Amazon Affiliate Program – 6 Ways to MAXIMIZE Your Earnings!
– I'm gonna share the top six strategies that we use to maximize our earnings in the Amazon affiliate program, including how to easily
recapture commissions that most people are losing every time they use their Amazon
affiliate marketing links. Hey it's Justin Brown
here from Primal Video where we hope you grow an audience and scale your revenue with online video. If you're new here, make sure
to click that subscribe button and all the links to everything
we mentioned in this video.
You can find link in the
description box below. Let's jump into it. Now whenever we're looking
to buy a physical product, Amazon is usually the
first place that we look. So we have absolutely no
issues at all recommending it and it just so happens that they also have an
amazing affiliate program. So in this video, we're gonna be covering these six simple strategies
that we've implemented to not only capture
otherwise lost commissions, but also to maximize our earnings and how you can easily implement them in your Amazon affiliate
marketing strategy right now as well.
Now just before we dive in,
a really quick disclaimer. Amazon is constantly updating
their terms of conditions for their affiliate program and what is accepted one day might be against the rules the next. They are widely recognized for strictly enforcing these rules and sometimes without warning. So even though this stuff
is working for us right now, always make sure to review
their terms of service to ensure that you are in compliance and that includes doing
your own due diligence before implementing anything
that we cover in this video.
Now as a little bonus
at the end of this video I'm also gonna cover the top
three most common reasons that I've seen people get
banned from the programs so that you can avoid the same problems because honestly some of
them aren't that obvious. So strategy number one is to sign up for multiple
Amazon associate programs not just the one in your region but in other regions as well. I think right now there
are 12 different regions or 12 different Amazon associate programs for different regions around the world. And a lot of people aren't aware that they can actually do this and this can dramatically
increase your affiliate revenue on Amazon especially if you combine it with the next two platforms that I'm gonna mention as well. So each of the different
Amazon affiliate programs for each of the different regions will actually only earn you a commission inside of that region.
So in order to earn a commission on a sale from someone purchasing in the U-S you need to be signed up with the U-S Amazon Associates program. Likewise in Australia,
you need to be a member of the Australian Associates program. And each of your affiliate links for each of those associated programs will only earn you a
commission in one location. So let's say that I have registered for the U-S Amazon Associate program. I send out my link. If someone is from Australia
they click on my U-S link, they're then redirected
to the Australian store and purchase on there, then I don't receive a commission for that because my link is for the U-S program.
And likewise. It works that way no matter which associate program you're with. Now to help with this, you
can use Amazon's one link. That's what they call it. It's a service that helps
with the redirecting of the users to their local store while still passing through
your tracking details. Now this is slowly rolling out. It's definitely not out
there for everyone yet and it currently doesn't
support all the countries or all the different regions and it only works if you're
linking from your website. These links with Amazon OneLink
don't work on YouTube yet so hopefully they sort
that out in the future. But this will lead us straight
on to strategy number two which is using Geniuslinks. Now Geniuslink is essentially doing what that Amazon Onelink promises to do but it does it right now
and it works really well and it's also got a bunch of extra functionality in there as well.
So what you do in
Geniouslink is you add in all of your affiliate details for all of the different
Amazon affiliate programs that you've signed up to cause you're now signing up to multiples and it generates you one link, one Geniuslink that you
can send out to people. They're gonna be automatically redirected to their local Amazon store and your affiliate link
or affiliate tracking I-D is passed along with this. Now just from implementing
Geniuslinks alone we've had a big increase in
our affiliate revenue on Amazon because our links are now being tracked across the multiple Amazon programs.
They also have amazing reporting in there showing you all the links
that you've generated. If products are out of
stock in different regions, if something is no longer available you can actually get alerts
and those sorts of things through to your email to let you know to update that link and point
it to a different product. And there's a heap of other features and really detailed reporting
and stuff in there as well. So pricing Virginia's links
at five dollars per month and it scales with the
amount of link clicks that you're actually getting. So totally amazing service. Geniuslinks, well played. That brings us to strategy number three is to use kit.co. Now kit.co is actually now
owned by Genius or Geniuslinks which is probably why that's so good too. So what Kit lets you do
is essentially build out kits or groups of Amazon links
and put them in one place. So for example we use this
on our Resources page. We've built our kits for different things like the best live-streaming gear or even my YouTube studio set up gear.
We've created kits for these where it's one place that people can go. It's all of our top recommended gear or top recommended products and all of them are direct links to Amazon but they are Amazon affiliate links. And just like Geniuslinks it also does that automatic redirection to the users local Amazon
store and still passes through your affiliate tracking
information as well. Now another cool thing with Kit is that it's also its own search engine. So you can use your YouTube S-E-O skills to rank your products
or your affiliate links on kit.co as well. And again if you're looking to level up on the youtube S-E-O side of things or the keyword ranking side of things, then make sure you stick
around cause I've got a resource for you towards
the end of this video.
Now in terms of pricing,
Kit is totally free. You actually get 100%
of your Amazon earnings. They make their money from
people who create kits and forget to put their Amazon
Associate information in and they use theirs in that case. So as long as you're putting in your Amazon Associate
information you'll make 100% of your Amazon earnings
through kit.co as well. So that's strategy number
three, using kit.co. Strategy number four is
using redirect links. Now starting out you might think that you don't need to do this but trust me this is gonna
save you so much time and potentially a lot of
headaches in the long run. So what I'm talking about
is creating a redirect link, a link that you share out
that will redirect people to your affiliate link. So you're not just sharing
out the affiliate link that you get from Amazon, you're using your own version of it.
