How to make Money with Affiliate Marketing (Amazon Associates)

Table of Contents

Introduction

I am not going to claim that you can make money with affiliate marketing in the millions and trillions within the next couple of months.

In this post, I will show you how I made money using the Amazon Associates program. I will go through the advantages and limitations of the same.

The case study I am going to use is one of my own side projects – a tech blog that I monetized using affiliate links from Amazon Associates program (U.S.).

Be sure to read till the end as I have a couple of surprises for you there. I will show you how I started, how the venture progressed, why I decided to quit before a couple of years, and why I decided to restart the exact same thing again – now.

Is it possible to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing?

You make money with Affiliate Marketing when a reader clicks on your affiliate link (a special link provided by the affiliate network or partner) and buys something on the partner website.

Of course, you can make money with affiliate marketing – I have done it successfully. But since mine was a side project, I was making only a few hundred dollars a month – at its peak. The important thing to note is, I was getting a cheque almost every month as long as I was putting effort into the project.

Ya, Amazon pays its international affiliates for the US market through old-fashioned cheques. The only issue was the time delay in receiving and encashing international cheques – but I didn’t miss any.

What are the Advantages & Limitations of Amazon Associates program?

Advantages and Limitations of Amazon Associates Program (Make Money with Affiliate Marketing post)

What did I do to actually Earn Money?

  1. I signed up with Amazon Associates program (US).
  2. I got access to SiteStripe. When I visit an amazon.com website using the same Amazon account I used with Amazon Associates, I find a grey bar on the top of any amazon.com page. I can instantly get my personalized affiliate link for that page that I use to promote the product in my blog posts.
  3. I created product review blog posts – once or twice every week, with my affiliate links at the end of the post.
  4. I continuously monitored the no. of clicks and the earnings to find which categories of products did better. This was useful to get future post ideas.
  5. Once my account balance crossed $100 USD, Amazon sent a check to my address in about 30-days or so, and I encashed it in a local bank.

What Type of Blog Posts work better for Affiliate Marketing?

There are four stages in customer buying journey. They are,

  1. Awareness
  2. Consideration
  3. Comparison/Decision
  4. Action

Any blog post targeted at the third and fourth stage of customer buying journey like reviews, comparisons, deals, etc. does well for Affiliate Marketing.

Why did I Stop writing new Affiliate blog posts after 3-4 years?

As I mentioned earlier, I was trying out affiliate marketing as a side venture, on a separate blog. On my main blog (this one) Google Adsense ads were monetizing quite well. After 3-4 years,

  • I was not able to write new blog posts regularly over there. The tech gadgets I was focusing on were being updated to new models frequently and my old posts started becoming obsolete.
  • I was focused on only one traffic source (blog) but I should have created the same content in all networks and all media that customers preferred. I was not present on social media or Youtube back then – that restricted the amount of traffic I got.
  • I did not learn the latest trends and updates in the ‘make money with affiliate marketing’ field. I should have followed an informative blog like this which gives all the latest info about SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, etc. [click].

As I stopped creating new content, my posts started to become obsolete and my traffic decreased.

So, what’s the Surprise I Promised earlier?