Monetisation using affiliate programs such as Amazon
Now that we have covered how to sign up for AdSense and how to embed the Ads on your website, we can talk about affiliate partnerships/programs. You might look at affiliate partnerships and immediately think ‘spam’ – but if used in the correct way, you should be able to make a little bit of cash from this without it having a detrimental impact to your content and website.
Many of the popular sites that sell products or services will offer some type of affiliate scheme, but today we will be showing you how it will work with the Amazon affiliate scheme. Amazon offer one of the more popular affiliate programs and it works by giving you a unique ID that attaches itself to links that visitors to your website can click. Once they click through to Amazon from your link, and Amazon will know they are there because of you and reward you for it.
Typical Scenario
A typical scenario would be this. Let’s say that you were regularly posting updates to your blog or website on fishing as a hobby and you are suggesting the best equipment to use in different scenarios for different fish. You noticed that there is an offer on over at Amazon that your readers might be interested in!
First up, you should head over and sign up to become an Amazon affiliate here.
Once you have signed up and followed the simple sign up form, you will now be able to start browsing for products within the Amazon affiliate website. After searching for products, you should see something similar to the below:
Now we can choose which product we want to link to with our affiliate ID built into the URL so that Amazon know that the link came from you.
As you can see in the above image, you have some basic customisation options available to you covering colour and whether or not you wish to have a border around the image. Other options include the option to have text only (for just a hyperlink), image only and ‘Add to widget’ which allows you to create a ‘widget’ type bit of code that can be embedded on your website by simply copying and pasting the code onto the relevant section of your website.
If you use WordPress as your CMS, there are many plugins that will make the process even easier for you.
Payment & Alternatives
Amazon should send you a monthly email letting you know what earnings if any you are due to be paid for purchases via your links. Amazon won’t payout until your earnings meet a payment threshold. Don’t worry though, if you miss the threshold one month, your earnings will be added to the following month until you meet the required minimum for payments to be made.
There are many affiliate programs out there that will help you out by generating a bit of extra cash. If you are already linking to a website’s product or service, you might as well investigate to see whether or not you can benefit via an affiliate program!
Image credit – Amazon
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