Do you want to earn a healthy income, or want to make money online? Try building an Amazon affiliate site.
You’ve probably heard about how much money an Amazon affiliate can make online. Maybe you even created a website, tested it, and found that after you got everything moving, only a few dollars in affiliate revenue came in a few months.
Well, based on my experience, here is the best way to really make money with an Amazon affiliate site. And it will only take a day to make the site.
The secret? Low cost, low effort.
How To Build An Amazon Affiliate Site
Just building an Amazon affiliate site is one thing, but it’s a completely different challenge to start bringing in the right traffic that will turn into product sales once they click on Amazon. For this reason, it is incredibly important to choose the most suitable niche for your site, right from the start. Let’s get to this.
1. Learn some basic HTML codes
You need to do this to keep your costs down and get everything you want. Even if the site is basically set up for you, you’ll need to know how to insert images, create hyperlinks, and do some basic text formatting.
2. Choose your niche
You’ll review products and recommendations, so choose a topic you enjoy and know something about. If you can’t stay passionate about this topic, it will show and it won’t hold your interest either. Choose a niche narrow enough to be distinctive, for example, bands in your city, left-handed guitarists, music for a certain type of dance, authors of a certain religion, books on business, arts and crafts resources, and so on.
3. Choose your domain name
Make it rich in keywords, not smart. Think about how users will find your site in search engines. Here are some ideas:
- Music: BandsFromTexas.com, BandOutOfBoston.com, SouthpawGuitarists.com, ClassicPsychedelia.com, Non-Stop-Hip-Hop.com, Merengue-Music.com
- Books: Mormon-Authors.com, Arts & Books-Books.com, Stephen-King.com Books, ClassicBusinessBooks.com
- Others: Best-Baby-Toys.com, MomsMags.com, FelliniMovies.com
4. Register your domain name
If you’re not technically inclined, register your domain whenever you set up your hosting in step 5. Otherwise, you can save a few bucks by choosing a low-cost provider. It’s not a big deal for one or two sites, but it can be ten or twenty. I use GoDaddy, which has excellent domain management tools and is less than $ 10 a year. The least expensive I found from a reputable source is 1 & 1, which is priced around $ 7 a year the last time I checked.
5. Create your Web Hosting
This is where most people are burned. For this type of site, you don’t need $ 10 a month for web hosting! Our online business guide has a list of Cheap Web Hosting for under 10 USD. Some are as small as $ 4 a month with unlimited domains, meaning you can run multiple sites like this on the same hosting package.
6. Install WordPress
“Blog, you say?” Yes. It will give your site all the structure you need, plus make it easy to quickly post new content. My choice is WordPress, which is open source (i.e., free), easy to install and use, but still very powerful.
Many hosts have a one-step installation process, or you can download it and follow the installation instructions.
7. Do it enough
One of the great things about WordPress is the huge variety of templates available for it – they can completely change the look and feel.
8. Setting the categories
Most blogging software allows you to create subcategories to help you organize your entries. This will help visitors narrow down more specifically their interests. For example, BandsFromTexas.com could have a group of genre categories – rock, country, blues, etc. – and another for the city of origin – Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, etc.
9. Sign up as an Amazon affiliate
It’s simple and free. Just visit Amazon and click the Join Associates link at the bottom of the page (here is a direct link for your convenience).
Your site should already have at least the basic setup done, even if you currently have no content, as they will manually review the site before approval.
10. Create your blog by Posting bookmarks and links
There are two links that will be essential to make this easy. The first is the blog post link. In your blog software, there should be a “bookmarklet” at the bottom of the page (see instructions) at the bottom of the page. Click the link (and hold the mouse) and drag it to the Links toolbar in your browser (assuming Internet Explorer) or in the Favorites menu. This will allow you to make a blog with a single click.
11. Create your Amazon Build-A-Link Bookmark and Link
This will make it easier to link to your embedded affiliate ID. Log in to Central Associations, look in the left navigation sidebar, go to Build-A-Link, and under Static Links you’ll find Individual Items. Click and drag this on the Links toolbar or in the Preferences menu.
12. Build your first connection
Go to Amazon and sign in with your associated account. Find the product you want to review and use the Stripe site (gray stripe at the top of the screen that you’ll see when you sign up as an associate) to get your custom link to the item. They also offer a variety of other options for creating links and banners.
13. Review your blog
Click your blog post link (click it in WordPress by default). If you use WordPress, you should now see two snippets of link code in your post form, the first of which ends with “Build-A-Link Associates>”. Delete through that point. The second part is a link to the product with the associated Amazon Associate ID. Now, write your product review, choose the appropriate categories for it and click “Publish”.
14. Build your Amazon affiliate site
Before you promote your site, you want to have substantial content there. Write more product reviews. You have at least 2-3 in each category you have created. You may want to create categories for articles, news, and comments about your topic. The more content your site has, the better. And the great thing is that as you type it all, search engines receive notifications automatically, assuming you’ve enabled the notifications mentioned in step 6.
15. Promote your Amazon affiliate site
The best free way to do this is to communicate with other bloggers who write about similar topics and to participate in online communities where the topic is discussed. See the Online Business Networking category for ideas, as well as the Internet Marketing category.
