If you’re looking to build a passive source of online income, Amazon affiliate marketing can be a great way to monetize the readers coming to your blog—by tastefully weaving in links to helpful products that can be purchased on Amazon after clicking through from your website.
Then, in return for referring that product sale to Amazon, you’ll collect a commission ranging anywhere from 1% to 10% of the sale price for the items your readers purchase during the session they start after coming from your website.
My best example of a blog post that generates a consistent stream of income from Amazon affiliate marketing is my roundup of the best business books for entrepreneurs, where you can click through and quickly pick up whichever books you want.
But… I’m an amateur at Amazon affiliate marketing (though I do know the best blog affiliate programs), compared to some…
And today’s guest post comes from one such good friend that I’ve gotten to know well over the past 8 years because of his awesome websites (one of which actually helped me sell my first product, the iStash), his crazy photography skills, and so much more.
Andy Feliciotti of Awesome Stuff to Buy is a man of many talents. He’s a Washington, D.C. based web designer and Wordpress developer by trade that’s worked on using everything from eCommerce website builders to creating the online presence for restaurant chains. He runs a five-figure website on the side, Awesome Stuff to Buy, which he’s talking about today.
Here’s Andy (oh and yes, he’s also an incredible photographer and regularly shares his work on Instagram)…
From here on out, I’m going to turn this over to Andy so he can share his story and break down everything he’s done to grow his main affiliate site (Awesome Stuff to Buy) well into the thousands of dollars in monthly side income.
And once you’re ready to start earning as an Amazon affiliate, head over to my guide on how to build a profitable blog here in my ultimate guide to starting a blog.
Want to Start Your Blog (the Right Way)?
Check out my ultimate guide How to Start a Blog (on the Side).
Always remember too, that when you publish a post on your blog containing affiliate links (like this post does), you’re required to have a disclaimer like this one here:
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I may earn a commission. Know that I only recommend products, tools, services and learning resources (like affiliate marketing courses) that I’ve personally used and believe are genuinely helpful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to purchase them. Most of all, I would never advocate for buying something that you can’t afford or that you’re not yet ready to implement.
Now, over to you, Andy!
Hey folks!
I want to give you a breakdown of how I built my side hustle, AwesomeStufftoBuy.com, which all started with just a simple Google search…
In 2012 I was looking for fun stuff to buy so I searched “awesome stuff to buy” and after seeing plenty of sites just using Amazon’s affiliate program I knew there was potential in this niche.
Plus the fact that that awesomestufftobuy.com was available I knew I had to start something.
Today, the site brings in around $1,000 a month consistently (with the holiday months often jumping up closer to $7,000), which is nice to have as a little extra side income for me.
I know it’s not $130,000 a month like some of Ryan’s friends, but no matter how much you earn monthly, it’s rewarding to share your knowledge online (in a way that’s fun) and actually get paid for it!
I was posting products for 4 months before actually seeing any kind of traction on the site.
In 2012 it was easy to make your traffic explode with StumbleUpon so when the time was right I submitted to StumbleUpon.
If you’re building something that you believe can bring value keep at it, if I gave up 3 months in I wouldn’t be at the point I am today.
At this point Awesome Stuff to Buy is over 2,000 posts with over 8 years of additional income with this side hustle.
Most of my extra income is from showing up in Google results so this guide will show you how I pick blog niches and use strategic keyword research to identify product opportunities and write articles.
Use My Free Keyword Research Tool
Try my free AI-Powered Keyword Tool to get dozens of research-backed ideas for keywords & topics to write about on your blog today.
If you haven’t started your site yet be sure to read Ryan’s guide to starting a blog where he covers every aspect of building a site.
How to Find Your Amazon Affiliate Marketing Website “Niche”
Honestly if you’re into a topic, kettlebells, yoga, photography, or even food I think there is always room in the market for more content about your niche.
I wouldn’t recommend pursuing a niche if you are only trying to make money, it’s essential to be passionate about the topic you’re blogging about. It’s better to make a few hundred extra dollars a year with a topic you’re motivated writing about than to get burned out on a topic you are unfamiliar with.
