How To Make $700 Per Month Like Max
So last Thursday we did Episode 3 of the Side Hustling series. We talked about Max, a Scottish dude who setup a quick blog about fish tanks, and forgot about it until he had a $200 check show up in the mail from the Amazon Associates Program.
I wanted to do a quick write-up and screencast showing anyone who isn't already an Amazon Associate or someone who isn't already into Affiliate Marketing the very basic steps in replicating this method.
Step 1
Sign-up for the Amazon Associates Program. I would recommend throwing up a quick blog with 5-10 posts prior to applying. If your completely new to blogging or have never built a site I'd recommend Blogger. It's free and very easy to use, and if you have a Google account or a Gmail account you already have a blogger account, just visit Blogger.Com.
Step 2
Settle on a niche. If you're first getting started don't worry too much about keyword research and researching niches extensively. While niche is incredibly important, as a complete newbie what's even more important is just getting started, getting used to building sites, promoting things on social media, etc.
Step 3
Setup or add content to a blog or website. Share your content on social media and create content for social media. Start building an e-mail list. Start making Youtube videos.
There's a heck of a lot that goes into this strategy. There's systems to automate these processes. There's analytics programs like LongTailPro, Terapeak, Jungle Scout and others that can help you do keyword research, find hot selling products to promote, etc
At first just focus on creating quality content. Don't just copy and paste Amazon descriptions and specs and add a picture and call it a day. That adds no value.
Price Point
Different people have different strategies when it comes to price point. Many people choose to focus on products which sell for at least $60. Other people do well with $8 Kindle downloads and cheaper products like lower end headphones while others choose to go for high end electronics or jewelry.
It's typically easier to get someone to spend $10 than it is $199, however with Amazon's relatively low commissions it takes a whole lot of small commissions on $10 items to add up to something big so if you work in a smaller niche or aren't driving that much traffic it may be worthwhile to focus on higher value items. Some people even focus on VERY high end items like patio gazebos, hot tubs, high end jewelry, etc. The commissions can be very large, but it's tough to make a sale. I can tell you from experience as someone who has ranked for the term "Rolex" in Google, VERY FEW people buy Rolex's on Amazon. Let's quickly take a look at the numbers.
Cheap Product $10 Mid Level Product $60 High End $200
4% Commission = $0.40 $2.40 $8
To Make $100 You Would Need This Many Sales
2500 Sales 41 Sales 12.5 Sales
As you can see from the numbers above, it takes a heck of a lot more sales to equal $100 selling $10 products as it does $60 prodoucts, and even less with a $200 product. .
Some Misc Tips
- Add value, don't just post an Amazon title, description, and specs, that adds no value to the reader. Add some value, tell them why they should buy the product, do a tutorial, an unboxing, something.
- Longform content not only helps shoppers and readers, but also search engines, it's viewed as quality content. Don't sell features, sell benefits, or don't sell at all. If I was trying to sell a Nutribullet I wouldn't talk about the blades and the motor, people don't care about that. I would post juicing recipes, weight loss stories, stories about healthy eating or Kale or something like that. Give people content that's informative or entertaining or provides some value and subtly mention products.
- Focus on answering common asked questions in both social media and long form content. A bag for example, will it fit an ipad? A laptop? etc.
- Use Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and Periscope to show off products, show product photos, etc. They drive a lot of traffic and can be great for marketing purposes.
- New products. When a completely new product comes out sometimes if your early to creating content you can rank fairly easily. Sure new hot products or trends can be competitive but it's an even playing ground. Your not trying to outrank someone with years in the niche and hundreds of articles.
Types Of Ad Units
There's a couple types of ad units.
Links - Links are easy to create using the sitebar at the top of the screen. From any page on Amazon or any product you can create either an HTML icon or an affiliate link with the click of a button. You can even select to have the link shortened for you. You can create your own banners or icons for
Native Ads - Native ads are a type of banner ad. They are dynamic in the sense wherever you place it it will automatically modify to fit that format as you can see from the example of hte ad being dragged from a header add to a skyscraper.
CPM Ads- These are somewhat new. It may or may not be available to all affiliates. A while back when I was playing around with these they were slowly being rolled out in a beta test. These can run in conjunction with Amazon ads.
Amazon Associates Isn't The Only Game In Town
Amazon's Affiliate program definitly has it's benefits. Amazon is a known and trusted site, customers don't think twice about making a purchase from there or about the return policy. This is a huge plus.
Amazon also has almost every product under the sun meaning no mater what your niche, there are products to market. Even if not a physical product there's always a book or software.
While Amazon is good for the above reasons, it does have it's downsides. The biggest being the low commission rate, you can view the most recent updated rate schedule on the chart below...
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| New Amazon Commission Rates |
Amazon also has a relatively short cookie period of 24 hours. That refers to how long after a reader/viewer clicks a link do you have until your no longer paid a commission for sending them over. While Ali Express is a session based cookie, Amazon at least gives you 24 hours. That said there are affiliate programs with 7 day cookies, 14 day cookies even month long cookies are fairly common. The longer the cookie the more likely you are to convert.
Other Affiliate Programs
When it comes to affiliate programs you have affiliate networks like CJ.Com which are a collection of hundreds or even thousands of affiliate programs from various niches. You can search by travel, 800 number, softwares, luggage, about any topic you could think of.
Then you also have affiliate programs run by companies or stores off their own site and they run and manage their own program. Big Box stores like Target, Walmart, Best Buy and others have affiliate programs. Smaller niche products often have their own affiliate programs. Even something like the Snoop Dogg Vaporizer Pens have an affiliate program that pays 15% if your into the weed or vape niche.
These programs typically pay much higher commissions. For physical products 10%, 15% or even 25% isn't uncommon. For digital products 50% to 100% is common as there's no physical cost for making or manufacturing an item so commissions can be up to 100% if that program, course or software is a lead or an upsell product for a seller and they just want to hook the buyer.
Additional Monetization Methods
While in Max's example he was affiliate marketing, we saw that later he changed his site FishTankBank.Com to more of an ecommerce site. Whether he stocks or dropships those items we don't know. The point is you can grow an affiliate business into something else.
If you discover a handful of affiliate products which sell consistantly you can turn into an ecommerce store, stock and sell those items yourself and make better margins than just affiliate marketing.
In the case of Max he could have started an online course or ebook or video series in which he teaches people how to setup their first fish tank. He could have sold ad space on his site to operators of aquarium ecommerce sites directly.
Once you have an audience, it's very easy to find additional ways to monetize.
