Any affiliate marketer out there would have heard of the Amazon Associates program where you can promote Amazon products and get paid for it. Their program is hugely popular because their core brand is well known and the prices offered across many different product ranges are competitive. However, if you are to have a lot of success with promoting Amazon products then you must understand the basics of selecting which ones are worth promoting.
Why Promote When the Commissions Are Small?
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If you are one of those affiliate marketers that are used to enjoying commissions of around 50-75% then you will be in for a surprise when you sign up to the Amazon Associates program as the commissions there are in the range of 2-10% depending on your performance and the type of product you are promoting. Even though the commissions are small it is still worth promoting their products because it’s about volume of sales that will get you a lot of money. Think about it: selling a $500 product with a 5% commission might not sound too exciting, but if you can sell 100 of them then that is $5,000 in the bank, not bad right?
Find Bigger Ticket Items
When selling on Amazon there are two main options that you can go with which is to sell a lot of low priced products or a small amount of ones that are highly priced. Most affiliate marketers are under the misguided impression that lower priced products are more likely to sell and therefore are worthier of promotion. However, that isn’t the case if you select a niche where the average customer spends over $100 then you can sell products over that price point and make a lot of sales. A writer from Income With Scotty explains that higher priced items are the way to go:
The trick here is to find bigger ticket items ($100+) and build your website around that. If you are relying on search engines for traffic, you’ll find there are plenty of bigger ticket items that have decent search volume and fairly low competition.
The Bestseller Section
Each category has a bestsellers section on Amazon that you just cannot ignore if you want to find great products. Bestsellers are on that list for a reason, and that is because they sell at higher volumes than other products. What is great about these popular products is that you don’t need to do much selling, all you need to do is simply show the product to your customers and they will most likely know what the products already are.
Just a word of caution – a lot of the other affiliate stores in your niche will also be promoting the same product. This means you will need to come up with a unique strategy to get an edge, or simply opt for selling non-bestsellers.
The Product Feedback
Customers when buying Amazon products get to leave some feedback on the products that they have bought. This is great because it allows other customers to see which products are worth buying, and which ones aren’t. You can use this feedback system to your advantage by only selecting products to promote that have a feedback rating of 4-5 stars or higher. An article written by Saad Naeem at SEO Allrounder explains the importance of choosing a product to promote that has great feedback:
If you promote a product with low star review, you will have difficult time promoting the product because people will view the product as low quality and not worth buying. At least, most of them. Product with good affiliate review has better perceived value for the potential customers.
Furthermore, if you are looking for an angle to promote the chosen products you can visit the customer feedback section. There you might be able to find lengthy points about the positive aspects of the product. You can use these points to use as the basis of your advertising efforts.
Another thing to consider is the amount of people that have left the feedback. If you find a 5 star product, but it only has 4 reviews to its name then that isn’t giving you a large enough sample size to make a determination about the quality of the product. Try finding a product with 20 or even 30 reviews. Moreover, do take care to not discard a product with only a few reviews or no reviews at all, because it might be new on the market. Advertising new products before anybody else has spotted them gives you an advantage that you just can’t pass up.
Don’t Put All Your Eggs Into One Basket
All clever affiliate marketers know the importance of not sticking to one niche. The more revenue generating streams you are involved in the better. Therefore, pick as many different niches as you can without spreading yourself too thinly. You could set up a review website for one niche then as you begin to get traction think about setting up another review website in a completely unrelated niche. An expert from AFFSTOP explains the importance of picking several niches:
Spread the actual love around. Don’t create only one product niche site and stop. Keep putting up much more sites, but keep just about every site specific to its niche. One niche each website. Don’t sell TV’s and baby toys on the same website.
When promoting your products you need to think about your consumer demographics. For example, if you are promoting computer games then you wouldn’t also promote women’s shirts on the same website, but you might promote television sets.
These are just some of the Amazon product selection tips that you need to keep in mind. There are plenty more that you will discover for yourself as you get into the process of promoting them. The key with this business model is to constantly test to see what works and what doesn’t. As a result, you will develop your own set of criteria for selecting a product.