So in our case, a lot of our affiliate
links are redirect links. We use primalvideo.com/go/
the product or the service. So then if for some reason we needed to update our affiliate link. We're able to just update that
on our end, on our website and that then is redirecting
to wherever we'd like it to go. So this alone could save
you an absolute ton of time because you're not then
going to have to go back to potentially hundreds of YouTube videos or blog posts or articles or anything to update each link manually. You can do it once on your
end cause you're just changing where that link is redirecting to. So effectively this is gonna
let you quickly and easily update a product or a link in one place that's then gonna be
pushed out everywhere. Now in terms of how you can
actually set up and create and manage your redirect links
for us right now for Amazon we are primarily using
Geniuslinks for this as well.
But to manage redirect links in general outside of the Amazon stuff
as well, then we also use a WordPress plugin
called ThirstyAffiliates which is again really simple to use. Now one thing I do wanna note here is that Amazon says that
you need to make it clear that any redirect link that you use is taking people to Amazon. So for us we use the
word Amazon in brackets in our link text so that
we're clearly indicating to people that these links
are going to redirect and take people to Amazon. Now this is something that
they might update in the future and the wording on this can still be a little gray right now. Now Geniuslinks have
done their own reviews and they have liaised with
the Amazon Associates team and for now this appears to be acceptable. But do your own reviews
and I will link an article from Geniuslinks below in the description if you want more information on this. So that brings us then
to strategy number five which is a resources page or a gear page or
the-stuff-that-you-recommend-other-people-use
page.
So this is one place where you list out all of the stuff that you recommend. Gear, books, audio books services, courses and of course this also includes
your Amazon links as well. So for us on our website
we have a resources page primalvideo.com/resources
and it's all the stuff that we use and that we
recommend to our audience. So for us on this page we
also have a combination of some of the things we have mentioned in this video as well. We literally have our kit.co kits embedded on our resources page. Things like the gear
that I use and recommend. All of those kits are
embedded on that page. So not only are they working for us in their S-E-O goodness on kit.co they're also on our page
to make it easy for people to find everything all
in one place as well. And this is something that I wanna stress, you don't need to overthink. You could just create a
simple one-page website with something like Wix or
a Squarespace or something.
Don't over complicate it. Just make it easy for your
followers or for your audience to find the stuff that you
use and that you recommend without them needing to ask you. I can't stress how huge
this has been for us. But the biggest strategy and probably the most important strategy is strategy number six and
that is to be authentic and to focus on adding
value for your audience. And I really should go without
saying but only recommend the products and services
that you've tried, that you've tested. The stuff that you
recommend for your audience. There's too many people out
there giving affiliate marketing a bad name by just picking the products that aren't necessarily the best products that have the best commissions
or the highest payouts. But I also see these days
that people are getting more and more switched on
to it and they can tell when something's not
authentic or not real.
So always try to come from that place where you're adding value and really trying to go that
extra mile for your audience. If there are multiple
versions of something that you recommend with maybe different
add-ons or different pricing spend the time to work out which one you recommend people
buy and link it to that. Make the buying experience
better for your users. You're gonna end up
saving them a ton of time and you're going to
maximize the likelihood that they're going to buy from you and that you'll earn a commission. Now if you're mentioning a product and there are additional add-on products that are needed to make something work then you could actually create affiliate links for those too.
So for example we always talk about the different types of cameras and the different types of microphones but we also create affiliate links for any of the cable adapters
or anything that's required to actually connect the two together. This way people who
already have the camera, already have the audio gear,
can then easily get the add-ons or the accessories they need
to make the whole thing work. So your goal here is to really
make it as easy as you can for your audience to
achieve a specific outcome and then they're going
to look for your links and look for your recommendations to help them get to that outcome. Now earlier in this video I said I'd share with
you three simple things to help you avoid
getting banned on Amazon.
So quick disclaimer. Their privacy policy,
their terms of services are always changing and this is just what we've
seen people getting banned for. So avoid this stuff and all
costs and make sure to review the terms of services or terms
of conditions frequently. So the first one is don't
indicate any incentive or reward for people to click your
links, monetary or otherwise. What a lot of people don't
realize is that this also means no mentions that people
will be supporting you if they click your links.
We've seen people getting banned for this and we've even got a warning for something similar in the past. The second one is to
always identify yourself as an Amazon affiliate and make sure that any earning disclosures
are exactly as Amazon requires. They set out some exact wording for this and make sure you get the latest version from their terms of service and use that. And the third one is
to make sure it's clear that everyone who clicks
your Amazon affiliate links will be directed to Amazon. Well it's not an issue if
you're using Amazon's links. If you're using any sort of redirects then it does become a bit of a gray area. As I mentioned earlier Geniuslinks
has done their research and they say that they've
got the tick of approval from Amazon but you need
to at least indicate next to those links that
they go to Amazon's website with an Amazon in brackets
or something similar if it's not otherwise clear and obvious.
So stay safe. It's an awesome affiliate program. You just don't wanna
jeopardize your earnings and have them disappear overnight
because of one oversight. They do monitor these stuff and we've seen some big
channels get shut down so don't take any chances. But enough of the negativity. Now that you've got these
tactics if you're looking to maximize the traffic that
you're sending to Amazon then grab your copy of our
free YouTube ranking guide which is linked on screen now.
This is gonna help you with
the tools and the strategies to help you get your content ranking on both YouTube and on Google. I'll see you in the next one..
