Promoting products that are for sale on Amazon can be a great and lucrative way for your website to make a lot of money in passive income. Some of my favorite website marketers have reported earnings of thousands of dollars each month from using the Amazon Associates program.
But earning Amazon affiliate commissions isn’t necessarily as easy as just adding a single link to your content and then hoping for the best.
In order to get the reader’s attention and get them to click on your links, you have to use a smart combination of common sense along with some proven marketing tactics.
Fortunately, it’s very easy to implement these strategies, and if you practice them enough they can become a normal part of your regular writing style.
Here are a number of great tips to help improve your Amazon Affiliate commission rate and get your website to bring in more revenue than ever before.
Boosting Your Amazon Affiliate Commissions
1. Give Accurate Product Descriptions:
This is where your sales pitch starts. In order to really be effective at promoting an Amazon affiliate product, the readers should not have to look anywhere else to find out the information they need to know.
Just imagine if you were going to buy the item. You’d probably want to know things like what it does, its size, its output, what it works with and what it doesn’t
The good news: Almost all of this information can be pulled directly from Amazon’s product descriptions. However, you NEVER want to copy and paste. You should always find some creative way to present the information as if it was your own; adding your personal touches.
Anything that you can’t get from Amazon you can usually find right on the manufacturer’s website themselves. Manufacturers are usually really good about going over-board with the amount of technical information they have available and publishing on their website.
2. Personal Reviews and Testimonies:
Your review of an Amazon product you’re promoting should never read like a boring list of specs that someone could find on some sales page. That’s not going to get anyone excited about buying the product! (And, more importantly, it’s not going to help you earn any affiliate commissions.)
You want to tell them all the things they’re NOT going to find in the product description on Amazon. That’s why they’re reading your site!
If you’re like me, one of the first things you do is jump down to the comments section and start reading buyer testimonials. Why? Because (usually) these are real people with real, honest opinions about whether or not the product was any good! (I say “usually” because there have been some products that use fake Amazon reviews to try to boost their scores).
How does this apply to your article? In two major ways:
The first is that hidden within these comments are a ton of useful, personal information that you can use for your writing. You can find out all kinds of comparisons, personal touches, etc. Example: Even though this TV was 120 Hz, the picture quality still didn’t look anywhere as good as my Samsung TV. This is extremely helpful if you are reviewing something that you don’t own or haven’t personally used.
Secondly, you can then use this information and creatively weave it into your Amazon product review. That way as the reader goes through your article, they will get a good dose of both personal touch and technical detail.
3. Use Lots of Big Pictures:
Within the article you are going to want to make sure you include lots of high quality, large photos that show the product from a multitude of angles and uses.
Amazon Associates provides you with code to a photo along with an affiliate link. But often these photos are tiny. You can usually find bigger and better photos right on the official Amazon sales page or the product manufacturer’s website. Do NOT just use any photo you find on the web because it might be an original photo that is copyrighted.
Larger pictures tend to do pretty well in Amazon product reviews because without having to do anything the user can get a great view of what the item is without having to do anything.
Even if you try to supply thumbnail sized images, it can still be pretty annoying to have to click on each one and then click the Back button to return to the main article. Making it easy on the reader is key!
4. Include Your Link In Every Photo:
Speaking of making things easy, it is also a good idea to make sure each of your images is also a clickable link using your Amazon affiliate link ID. This allows the reader to quickly move off your page (using your referral link) to the product they want directly on Amazon.
Remember for SEO purposes to make sure that all of these links have the “nofollow” attribute. Otherwise it could impact your site negatively as far as SEO goes since you would be passing link juice on to a “commercial” site. You can find out a lot more SEO tips in our free guide here.
5. In-Content Text Links Work:
It’s been said that in-content text links (links you find naturally within the body of the article text) are more effective than picture links. This is because as the reader is working their way through the article, they have more trust for these types of links.
With in-content links, the trick is not to overdo it. A well placed link somewhere near the beginning of the article and somewhere near the end of the article is all you need. Anymore than this may come across on the surface as “spammy” to your reader. Plus, if you followed the last step, then you’ve already got plenty of affiliate links hidden throughout your article in the form of photos.
Again, don’t forget to use the “nofollow” attribute to make sure these links don’t count negatively against your SEO. The last thing you want for your article is no have no one find it in Google and make no conversions!
Summary
The trick to increasing your Amazon affiliate commissions and making more money online is to make sure your website is just like any other good advertisement: Fun, creative, and easy to use.
Make sure you add in lots of personality to the review and do your homework to find information that will be useful. Use nice, big, high-quality photos that contain your Amazon affiliate link. Use your link within the body of the article too, but be a little bit more discrete.
Remember – the goal of your article should be to make a conversion by giving honest and accurate information – just like if you were really there selling the item to them in person.
Featured image courtesy of Soumit Nandi | Flickr
Good tips, thank you! We have also found that it takes time for a site to reach its potential.
Is there an easy way to make those links no follow without a plugin like Prettylink?
Thank you!
Unfortunately, no. I’ve always just manually added in the “nofollow” attribute every time I add an affiliate link.
Great idea, DW! I’m sure that if you know what you are doing, you can easily make a good Amazon-based niche site. I have one niche I’d like to enter myself. I’m not the first one, though.
Do you recommend hiring writers to write the reviews for you, or doing them all yourself? Or some sort of mix?
Also, how do you add “no-follow” tags to your links?
Sincerely,
ARB–Angry Retail Banker
Whenever possible hire good writers. Though it can be fun to write the posts yourself, you’ll cover more ground and be way more productive if you leverage the talents of others.
“Nofollow”ing a link is very easy, but tedious the more posts you publish. To do it, as you write your post, switch the view to html and then add rel=”nofollow” to the context of the link. Here is a more detailed explination: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-add-nofollow-tag.html