely to happen. If it happened, they would automatically lose a lot of marketing and sales they currently have at no cost. Therefore, creating an Amazon-focused website is a good prospect for the future.
  5. It is not exclusive: Monetizing with Amazon Associates does not mean that you can only monetize with them. For example, you can use other services, like Google AdSense, to increase your earnings.
  6. It is easy to beat the competition with Wasabi Theme: Amazon Associates requires a slightly different type of website than usual. You need to show products, explain their characteristics, compare them, etc. This isn’t easy to do with standard websites. However, using a theme like Wasabi Theme, which has been created especially for Amazon niches, makes the work a lot easier and faster. In summary, with Wasabi Theme, you will be able to beat your competition in record time.

📙 How to create a website to earn money from home with Amazon Affiliates

Now that you know what Amazon Associates is, what its advantages are and what you have to do to sign up on its platform, let’s see how to create a monetization-oriented niche website with Amazon Associates. Pay attention.

1. Choose the niche

First, you will have to choose the niche you want to target. There are fundamentally three options:

General website

A general website focuses on all kinds of products. They are, for example, the typical analysis and comparison websites that do not have a specific theme but rather tackle a variety of products.

These websites are generally tricky to position, but they can make a lot of money in the long term.

Thematic website

Thematic websites are halfway between general and niche websites. They address all the products within a theme (for example, sports).

The advantage of these websites is that Google understands you are talking about a specific type of product and therefore positions you more quickly than a general website.

Niche website

Finally, niche websites are oriented towards a product or a small set of product types (for example, beds, thus posting on them about mattresses, sheets, etc.).

These websites tend to position better because Google sees that they handle a specific topic. Also, since they have fewer pages, they concentrate better on the links’ strength.

However, the amount of money it can generate is also more limited.

Generally speaking, if you are starting in SEO and affiliate monetization, the best thing you can do is create several niche websites. Then, it will be easier for you to position yourself and start making some money, although not that much.

This will motivate you, and said motivation would allow you to grow the website. So it goes from a niche to a thematic website, for example.

It would be best to make several niches because some will inevitably fail. There is no way to know beforehand which ones will go well and which ones will go wrong; therefore, it is best to make several and put them to the test. Keep in mind that not even expert SEO professionals know in advance whether a niche will work out or not.

Furthermore, what kind of niche should you choose?

You need to focus on the number of searches that the product or set of products in that niche has and the average commission you will get.

Logically, the more visits your niche has, the more sales and commissions you will get. Therefore, a highly searched product is a sign that it is a potentially profitable niche.

You have to pay attention to the average commission that you will get. Find this out by looking at the average price of the product and extracting the percentage that you will get as a commission (there is a table on the Amazon Associates website with commissions by type of product).

For example, the phones niche has expensive products. Still, at the same time, the commission Amazon pays you for them is pretty low. On the other hand, the fashion niche has cheaper products, but the commission is very high.

You must calculate which products seem to give you the most money and subsequently choose those (always keeping in mind the number of visits they have).

Finally, remember you will have to write a lot of content about these products, so try to choose a niche you feel interested in. Otherwise, you will get frustrated and bored during the process.

Here you can read a little more about finding profitable niches.

2. Website creation

Once you have chosen the niche, you have to create the website. This phase will surely scare you, especially if you do not have basic programming knowledge and have never been into it.

But do not worry. It is much easier than it seems.

You will need a hosting provider, a domain, and WordPress. Regarding the connection between hosting and domain, the hosting provider will help you do it. So you do not have to worry about it either.

Once connected, you will only have to install WordPress. Why WordPress? Because it is the easiest way to create a website. WordPress gives you all kinds of plugins and additional features. Since it is the most used option, any doubt can be quickly solved by googling a little.

We suggest you use Wasabi Theme because it is the most optimized theme for SEO and Amazon Associates monetization, as we will explain below.

As a matter of principle, you will not have to install any more plugins because Wasabi Theme includes everything you need to make money with Amazon Affiliate Program. However, you may be interested in visiting some lists of essential WordPress plugins to see if any are of your interest.

You must also set up the website’s parameters and establish the design and type of permanent links you want. Finally, you must make the website beautiful and with a minimally optimized structure for SEO and affiliates monetization (a simple thing if you use Wasabi Theme).

3. Content creation

This is by far the most critical point when creating an Amazon niche. The content of a monetization-oriented website with Amazon Associates is different from that of a standard informational website.

When we write on an informative website, it is relevant to give all the necessary information that the user is looking for. But in the case of Amazon Associates, that is only half true.

You have to offer information that the user is looking for, but you also have to sell the product. So in this sense, it is a type of text that has much more to do with copywriting. That is to say. It has to do with sales.