Let’s say you’re into Netflix, even something as simple as that has massive potentials for articles.
Best Netflix Movies, best things to watch on Netflix, best kids movies on Netflix, there are a limitless of topics you can think of just based on one subject.
You can use a blogging tool like Moz or Ahrefs keyword finder for free to check how hard it would be to rank and the search volume for specific terms.
Moz will even offer search suggestions which you can use to write your articles. I will note you only get a limited amount of data for free but it’s enough to start and give you guidance.
For “best movies on Netflix” Moz suggested “best teen movies on Netflix” for example, this is a smaller place to start and would be easier to rank when starting out.
These longer phrases are searched less but the difficulty to rank is much lower. This slow land grab for these longer terms will make your site rank slowly overtime.
Additionally many Niches have plenty of room for videos, so if you think you would be good on camera making affiliate money on YouTube is always an option. Frequently on my photography blog I will pair a YouTube video I made with an article to fully cover the topic with both mediums.
How to Creatively Write Your Affiliate Articles.
One big mistake I see people do when starting out is writing without a person in mind. Think about what someone would Google to get to your article and think backwards.
Search the terms you want to rank for and study all of the top results, a small article most likely won’t make Google rank you above well researched articles.
We’ll be using the “best teen movies on Netflix” as our example. Just from quickly glancing at search results I can see most articles have around 15 movies listed. So if I can write a better post with more information in a better format I will be ranking with the bigger pages.
Try to put as much effort into your articles as possible. You should shoot for 2000+ words in your articles since articles around 2000 words rank much higher.
Luckily if you’re using WordPress the bottom left of the edit screen will constantly monitor your word count.
Once you’ve mastered your writing; elements like photos, graphics, and layout play a huge part. You really need to study competitors pages and see what works and doesn’t.
For example having a giant red button to each video on Netflix would be great for our example. When I was building Awesome Stuff to Buy I realized clicking next page was annoying for example so I added infinite scrolling and time on site spiked.
I have articles revolving around places to photograph and was annoyed by other sites lack of links to Google Maps so I added them to my article.
Just finding those simple pain points can pay out big, if a user clicks you article in a search and hits the back button that triggers Google to know your page wasn’t what they were looking for. So it’s huge plus to keep people glued to your page and providing them the information they need. For even more ideas, check out this related guide on Google Maps marketing.
Once you have written a piece of content it’s essential to return to it every few months to update the content. Even if an article isn’t initially ranking in Google updating it overtime to have more and more content could lead to success.
Tips for Promoting Your Affiliate Content.
The first thing you should do when your site is ready for the world is sign up for Google Search Console. In search console you can give Google your sitemap which is generated for free by WordPress.
You can also use a service like Quuu to promote your items on social. Once approved they’ll share your content through their network of people who share their content. From my experience you don’t get major traffic from this source but it is a simple and easy way to start.
Building connections in your niche is essential. Once you know people posting similar content you can work with them to write guests posts on their blog. This is a great way to get backlinks since you’ll be writing the content on their blog. If you have a huge article about the “best kettlebell for beginners” for example you could guest post for people in the health niche with kettlebell exercise tips. Building backlinks to your article and site is essential when trying to show up high in Google search results.
I have found that if you write a comprehensive post with 2000+ words you’ll slowly start to rank up as you add more content to your site.
Also you’ll want to constantly update your pages for the most accuracy. I have a page about vlogging cameras and every time a new camera fits into this category I add it to my list and make improvements. This shows Google that the content is relevant to the parent topic and that it’s an updated piece of content.
Fill out all meta information if you’re using Yoast SEO it’s easy to fill out a meta title and description. It’s essential to fill out this information since Google will be displaying it. Compare your title to other articles for the term you want to rank for and accurately describe the page using the meta description.
Something to not overlook also is Pinterest, on almost all of my popular posts I spend the time to make a Pinterest specific image for them. If you don’t know how to use Adobe Photoshop you can use a free online tool like Canva to create images. There are also plenty of WordPress plugins that add pin buttons to your blog as well. There are plenty of ways you can use Pinterest to drive traffic, see more tips on Buffer’s blog.
