How to become an Amazon Affiliate

One of the ways I have been trying to make money as a stay at home mom is through being an Amazon Affiliate. When you’re an Amazon affiliate, you get special links you can share on your blog, YouTube videos, social media, and more! You can get started the day you sign up, and earn commissions on everything your readers buy within 24 hours of clicking your link! Sounds amazing, right?

Of course, there are some things you’ll need to know and do before diving in. Let’s break it down. But first, these are the positives and negatives of the Amazon affiliate program at a glance to help you decide if it’s for you:

Positives:

-Sign up is quick and easy and you can get started as soon as today! (Check out the link here: https://amzn.to/3QwRYN0)

-Make money whenever someone uses your link and buys anything (really, just about anything!) off Amazon within the next 24 hours after clicking your link.

-You get a convenient “site stripe” on top of every Amazon page you visit, that allows you to quickly copy/paste your affiliate link to any page on Amazon.

-Not much advertising needed on your part, Amazon already has a large customer base built in.

Negatives:

-Lots of rules to remember and follow, and breaking them can result in losing your account (after a warning).

-The 24 hour buy window is short compared to some other affiliate programs.

-The percentage you earn is relatively small compared to other affiliate programs.

-Takes 3 months to receive earnings.

-You need a blog or relatively large social media following to get started.

That being said, this is a nice little side hustle where you can make some spending money on the side if you play your cards right, and if you play them really right, you can rake in quite a lot.

Steps:

Have a blog or social media account.

In my opinion a blog is the easier one to start unles you already have a large social media following. This is the part that scares off some people. I get it. I have always wanted to start a blog and I still hesitated knowing about this requirement. But it's not too crazy hard if you choose a topic you care about/are interested in and get to writing. Grab a free site (ehem, ehem! Like like I did through Wix! There's also Wordpress and a few others) and start building your website. Amazon recommends at least 10 blog posts on your account. I happened to have exactly 10 on my blog the day my account got approved by Amazon, so that seems to be accurate. The social media route (to me) seems a bit more difficult since they recommend you have something like 5,000 followers. But hey maybe you do have that many, if so, good for you and you should definitely monetize that following by joining the affiliate program!

Basically this will be your main avenue through which you post your affiliate links (although there are many others and I'll talk about that below). For example, I post Amazon deal posts on my blog like this post: https://minniebla.wixsite.com/website/post/amazon-black-friday-baby-deals . I then share those posts on forums and places where I think people will be interested. For the blog part, choose something you like and can write about. Maybe that’s a hobby, maybe that’s a lifestyle blog, maybe that’s a career-based blog, whatever the case may be, you’ll start writing articles you can put links in to Amazon products that are relevant to that topic. Amazon wants to see that you’re providing value though, if they check your site (which, by the way, you do have to share the link with them) and see that you’re just spamming links with little to no content, they could possibly choose not to accept you into the program. I also advise you to form a relevant Facebook group (<— link to mine where you can get parent deals!) that you can invite people to join, and in that Facebook group, you can post your affiliate links too.

You can make social media posts, YouTube videos, and reels with your links on them. Post about a product or make a video about a product and then share your affiliate link in your post so that those who want to buy it will do it through your link and you earn that commission!

Earn commissions and bounties

You have the opportunity to earn both commissions and bounties by posting your personal affiliate links. Amazon gives you a convenient “site stripe” at the top of your Amazon page when signed in. This allows you to get your affiliate link in text, image, or text+image format. So let's say you're writing a blog post about the best fishing equipment and you're recommending a certain rod. You look up that rod on Amazon, pull up the product page, then click on a simple button at the top of the page to get your unique affiliate link to that item.

Commissions: Here's where the earnings come in. When someone clicks on your link, a 24 hour period begins. If they buy any item through Amazon within that 24 hours, whether it was the item you linked or not, you earn a small commission on that item. As of writing this blog post, commissions range from 1% (on Health and Household category items) to 20% (on Amazon games). Amazon also runs periods where commissions go up. For example, I joined close to Prime Day and commissions were temporarily doubled. They're also currently in another promotional earnings period where certain categories earn higher commissions than usual.

Bounties: A “bounty” is earned when you refer someone to one of Amazon’s programs, for example an Audible Plus membership or Amazon’s baby registry or even free trials like the Amazon Family free trial. You earn a set amount per person who signs up, around $3-$10.

Rules

Of course, please make sure you look up the latest rules on Amazon when you sign up! You can expect that rules may have changed from what you read on this blog post or what you see in any other articles about this, so be safe and make sure you read the latest rules! However, these are some of the most current important rules when you’re an Amazon affiliate:

-Always let people know the link you’re sharing is an affiliate link. You must mention that you get a commission from the link. This should be mentioned somewhere in your blog post (I always include a statement at the beginning or end of my posts)

-You need to let people know the link takes them to Amazon.

-You can’t say things like, “Use my link to help support me” or anything like that implying people will help you out when they use your link.

-You can’t use your own links. This can be tricky and Amazon seems to overlook one-off mistakes (I got so scared when I accidentally bought something after clicking on a link of mine. My account wasn’t deactivated though thankfully and I read of another affiliate who made that mistake and wasn’t deactivated, but still, be safe and use a different device for your own orders OR go find someone else’s affiliate link to use to remove your affiliate link’s connection to your account if you've accidentally clicked on one of your own links.)

-You can’t send links in emails, texts, or other private modes of communications. That includes no texting friends and family to get them to use your link.

You can view the entire operating agreement here.

Share your site

So once you've gotten your site set up, and have applied to become an Amazon associate, its time to get those sales! You need to get at least 3 qualifying sales within your first 90 days as an Amazon Affiliate. Advertise your blog everywhere you can, on Facebook, networking chat groups, and relevant websites and social media pages (say your website is about camping, share it in camping groups or share relevant blog posts on camping sites or on social media posts to do with camping.) You have to put in some work promoting yourself, but it pays off!

If you have any questions at all, feel free to ask them in the comments below!

*As an Amazon affiliate I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases made through my links.