Earning Money with Amazon Associates

Being an affiliate of Amazon Associates I only recently started to see earnings surpass the $50 per month mark from affiliate product sales and crossed $100 in earnings in a single month for the first time last month.

With Amazon Affiliate I found that simply doing a product review and including a little Amazon information and purchase option at the end of the product review worked well if consumers found the product.  This particular worked with my Roku XDS and video game reviews which sold the most “direct sales” out of any of my affiliate banners.

That being said most of my earnings didn’t come from products I directly advertised or sold but came from the cookie being set by the reader clicking on the affiliate link and then finding another product they liked and wanted while in Amazon.com.  It is these indirect sales commissions where Amazon affiliate really ads up and many times someone will order multiple items in the same purchase and you get commission from each item.

Amazon associates also tiers your earnings % based on number of sales, and you start at 4% but after your 7th sale the commission increases to 6% which starts to get better than some CommissionJunction commissions.  For instance if you become an affiliate of Roku XDS on CJ, you get 5% commission which is less than the 6% after your 7th sale!

I will say that most commissions range in the $2-5 dollar mark, but my highest commission ever was $47.96 commission on an $1199 camera lens that was sold from my affiliate link.

Overall I am still trying to get more creative and boost my affiliate sales and one way I have started doing this is with the EasyAzon WordPress plugin which allows you to insert images, info blocks or text links into posts and link to your affiliate account automatically.  This can also be a good way to find images for posts that won’t violate any copyrights so it is something to consider if you ever need to add images of generic product stuff that can also serve as a way to gain some occasional affiliate sales from wandering clicks.

I also leverage the Affiliate Easel plugin for WordPress which has just a few features that are lacking in EasyAzon such as product search and auto building a store, but also EasyAzon has some features missing from Affiliate Easel.

I wrote a 2 part series on how I build an Amazon Store in WordPress with the Affiliate Easel for Amazon WordPress plugin and if you are interested in incorporating Amazon sales page, or even just simply product links and sales information with related items into your blog posts then this is the best free plugin I have found that accomplishes this.

You can read my two parts here for more information.

Building an Amazon Store in WordPress – Part 1

Building an Amazon Store in WordPress – Part 2

-Justin Germino