How to Become an Amazon Affiliate
I only recommend joining the Amazon Affiliate Network after you’ve graduated from choosing the best website builder, to fully learning how to make a website and on to actually growing your blog up to daily traffic over ~100 visitors with strategies like guest blogging and perfecting your blog SEO. If your site has low traffic and doesn’t have users to click your Amazon links you will be kicked off the affiliate network for having low sales.
While signing up you’ll give Amazon the list of website(s) you’ll be advertising on. If your site is low quality they won’t approve your site which is why it’s so important to get a few well written articles initially.
During the sign up process you’ll also select your Amazon tag to be used for affiliate links which you can always change later. This is just a simple query string appended to urls like this “?tag=yourtag-20”. After signing up it’s as simple as adding that to Amazon urls to make them affiliate links.
After your account gets approved and you start posting links on your site you’ll want to include a disclaimer about your affiliate links so you don’t get kicked off the network. (Ryan included an example of a disclaimer at the top of this article)
In addition to not including a disclaimer you can be removed from Amazon’s Affiliate Network for linking to products in emails (email marketing), cloaking links, including links in eBooks, noting a static price of a product and more. So you’ll want to be familiar with Amazon’s rules before posting content with links.
Additionally there are tons of tools and plugins to automatically add your affiliate tag to links which you can see below.
6 High-Impact Tools (and Tips) for Affiliate Marketers
Once you have built your blog, written some high quality pieces of content, and have joined the Amazon Affiliate program. you’ll want to optimize your income.
There are thousands of other affiliate programs for bloggers and international Amazon programs that you will want to be part of and these tools will help.
1. International Amazon Links.
Once you have people clicking your Amazon links geni.us is super useful for gaining a ~6-8% boost in sales via international sales. You’ll need to signup on all of Amazon’s international affiliate programs and geni.us will automatically redirect users to the correct Amazon store. I also did an interview with GeniusLink that goes more in-depth about international affiliate income.
Extra tip: If you’re having a hard time depositing international payments, Payoneer will let you direct deposit from the international Amazon affiliate networks.
2. Other Affiliate Networks.
The easiest way to add monetized links to your site for all links besides Amazon is Skimlinks. This is the easiest way to make all links use affiliate networks.
I recommend signing up for Amazon affiliate network and skimlinks, Skimlinks will let other sites like Etsy, Newegg, and tons of others. I find this the easiest way to adding affiliate links from the one off sites I link to. Plus they offer a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to integrate to your site.
About 10% of my income comes from Skimlinks so it’s not something to overlook. Plus if you’re in a specific Niche that doesn’t have products on Amazon it can help.
3. WordPress Tips & Plugins.
Besides the essential WordPress plugins for performance and security here is my list of niche plugins I use for most projects (If you want more suggestions for plugins read my list of best WordPress plugins).
- GeneratePress: One of the best WordPress themes (which I use) to start most of my projects. It offers a very minimal clean slate for you to start your site. Plus you can expand to a page builder if you need more complex layouts. You can also pair this with GenerateBlocks and the WordPress block editor to create any type of landing page.
- Yoast SEO: Obvious requirement for all WP sites, lets you have full control over your page titles, descriptions and what pages are indexed. This is essential for any WordPress site looking to rank well. Plus Yoast SEO will create a sitemap that you can use to submit to Google Webmasters, this way Google will index all of your pages.
- MightyShare: Plugin I made to automatically create social share images for your articles. This is really helpful if you have a large site and are unable to create share images for each. Best of all it works well with most SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or RankMath.
- Auto Post Scheduler: If you’re queuing a lot of posts in WP it can be annoying to manually set publish times for posts, this plugin will space out publish dates automatically. This is great is you have a large site where you are constantly adding content.
- Media File Renamer: Removes the pain of manually renaming every image file (though I still recommend manually renaming images) but I highly recommend this for SEO, it’ll automatically rename files to match the post they are attached to.
