1. Niche Selection Is Crucial

The niche you choose is the absolute most important decision you can make.

I love to target physical product focused niches and keywords

It’s easiest to make money using Amazon’s affiliate program if the people coming to your website are looking for a specific product that your website discusses. It’s more difficult to use a website that deals with making money online and make money linking to physical products because the people going there are looking for advice on how to earn money online – not what iPod speakers they should buy.

2. Link To Products Inside Your Content

Roughly half of my Amazon income comes from basic text links posted inside the content body area of a blog post or page.

Example: Check out this cool helicopter. I’ve been covering these RC helicopters for months and I’ve never seen this one priced for only $25.98 well off it’s $129.95 list price.

Simple text links in the content of an article are the most effective way to get web visitors to click. People trust the body of the content on a page more so than any other area of the website and I know this because the tracking data I’ve collected.

3. Make Product Images Clickable Affiliate Links:

The second best thing I’ve found next to a simple text link is to use images of the product you’re talking about and make them clickable


4. Link To Amazon.com As Many Times Possible

I alluded to this in the previous few tips but I want to make sure you understand that each link inside one of your articles is another opportunity for a visitor to click through and make their way onto Amazon.com.

It’s common for me to link to Amazon five to ten times in a single article (more if I’m doing a product review).

5. Product Review Articles Convert The Best

Doing a quality product review for a product directly related to your niche is a very easy way to garner higher click thru rates and increased sales, but only if your review is higher quality.

Ideally you contact the manufacturer’s marketing team or PR agency and get them to send you a demo unit of the product to review, but this takes a lot of effort and may not be worth it on a smaller traffic site (at first).

You want to convince the reader to investigate their purchase options by the time they finish reading an article, which is why I’ll always include links to all of the products mentioned in a review at the end of the article. That way it’s an easy transition from learning about the product during your review and then at the end it’s time to make a purchase.


6. Build An Email List

You’ve probably heard this a hundred times by people telling you to build an email list from the blogger and internet marketing crowd, but building an email list is way easier on a physical product oriented website.

Why? People don’t have their guard up when they are researching a physical product to purchase (when compared to other purchase decisions online i.e. digital goods). So what I like to do is offer some type of freebie like a buyers guide or some type of information that provides more details about the products they’re researching.

For my newsletter provider I use Aweber and highly recommend them.

7. Write Sales And Promos During The Holidays

sales during during Black Friday Week, Cyber Monday and Cyber Week are high. It is lower during other holidays like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Presidents Day, Valentines Day etc. but you can still promote various sales during these holidays as well. I target every holiday because Amazon creates an actual dedicated sales page every time one of these holidays come around. The deals shared on these pages are generally really good too.

So what I’ll do is put together an article of all the top products that are on sale in my niche using the tips I’ve shared earlier like linking as many times as possible, making the product image clickable and then sending out an email to my list etc. to get even more conversions.

Stats From A “Cyber Monday (My Niche) Discounts” Post Last Year

For the structure of these articles I like to target a frequently searched keyword such as “Cyber Monday (My Niche) Discounts” etc. because I know people search for “Cyber Monday” and “Black Friday” millions of times each year but they also search a longer form version like “Cyber Monday (My Niche) Discounts”

8. Sell More Products To Make Incrementally More Money

This one sounds simple enough and it really is. The more you sell with Amazon the more you make AND the higher percentage you earn. During holiday months you can typically hit around the 8% mark which is double the 4% rate you start with for shipping only 1 – 6 items per month. Even if you sold 7 items you get bumped up to 6% and the best part is that this increase in commission percentage is retroactive (meaning once you reach the next level you get to apply the higher percentage referral fee to every product you’ve sold during the entire month).


9. Sell Large Quantities Of Inexpensive Products To Boost Your Payout On High Priced Products

One thing you can do is to have websites that are set up in lower competition niches where the items typically aren’t as expensive and where it’s easier to sell these products in larger quantities ($50 or less). Then I have other niche sites that sell more expensive products at much higher prices ($Bleep – $X,Bleep) that are sold less frequently. So this way I get to use the increased quantity of sales from these lower priced product websites to help me get up into higher payout brackets so instead of making 6% on that high end item I’ll get 8% instead.

10. Use Multiple Tracking ID’s For Each Website

By default Amazon assigns you one tracking ID like blahblahblah-20 but you can create additional tracking ID’s here up to a total of 100. If you hit that total you can always ask for more so feel free to be liberal with your creation of tracking ID’s for your websites.

You wouldn’t install the same Google Analytics code on every single website you own right? Of course not, because you wouldn’t be able to tell how much traffic each of your websites were receiving individually. So the same thing can be said for tracking the money you make on your websites (and yet people still tell me they use only one Amazon tracking ID for all of their websites /facepalm). In the past I’ve gone so far as to create 15 different tracking ID’s for use on a single website.