Amazon Associates is a great affiliate program for publishers to start earning from their websites. If you own a website or are planning to start a one, be it a blogging or a product website, there is lot of potential to earn from the Amazon affiliate program if you can strike the chord with your website visitors.
Amazon provides a lot of Ad options to choose for advertising the products from Amazon website so that you can easily blend them with your blogs, website layout and the theme of your website.
This quick beginners guide will definitely help you in exploring the different Amazon Ad types and choose the best for your blogs or your Amazon affiliate store in 2020 to boost your website earnings in a short period.
Ways to Earn from your Website using Amazon Affiliate Account:
1. Product Linking:
Promote a particular product on your website by writing the product reviews or by creating an affiliate store with images and link for that particular product.
For example, if you own a Sports related website, you might want to write the product review blogs for Wireless sports earbuds and choose the most popular products links like Jabra Active 75t, Bose SoundSport Free and Powerbeats Pro.
This is the most commonly used method by the Tech review websites to earn.
2. Banner Ads:
Amazon also provides the banner ads, which you can place at the best locations of your websites. It is similar to Google Adsense Display Ads. You can choose between different types of Promotional deals, Ads by Category with various sizes of Ads to place on your website. Banner Ads display the varying Amazon Ads based on the category of the Ad you selected and the content of these Ads is provided by Amazon.
3. Native Shopping Ads:
These Ads provide relevant recommendations of the product based on your website content or your pre-selection while creating the Ad. One of the best type of this ad is a Search Ad in which your users can also search a product on Amazon directly from your website. I will explain each type of Native shopping Ad in detail in below section.
How to Earn From Amazon Affiliate Product Linking?
First of all, you should be aware of how to get the affiliate links for the products which you want to promote on your website. As this is the most popular method of Amazon affiliate marketing, Amazon has released a Stripe (explained below) on their shopping website for the Amazon associate account holders which provides the easy access for them to get the links of the products from the Amazon shopping website.
How to Get Product Links:
Method #1: Amazon Associate Website
Login to the Amazon Associate website and click on product links as shown below
Search for your product
Click on Get link
Method #2: Amazon SiteStripe
If you already have an Amazon Associates account and you login to Amazon.com using your same email ID which has been registered with Amazon associates, you get an Amazon Associates SiteStripe at top of the Amazon website header. This is pretty straightforward and simple to use.
You can browse Amazon website for any products or deals like you normally shop from Amazon. For example, I browsed for the Samsung QLED 4K TV deal from Amazon deals page and from there, it will allow me to build product links using text, image or both for this product by clicking the buttons as shown below in SiteStripe.
How to place Amazon Product Links in your Website:
1. Embed text links of the product
You can get the text links of the products by using one of the methods mentioned above and then can place the text link in your blogs.
For example, check the text links placed in one of our Amazon product recommendation article.
You can use the below link types for the text links:
HTML : It will display the product link like the one highlighted in yellow below on your web page. You can always check the live preview of the HTML result like the one below for Jabra Elite 75t earbuds.
Standard Link: This is the standard URL for the product page. You can either embed it in form of a keyword on your blog or can place it as it is. I would recommend embedding the URL in Keyword which looks presentable and organised to our readers.
Short Link: I would highly recommend it to be used as this is a short link URL for your product and there are minimal chances of missing anything in copy pasting of URLs
2. Place the Image links of the Products:
Get the Image links of the products by using one of the methods in above section. The user will be redirected to the product if he clicks on the image. This is one of the best methods for your product review blog.
You can choose from small, medium or large image size according to the layout of your website.
3. Place descriptive Image Ad for a product
The third method of placing the ads for a particular product is by placing an Amazon branding Ad for the product . This ad will contain the Amazon branding unlike the above two methods. You can choose the title, the price colour of the ad along with the background colour to match or contrast your web page colour.
The marketing analysts do mention that different colour combination of the ads is vital for the customers interest to buy products so you can google it further on the colour combinations and experiment it to increase your earnings.
How to Earn From Amazon Native Shopping Ads?
You can create the native shopping Ads by logging in with your Amazon associate account, it cannot be created using SiteStripe as they are flexible ads for multiple products or pages of Amazon website unlike specific product linking.
You can create them by clicking on each ad type as shown below.
All of these ad types support Grid, List and Strip format. You can choose any format, which you think blends best in your blog or page.
1. Recommendation Ads:
This is the flexible Ad which displays products according to your website page content on which you are placing this Ad. Let us take the example of the Sports blogging website which intend to sell the running shoes to its readers.
Give your Ad a name.
Select the format of Ad and restrict the category in which Amazon should search for the products based on your website content.
In this example, I have given the Ad name as "Running Shoes Ad", selected the format "Grid" and have restricted the Category containing Shoes
You should always choose the Fallback Option with your Search Keyword so that Amazon shows Ads based on your search criteria in case it is unable to find the relevant content on your website.
For example, this Ad will display the Adidas running shoes in case it is unable to find the running shoes related content on the website.
You can further choose the options of Ad Size and Interest based ads in the advanced settings.
Click on Save and you will get the Ad code to be placed on your website.
2. Search Ads:
These Ads are shown based on the search keyword that you provide while creating this Ad. Amazon does not read your website content to create this Ad. You can also show the "Amazon Search Bar"in this Ad so that users can directly search for their product and if they even buy using the search, you will get a commission.
Again taking the Sports website example, if you want to promote Nike Air zoom Pegasus shoes, you can do that by filling in the below options. You can change the title of the Ad as well, for example by writing "Nike best running shoes" instead of " Shop related products"
In the advanced settings of this Ad, you can choose if you would like to show search bar as an option to the readers and can also decide where would you like to place it.
Save and copy paste the code on your website.
3. Custom Ad
This Ad type is a fixed multiple products Ad which you pre-select while creating this Ad. For example, you can select minimum of 4 particular products in your Ads and then display it mentioning as "My top picks" to suggest your readers based on your reviews.
In this example, out of the numerous Nike running shoes on Amazon, you can select few which you would like to recommend to the readers and can label it as "My top rated shoes". You can also add the search bar for your website visitors in this ad type.
How to Earn From Amazon Banner Ads?
Amazon provides a lot of options to choose from the banner ads. You can choose among promotional link ads, Amazon Gift cards ads and Banner ads based on various categories.
Explore the numerous Banner Ad types by heading to Product Linking->Banners in the menu.
You can choose from different sizes of Ad units for different categories which also include the most popular Ad sizes like 300X250, 728X90 and 300X600
Hope this guide helped you in understanding different ways to promote Amazon products on your website.
Do let us know in the comments section which Ad type is performing the best for your website.