- Requirements Checklist: If you have other authors on your site requirements checklist is perfect for forcing posts to have specific requirements (2 tags, a featured image, body text, etc).
- PB SEO Friendly Images: Automatically adds alt or title to images when they are uploaded.
4. SEO Tools.
When trying to brainstorm for article ideas or finding low hanging fruit on my site I use Ahrefs. At $99/mo I really only recommend this tool to people who already have established sites with revenue, so check out Ryan’s list of free SEO tools for more there.
To start I would Google a niche you’re looking to get into “Best Drones” for example, the related searches is a gold mine for free. Just from this quick search I can see a site focusing on “drones under $200” would be a popular article.
Ahrefs is great at picking apart a competitors top pages and learning what works for competitors in your niche. Additionally I use Ahrefs to find keywords I rank for in the 5-8 positions on Google. This is great for knowing which pages I can put a little bit of effort into and gain big results by moving a few positions up.
5. WordPress Hosting.
If you’re starting a WordPress site I highly recommend using a premium WordPress host like WPEngine, Kinsta or one of these best web hosting plans from reliable hosting companies. I see way too many people using cheap hosting which will slowly screw you over in the end. Google will be ranking you based on site speed and using https which most premium hosts will handle for you.
For more about how to start a blog read Ryan’s post.
6. CDN & Performance.
Setting up a free Cloudflare account is a must for any website. It’ll add a performance boost and security with almost zero effort. One tweak I recommend in Cloudflare is turning your wp-content/uploads directory into a fully cached directory using page rules. This means Cloudflare will serve all images from cache acting as a free CDN plus it’s very simple to set up. Once you have the budget you can spring for the $20/m Cloudflare account which will automatically compress your images and even convert them to .webp for browsers that support it.
Overall Cloudflare has become an essential service for keeping my sites fast and secure.
I hope these Amazon affiliate marketing tips have been helpful!
Feel free to stay in touch with me on Instagram or Twitter.
I’ll be reading the comments, so if you have any questions about affiliate marketing let me know in the comments below!
Once you’re ready to put your Amazon affiliate marketing into practice and build a profitable blog—head over to my ultimate guide to starting a blog.
Want to Start Your Blog (the Right Way)?
Check out my ultimate guide How to Start a Blog (on the Side).
131 replies to “How I Earn an Extra $1,000 a Month with Amazon Affiliate Marketing (Plus the Tools I Use)”
Thanks Ryan for letting me share my story.
If anyone has any questions feel free to drop a comment!
🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼
I am thinking of starting a blog and this article really shed a light. Thanks Ryan and Andy!
Glad to help Issac
Great article Andy! Super helpful for sure. I have built a few amazon sites and helped some of my clients do it over the years, too. It’s a long-term plan for sure, but once you get it running, these sites can be gold.
I have a couple that regularly do $150 per month and may have bigger months. The best part, I don’t have to touch them anymore, they just keep making me cash! If I had the time, I would probably do more with them, but I am working on other projects.
Anybody looking to make some cash online should follow this advice in this article. It’s as simple and solid as it gets and far better than most guides you’d pay for on the subject of Amazon sites.
Thanks Ben! Yeah once you get the ball rolling on a site they can make you $ for years. I bet it took a bit of work to get up to $150 on those sites, I think a lot of people have the misconception that it’ll rise to that overnight.
But are all of *these* links affiliate links??? 😉
Joking aside, this is a great article. My husband has been thinking about building a side hustle and he has a deep understanding of a niche industry so I’ve mentioned affiliate marketing to him before. Even though I work on the Internet and built my business it helps him to hear it from someone else. I just never had as comprehensive of an article to send him until now! It also helps that you emphasize the fact that it isn’t an “overnight success” thing AND that you aren’t earning $30k+/mo. It’s a few thousand that makes a difference in your life and that’s what he wants. Thank you!
Glad you liked it Val! I am wishing your husband luck!
This is so helpful and useful. I’ll be adding some of the recommended plugins on my blog. Thank you for sharing.