Offering a vast amount of information such as technical details can be counterproductive. For this reason, it is convenient to hide said information so that it is only seen if the user clicks on “see more” (or any other similar formula).

That way, you will be able to get the vast majority of users to buy (those who are only looking for a product, and if you convince them that it is the one they need, they will buy it) and that other minority of users who are more specific and seek to know the characteristics of each product.

Furthermore, as we have already mentioned, how contents are presented varies. The content presented on an informative website is not the same as on a niche website. Here you will need comparison tables, product images, CTAs to encourage the purchase, separate each product correctly, etc.

This requires additional work you either carry out by yourself, using plugins or using a professional theme optimized for Amazon Associates monetization, as with Wasabi Theme.

Anyway, you need to realize that once you start creating content, the final objective must be making a persuasive text that leads to the sale and having an information structure that is presented in a way that favors the sale.

4. SEO optimization

Logically you will also have to work on SEO optimization. This is because most of the visits you want to get are through search engines like Google. Why? Because it is free, no more and no less.

If you focus on buying traffic on Facebook, said traffic will cost you money, and what you earn with Amazon Associates will decrease because of the costs generated to capture traffic. So having a free traffic source is a much better idea.

SEO optimization, however, is not a simple thing. Some professionals dedicate their entire lives to this area of ​​online marketing. Therefore, you may find it somewhat complicated if you start from scratch.

You will have to fight against link structures, internal linking typologies, image optimization, meta tags, titles and heading structures, loading speed, rich snippets, etc. In summary, there are many things to cover.

Not to mention it is essential to edit codes in most of them. That is to say, programming (It is not very advanced programming, but still).

The truth is that there is no other alternative. If you want to make money with Amazon Associates, you must use SEO. Luckily for you, there is a straightforward way: having a premium theme developed with SEO in mind.

There are several in this regard, but only one of them has been specifically designed both to meet 100% of SEO criteria and to sell more on Amazon Associates at the same time. That theme is Wasabi Theme.

5. Using Wasabi Theme

We have talked several times about the importance of having Wasabi Theme when creating your Amazon Associates niche website. However, it is time to dig deeper and understand why it is so important to use this theme over others.

First of all, Wasabi Theme is an SEO-optimized theme. It is developed by and for SEOs with the collaboration of many experts to create and monetize niches. Therefore, it is a safe bet if you want to gain an advantage over your competitors.

Secondly, it has the best loading speed possible. Wasabi Theme’s deployment is ultralight and allows you to obtain the best scores in load speed analysis tools and excellent performance. It is effortless to get websites that load less than three milliseconds with Wasabi Theme.

Thirdly, it integrates the main rich snippets. Rich snippets allow you to appear prominently in the SERPs and, therefore, will enable you to capture more visits (which translates into more sales). The problem is that they are challenging to integrate. But with Wasabi Theme, that problem disappears because using them is a matter of two clicks.

Fourthly, it offers differentiated boxes for Amazon products. For example, the products analyzed with Wasabi Theme appear in different boxes alongside their pros and cons, images, CTAs, and everything necessary for the user to see the other purchase options.

Fifthly, it allows you to create comparison tableseasily. While other websites need plugins or custom developments to use comparison tables (which take a lot of time to fill out), Wasabi Theme offers attractive tables that are quick to insert. Furthermore, these tables automatically collect the information they should show, saving you a lot of time.

Sixthly, it allows you to get data from Amazon without using its API. Amazon’s API has more and more restrictions as time passes. By not using the API, Wasabi Theme allows you to monetize Amazon Associates like a professional right from the start while saving you a ton of work.

Seventhly, Wasabi Theme offers a professional look. This is very important because themes on the market are either focused on SEO and very ugly or very beautiful at the cost of sacrificing SEO. Wasabi Theme is the only theme that is perfectly optimized for SEO while at the same time offering a neat and pleasant design, like that of an online magazine.

It gives you a convenient and easy way to optimize internal linking. The cluster system used by Wasabi Theme will allow you to perfectly manage the flow of PageRank between the different pages of your website. It will also allow you to manage various anchor texts to make your search engine positioning easier.

Ninthly and lastly (although there are many more reasons to use Wasabi Theme), it allows you to save a bunch of plugins and external apps. This translates into a better loading speed and, above all, into a much lower money investment.

6. Read our complete and free guide

Now that you know the main steps, we recommend you read our complete and free guide on creating monetized websites: how to create profitable niche websites.

As you can see, making money with the Amazon Associates program is possible. However, it is not the simplest thing in the world. You will have to practice and apply everything we discussed in this guide in different ways until you find the right key. But if you put in the effort, you can make an excellent extra salary every month, or even more!