How to Build a Successful Amazon Affiliate Site (Step by Step)

Do you want to make some extra dough promoting products on Amazon?

Lots of people make money with Amazon affiliate sites. But for every success story, there are plenty who never quite get there.

If you want your story to be a successful one like $ 1K/month for that, this is the guide for you.

Here’s everything you’ll learn:

What is the Amazon affiliate program?

The Amazon affiliate program (Amazon Associates) lets people earn money by referring sales to Amazon.

How Amazon’s affiliate program works

When you sign up, Amazon gives you a unique tracking ID that looks something like this: yourname-20.

You can add this to any Amazon product URL to create an affiliate link.

Example:

amazon.com/dp/B01K1C94E4

→

amazon.com/dp/B01K1C94E4?tag=yourname-20

When someone clicks your link and buys something on Amazon within 24 hours, you’ll be paid a commission on the sale.

Even better, they don’t have to buy the product you recommend. If you send them to a kitchen knife and they end up buying a tennis racket, you still get a commission. If they buy the kitchen knife, a tennis racket, and a bunch of other things, you earn a commission on everything.

This is partly why the affiliate program is so popular. Amazon sells most things, so it’s not unusual to see a good chunk of commissions come from products you’ve never even heard of.

How to become an Amazon Affiliate

Follow these steps:

Go to the Amazon Associates homepage;
Sign in with your Amazon account;
Follow the on-screen instructions

During signup, Amazon will ask for your website address. Although you can enter a social media profile link here, you’ll want to set up an Amazon affiliate website if you’re serious about making money with Amazon Associates.

How to build a successful Amazon affiliate site

Everyone has a different idea of success.

For some, it’s a site that makes $1,000/month. For others, it might be a more ambitious goal of $10,000/month.

Whatever the number, the steps to success are the same.

1. Choose a good niche

Have you heard of The Wirecutter?

It’s owned by The New York Times and is perhaps the most popular Amazon affiliate website. It has reviews for everything from knife sharpeners to standing desks and gets an estimated 3.9 million monthly visits from Google alone.

2. Do keyword research

Finding a niche with potential was the hard part; keyword research is comparatively easy.

If you’re feeling lazy, you could even just export the filtered Top Pages report from the previous step. That should give you enough profitable “product roundup” topics to keep you busy for a few months.

3. Create the right kind of content

Assuming that you’ve chosen a domain and put up a website, it’s time to start writing and publishing some content.

You may create three types of content. These are:

Product roundups
Product reviews
Blog posts

4. Drive traffic to your site through SEO

SEO isn’t rocket science, but it’s also not something that we can summarize from start to finish in this post. There are just too many elements.

Instead, I’m going to talk about two important aspects to focus on, then link up some SEO tutorials from the blog.

A. Create content hubs

Content hubs are interlinked collections of content about a similar topic.

They consist of three parts:

Hub page/pillar content: This is a high-level guide about a broad topic.
Subpages/cluster content: These are in-depth guides about parts of the main topic.
Hyperlinks: These connect the hub page and subpages. The hub page links to all the subpages, and each subpage links back to the hub.

B. Build links

Backlinks are arguably the most important Google ranking factor.

They’re the foundation of Google’s ranking algorithm, and multiple independent studies have found strong correlations between the number of backlinks from unique websites and a page’s organic traffic.