Is Amazon Affiliate Marketing Best for Beginners? — affiliatemarketingmc at YouTube.com.
Amazon has what’s known as an affiliate program. That means you can sign up as an Amazon affiliate. You get a special link, then you take your traffic and send them to that link. Amazon handles the rest. You sell products through your website, and you get paid. You don’t even have to ship anything – people just go to Amazon and buy what they want, and they handle shipping by themselves.
Can you make money with Amazon affiliate marketing? We’re talking about how to make money with the Amazon affiliate program. We’ll talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. There are a lot of affiliate programs out there, and there are a lot of affiliate offers on Amazon. So, it’s very important to look at them.
Amazon Affiliate Marketing: The Good
Everyone knows about Amazon. Everyone has probably gotten a shipment from them at some point. People know it’s a trusted source, and they know they’ll get their delivery on time.
It’s also a big program. It has tons of different products. It has both low-cost and high-priced stuff. Amazon is making millions of dollars a day, hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and the guy who started Amazon is now the richest person on the planet. There’s lots of money here.
It’s easy to get traffic with Amazon. This works well if you are just starting out, and you have a very refined niche, and you don’t know how to monetize your traffic.
Example: Calico Critter Market
When my kids were little, my wife wanted to get them these toys called Calico Critters. She went and spent a fortune on these.
For an affiliate marketer, the Calico Critters’ keywords are very inexpensive, and you can get a lot of free traffic really, really cheap. There probably aren’t other affiliate programs in the world that have Calico Critters. Amazon is the best choice here.
If you have a niche that is very refined, Amazon is your way to go.
Amazon Affiliate Marketing: The Bad
The Amazon Affiliate program has a really low payout. Your commissions are usually 4 -8 percent of what you sell. So if you sell something that’s $1,000 dollars, you’ll probably get between 40 and 80 dollars. You also want to think about the CPM – how much money are you making per 1,000 visitors?
Let’s say you are selling a laptop, and it costs $1,000 dollars. If you send 1,000 people to your Amazon affiliate link for your laptop, you might get a 1% conversion rate – so you make 10 sales. If you make $10,000 in sales, you get paid around 400 dollars, or you have a 400 CPM. In that case, each click is worth 40 cents.
If you are using paid traffic, the results can be even worse. If you went and bid on Google for keywords with “laptop” (“big laptops”, “small laptops”, “cheap laptops”, etc.) it would probably cost you 80 cents to $1.20 per click. That means you’d be spending $800 to $1,200 to get that traffic. If it costs you $1,200 to get 1,000 clicks, and you only make $400 at the end, that is bad business.
Example: Calico Critter Market
As mentioned before, a refined niche like Calico Critters could work for Amazon. But you’d still have a very low CPM. It would be a very low earnings-per-click because these toys are very cheap, and you’d only be making 4 – 8 percent commission on something cheap.
If you sell $100 in calico critters a day, and you get 4 to 8 percent commission, you’d make 8 dollars on a good day. That would take a lot of traffic to get those 8 dollars, because not everyone is going to buy.
Amazon Affiliate Marketing: The Ugly
We know the payout for Amazon is very low, but when you starting making a whole lot of sales, the rates are even worse.
I recently went and looked at some of the top Amazon affiliates who make a lot of money. I took a look at how much they’re making per click.
One top Amazon affiliate sold over $8 million in Amazon stock from his traffic. The amount of traffic that came to his site was 2.8 million visitors. (That’s a lot of traffic – some people struggle to get 1,000 visitors per month.)
The money he made was between 4 to 8 percent of his sales. Let’s say he made approximately $400,000 – $500,000. You might think that’s pretty cool. But this is very important to realize, because people don’t pay attention to this.
In order to get 2.8 million people to Amazon, he probably needed 20 million people or more to come to his website. That’s a 10% click through rate, which is still pretty high. But in order to generate that, his effective CPM is less than 10 cents a click.
If this affiliate has 20 million visitors, and he’s only making $500,000, the amount he’s earning per click is so low that it’s not even funny.
A lot of people will not be able to generate 20 million visitors. It’s very difficult to do—one in a million are able to do it. In order to do this, you either have to have a lot of money, or you have to do a lot of work. And for all that work, this is a very little amount of money.
Remember that this is a targeted market – the amount should be way higher. You would do better if you were to make a site on Calico Critters, and you got a bunch of visitors to actually buy the toys wholesale, or dropship them. You would do way better than this.
Let’s look at another example: Another top Amazon affiliate got 15,000 clicks, which generated $3,809 dollars. For the amount of traffic he sent to Amazon, he was making pennies per click. That sucks.
Another Amazon affiliate got 27,097 clicks to Amazon, and he only made $790 dollars. How many visitors did he have to get for those many people to go to Amazon? 270,000 visitors? If I were making those kinds of numbers, I’d quit and go do something else for a living.
This is the kind of stuff that make people quit affiliate marketing. It’s the stuff that makes people think affiliate marketing doesn’t work, because these kinds of programs pay so low.
Final Thoughts
So, what’s the verdict? Is Amazon the best way to go? If you have no other options, Amazon is probably the best way to go. If you’re in a niche where you can be more creative and make it work, then I’d like you to look at some other options. You can make a lot more money doing different things.
For more information, visit www.AffiliateMarketingDude.com.