Glad to hear! let us know if you have any questions
Woo! This is so awesome to hear Val. Let Andy & I know how we can help your husband out at any stage of his journey when he dives in 💪
Great article Andy. Given that guest posts are not only good for backlinks and thus rankings but also a very good source of consistent traffic flow, would you recommend regularly or frequently posting on the blogs?
Also, would you put in a “bit” of an effort to promote those guest posts?
Highly recommend putting your best content in guest posts and promoting them, Google takes into affect the quality of the page you’re being linked from.
Affiliate Marketing seems to be red hot recently. If I were to build a website it would be for affiliate marketing. I really like this article, it gives a general run down of how to do a lot of stuff.
Glad you enjoyed it Andrew!
Really good article with a lot of great info. Have been wanting to get into online media info/marketing/promotion to develop different additional streams of income and really didn’t know how to tackle this. I’ve started researching quite a bit to lay some groundwork for this. Your info gives a good basis to start from. Thanks.
Glad it helps Betty! My biggest advice, just start, any hobby you love start sharing your knowledge!
This is a great guide. I really appreciate tips and specific resources for each category. It was helpful to see the percentage of revenue driven by geni.us and skimlinks as well. DO you have any suggestions for outsourcing the content generation?
Daniel, Hi, Thank you!! Hiring writers is pretty easy on Upwork but the better quality writing can cost a bit more.
Hi Daniel,
You should also check out Textbroker for content outsourcing. We have had success hiring writers on that platform. If you want to get an idea of the writing quality, you check out the content on our website www.beatbowler.com
Hey Daniel! Throwing in my 2 cents here as well.
Check out these freelancing platforms (particularly the ones in the freelance writing section): https://www.ryrob.com/freelance-jobs/
Great article Andy! Thanks for the tips as well as sharing your journey! We actually use Ahrefs for brainstorming ideas for our affiliate website.
That’s awesome to hear! Ahrefs is such an amazing tool
Hello, I appreciate your content, Can you please tell how much time do I need to see results through Seo Strategies.
Andy. This post was great and very helpful. Thanks for sharing. I learned a lot and I should read all your guide carefully again. I especially didn’t know what I should write about before.
Great!
Wow I must say very informative article,I’ll definitely save the link for further referral,it sure very informative and useful for my online business. Thank you. Take Care
This article is a great resource and a good Kickstart as I launch into blogging/affiliate marketing. I have bookmarked it!
however, I would to know the related actual costs involved other than just the time needed to write the articles.
I practically do not have a budget to start with.
Glad it’s helpful!
I think the main costs starting out is WordPress hosting (if you use WordPress), after you get that you can get a free theme like OceanWP and just start writing!
I’d recommend reading Ryan’s guide on starting a blog https://www.ryrob.com/how-start-blog/ he recommends bluehost which is only a few dollars a month.
Great Work Andy. Loved the way you have written the article. Extremely useful for newbies.
Hi,
Can you please let me know how awesomestufftobuy.com is being used as an affiliate site? I don’t see any links in product pages to Amazon. I am farily new to affiliate marketing so I am just wondering how it works.
Thanks,
Ron
Good day Mr. Feliciotti.
Im getting interested with affiliate marketing…is there any fees to be paid during sign up? and is it ok to post links on facebook and other social media sites?
thanks! 😊
Thanks, Andy. I learned a lot more information about affiliate marketing.
Does the international amazon include everything but the US. Or is it US/Canada. I’m a Canadian resident so i wondering if i need to sign up for extras. Thanks
Very good
Great information, very helpful. I in the process of creating my first blog. My question is one of the products I want to promote is “car glass sealant” I see the product on amazon.com but not on .UK, .com do not offer delivery to the UK can you suggest what option I have to overcome this.
Thanks
Hi Andy,
Such a helpful article, i am new in this program so i read your blog hope this will help me in my own website (ahmadzonstore.com) which I just created for affiliate program
Hello, Andy, thank you for the article. Do you know good detailed articles about affiliate programs at youtube?
Do you mean selling YouTube premium as an affiliate or making videos that refer to products? If you are great on camera you can do well by doing products reviews for example.