What is an Amazon Associates Account? It is Amazon’s Affiliate program.

What is an affiliate program?

What is an affiliate program? It’s a way you make money from sending traffic to other people’s websites. This is an awesome way to create revenue for your website! As you write blog posts about different products you use or want to highlight, you use links that are provided to you by the company. When someone clicks on your special link, goes to their website, and buys something the company gives you a commission/ pays you money. There are many different types of affiliate programs out there beyond just amazon. You can go to the affiliate link site link Clickbank, or many other brands have affiliate programs as well. All you need to do is look in the footer of their websites to find them.

How does the Amazon Associates Program Work?

You can add amazon listings into your article with direct links back to those products on amazon. If someone buys these products Amazon will pay you a commission!! The commission amount varies based on product type, but one of the really cool things that once you send someone to Amazon through your link you get paid on ANYTHING they buy within 24 hours. It doesn’t even have to be the product you sent them there for. So, if they have other stuff in their cart, or add anything to their cart and check out, you get paid. I’ve been paid for things before that were in no way related to products I was linking.

How do you keep up with what you’ve sold? GREAT QUESTION. When you login there is a full reporting function that tells you how many impressions you’ve driven, sales, and items sold.

NOTE: they require you to sell a certain amount with the first few weeks to make sure you are a serious. When I got started I had to restart my account a few times.

How do you setup an Amazon Associates Account?

How do you set up your account? All you have to do is go to https://affiliate-program.amazon.com and create your account. Once you create your account you will be able to search the products and use special links they give you! You will need to make sure you add a way for them to pay you, and you will need to add the websites that you will be promoting links from. And, then BAM you are off to the races!

What do Amazon affiliate links look like on a website?

Ok, I’m sure you are curious how to implement them into your website. They give you a few options, straight link, linked image, linked product description, and linked image & description. The later examples provide you an embed code to use so you don’t have to recreate much, you simply copy and paste the code into an HTML box.

You can see an example of how it is used in a story here: https://paleobelle.com/different-types-paleo-cooking-oils/ You can see how the images are placed and linked as part of the story.

Here is another example: http://www.wellfullyu.com/how-to-start-an-organic-garden/

Here is one more example: https://www.guesshownow.com/how-to-screenshot-a-mac/

In conclusion

Look I have seen many people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on apps and other business models that didn’t pan out. If they would had spend the same about of money and effort on a website that creates great content and provides affiliate links they would have had a resource that had the potential to create that recurring income they were looking for. So, check out amazon associates as a way to start generating revenue off your website traffic today.