7 Steps to Making Money as an Amazon Affiliate With WordPress

Published by sharedeals.me on

Do you want to make passive income by blogging? Do you enjoy reviewing products? If the answer is “yes” to either of those questions, then starting an Amazon Affiliate site with WordPress may be right for you!

Q: But why Amazon Affiliates? (Amazon Associates Program)

A: The Amazon Affiliates/Associates Program allows you to earn commissions by posting product links on your site. When a reader visits your site, clicks on a product link, and buys a product on your website, you earn a commission from that sale. This can be one of the many ways you can monetize your existing site or one of the simplest ways to earn passive income if you are looking for a side-hustle.

Q: How hard is it to start if I don’t have a website?

A: It’s actually really simple to set up a WordPress website, and you can do it using free web hosting and a really cheap domain. Plus, WordPress is really easy to use, especially for those who aren’t technically savvy.

1. Pick a Niche

Amazon currently has millions of products to choose from. When Amazon started out, they only sold books and branched out from there.

Likewise, when starting your first site, it’s better to pick a niche rather than try to feature every product under the sun. You will be more likely to succeed if you do.

Pick something you are passionate about, pick something you know a lot about, pick something you like. You will produce better content more naturally. Plus, different products require different marketing strategies since they likely serve different target customers.

2. Set Up a WordPress Site

Setting up a WordPress site is a lot easier than you think. In fact, you can do it quite cheaply or even for free. To create your WordPress site, you need to use a hosting service. There are broadly two choices:

  • a website hosting service
  • or WordPress.com

We highly recommend that you choose a cheap or a free website hosting service over WordPress.com.

Why? Because WordPress.com’s free plans come with a lot of restrictions, the biggest being that you cannot install plugins. Plugins are absolutely required if you want to customize your WordPress site. If you want the ability to use plugins or customize your website with themes, you need to at least pay for a Business plan which costs $25 per month. Alternatively, you can find free hosting services that let you use WordPress unrestricted. But if you want to pay a bit extra to have your website load fast, you can find cheap hosting services for as little as $2 per month.

Companies that offer a free hosting plan will often let you install WordPress with just one click and let you use WordPress without any restrictions. Also, they usually give you access to the files and database. This means that if you don’t like them, you move your site to another service.

Our personal recommendations are:

3. Sign Up for Amazon Associates

Before you can start earning commissions, you need to sign up for an Amazon Associates account. Amazon Associates, sometimes referred to as Amazon Affiliates, is Amazon’s affiliate program. Visit the Amazon Associates sign-up page to get started. To understand how the sign-up process works, you can view this step-by-step guide for setting up a new account.

4. Install an Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin

Amazon Affiliate Buddy WP pictured left

You will need to install an Amazon Affiliate WordPress plugin on your website in order to start earning commissions from Amazon sales through your site. Although Amazon provides tools to generate links, they are often small and not attention-grabbing (see the example pictured above in which the left link is generated by a plugin and the right is a standard link from Amazon). This often leads to lower sales and, therefore, lower commissions.

Because of this, it is always better to choose a plugin. While there are a few out there to choose from, we highly recommend
Amazon Affiliate Buddy WP by ShareDeals. This plugin makes it easy to insert links into your blog posts without copy-and-pasting html.

And due to a recent change to Amazon’s Product Advertising API policy, most plugins won’t work for beginners since they require at least 3 sales in 180 days before you can use their API, which most plugins require. This is not the case for Amazon Affiliate Buddy WP which makes it perfect for beginners.

5. Register a Domain Name

In order to establish your site as a reputable source of information, you need to have a .com or .net domain name (for example: myblog.com). The easiest and cheapest way to start a website is to first go with a free web hosting service (like the ones listed above) and pay for a domain name separately. Services like Namecheap offer .com domain names for as little as $10 per year and you can point your .com domain to your website hosted on a free web hosting service. You always have the option of upgrading to paid hosting later once your website receives a significant amount of traffic. Check out this guide to understand how to register a domain name.

6. Post Reviews

People are always browsing product reviews before they commit to making a purchase. Think about the products that you like and use daily: if you were to recommend them to a friend, what would you say? All of this information is valuable to a prospective buyer. While it might be tempting to only say good things about the product, it’s best to be honest and also highlight its flaws. Building trust with your readers as a product reviewer is key. The greater the trust, the greater the likelihood of them reading and sharing your content.

To improve your chances at a sale, you can write articles comparing several similar products or even a top 10 list of the best products out there. Read this article for some great tips on how to write a good product review.

7. Drive Traffic to Your Site

Your final step is to grow a following for your site. While there are many ways of driving traffic, the key is to post often, share your content on as many platforms as possible (like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.), and have patience.

In fact, one of the most effective ways of directing traffic to your site is by submitting your RSS feed to Flipboard. Flipboard is a news aggregation platform that features stories from various websites. If you post great content often, they will accept your feed and in a short amount of time, you will have many visitors flowing to your site from their app.

Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com


1 Comment

Diane · January 28, 2020 at 4:55 am

would like to become an affiliate, I already have a WordPress website

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