What is an Affiliate Program?
An affiliate
program is a system that allows webmasters to
earn money by referring customers or leads to
another website that sells goods or services.
When you sign up for an affiliate program such
as that offered by Amazon.com, you are known
as the affiliate. The affiliate does not sell any
product.
He or she simply refers potential customers to
the storefront on another site. To use the
Amazon Affiliate Program as an example, the
affiliate gets a small percentage (commission)
whenever an internet user goes from the affiliate's
website to the Amazon.com website and buys
something from that website.
How Does the Amazon Affiliates Program
Work?
The Amazon affiliates program is one of
the oldest on the internet. Amazon pioneered this
method of marketing when the internet was still
in its infancy.
At its most basic level, the program
works like this:
1. You sign up for the Amazon Affiliates program.
2. Once approved by Amazon, you will be given
access to a special area on their website which
gives you a number of ways that you can link to
the Amazon site or specific products they sell.
3. You then create affiliate links on your site which
point to Amazon.com or any product on their
site. If a visitor to your site clicks on one of the
approved affiliate links and goes to mazon.com
and they then buy something from Amazon.com
within the time period specified in the affiliates
agreement, you get credit for the sale and a
commission on the total selling price, not
including shipping.
4. Once your total sales reach a certain minimum
level, Amazon.com will pay you your
commission. Commissions are paid quarterly
(every 3 months). If your sales do not reach the
cutoff level in any given quarter, they are carried
over to the next quarter and so on until you
qualify for a pay out.
5. As with all affiliate programs, you have to
follow the terms of the affiliate agreement
carefully, and make sure that the way you
promote your affiliate links in accordance with the
agreement. You may be kicked out of the
program and lose whatever commission you
earned. For example, a big no no is you cannot
buy stuff from Amazon using your own affiliate
links. Otherwise everyone could give themselves
a secret discount simply by signing up for
Amazon's affiliate program and then visiting
Amazon.com from a link that they place on their
own website.
6. Obviously, in order to make any money, the
visitor must go from your website to
Amazon.com using an approved link. If you just
place a normal HTML link to Amazon.com you
will get no credit. An approved affiliate link, on the
other hand, incorporates your unique affiliate ID
which guarantees that Amazon can keep track of
who referred them the customer and give you
proper credit.
How Much Can You Earn Using the
Amazon.com Affiliates Program?
It is not
possible to predict what you will earn because the
affiliate commissions you earn will be affected by
1. the cost of the item sold ( the higher the sale
price, the greater your percentage)
2. how many items you sell in a quarter. Amazon
has an incentive program in which your
percentage or commission increases once you
reach certain performance levels.
3. how many visitors you get to your site and
how many of these follow the affiliate links to
Amazon.com
4. And lastly, how many of the people you send
to Amazon.com actually buy something once
they are there. This is known as the conversion
rate. You should also note that under the terms of
the Amazon.com affiliates agreement, the
customer you refer must buy something within
24 hours in order for you to get credi
How to make money with the Amazon
affiliate program
Making money with the
Amazon affiliate program (or any other similar
program for that matter) involves driving visitors
from your site to Amazon's site for the purpose
of buying something. The more visitors you
send over, the greater the chance that someone
will buy and that you will earn a commission.
Sounds easy, right? Well, obviously, it's not that
simple. First, you need to get people to your
website. Secondly, you need to give them a
reason to want to buy something from Amazon.
Let's use an example: Jane has a website dealing
with tropical fish. She writes informative articles
about how to care for tropical fish, how to
choose an aquarium, what foods they eat, how
to treat tropical fish diseases, etcetera.
Because Jane's site has niche content, she is not
competing with millions of other sites selling the
same thing so she ranks high on the search
engine results for terms such as "tropical fish".
Jane is happy. She gets lots of visitors, but she
wants to make some money from all the internet
traffic. So she signs up for the Amazon Affiliate
Program and places links from her site to
Amazon.com. But she makes no money. Why?
The reason is that it is necessary to make the
visitor to your site want to check out more on the
Amazon site. So for example, Jane could write an
article about fish, and then provide direct links
from the article to specific products mentioned in
it. If her article recommended a specific type of
aquarium, she could provide a link directly to that
product on Amazon.com. In other words, the
links should be relevant to what the people who
came to your site were looking for in the first
place.
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