The Amazon Affiliates Program is a great way for any website owner to monetize their site by selling linking to Amazon products from their site. The Amazon affiliate program provides an easy way to post links to products on you site, and has a variety of different widgets and even a full store that are fully customizable and able to be posted on your site. When your visitors purchase these items, Amazon gives you a cut of the profit, so you earn money form the customers you refer.
The great part of this is that both Amazon and you benefit from your increased sales, so everyone wins. The customer doesn’t have to pay a higher price, and gets all the benefits of using Amazon to purchase their products – the low prices, and promise of security. Let’s look a bit closer at how you can get started with the program and start making money.
To use the program, you have to sign up on the Amazon Affiliate Website – you can log in using your Amazon account, or create a new one (they’re free), and the sign up. You have to give them a bit of personal information, but this is simply because they need a way to contact you to pay you, and also for keeping track of tax related information.
It’s worth mentioning that because of tax laws, residents of North Carolina are currently prohibited from signing up.)
Once you sign up, you will see a variety of options for posting links on your site. You can post a plain text link to a product and get credit for the sale, because Amazon tracks where the customer comes from, and credits you for that sale. You can post widgets which detail the features of certain products. They have customizable widgets which allow you to put a selection of products into different flash animations, and display those on your site.
You can also create a store, and embed it on your site using an iframe. You have quite a bit of customizability, and can choose categories and products to go in your custom store. This is a great way to show off a variety of product recommendations, and in a way that can it can be blended with the rest of your store.
The process of getting paid is fairly straightforward. You have to have at least $10 (US) in your account to get paid. You can be paid in an Amazon Gift Card, or have the money direct deposited into your bank account. You have to go into your account and request a payment whenever you are ready and meet the requirements.
How much money you earn off of each product sale depends. There are several different options you can choose for how much you get paid. The most common one is adjusted by how many products you sell. You start off earning 4% for each item, and work your way up a scale. When you’ve sold enough items, you can earn up to 15%. There is also an option to earn a solid 4%, regardless of number of items sold, but obviously that doesn’t pay as well (or at least not any worse.)
Lastly, one of the great features of this program is that it’s free. You have absolutely no cost, and you only earn money. The Amazon Affiliate program is a great way for website owners to earn money off of referred product sales, without ever having to incur cost or risk – you can only benefit from trying this program.