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5 Different Ways to Earn With Amazon

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Make Money, New 37 Comments

5 Interesting Ways to Make Money With Amazon

It feels weird to launch a blog post on Tuesday instead of Monday, but I’m a day late because I HATE launching posts on Holidays.

Anywho… let’s get to it.

No doubt you know about Amazon’s affiliate program by now.

It’s been coined “The Web’s #1 Affiliate Program” by many, but do you know about the other 4 ways you can make money on Amazon?

In the video below, I go over all 5 ways.

If you’re not into video, 🙁 🙁 I’ll list the 5 ways underneath it. But you’re going to miss my cheesy Amazon delivery truck animation.

Oh well. Your loss.  😉

#1 Amazon FBA

FBA means “for sale by Amazon.” You partner up with suppliers, send the products to Amazon’s Fulfillment center and get paid when people buy.

There are people who are making a killing with this — yes 5 figures per month — but there is a learning curve.

Check out Rob Cubbon’s story on his experience.

Thank you, Rob, for highlighting both the good and bad. I love the transparency you displayed here.

Sign up here.

#2 The Associates (Affiliate) Program

You can complain about the low commissions all you want, but I love this program. I have never been an affiliate for any other company where people buy so many products in addition to what you promote.

That’s a testament to Amazon’s great upselling and the overall brand trust.

They even pay you when people sign up for Amazon’s free trials.

The only thing I don’t like is that they have a 24 hour cookie. That means if someone buys 24 hours after using your affiliate link, you don’t get the commission. So I guess that’s a trade off for the multiple product commissions per order.

You definitely need traffic in order to make worthwhile money. My last check was for over $500, and I had to generate over 10,000 clicks to the site.

Sign up here.

#3 Amazon CPM

I published a podcast on this in February, 2015. In short, I wasn’t impressed. I think it can be great if you happen to have the right kind of site, but my results weren’t impressive.

There were hardly any ads relevant to my content, and that’s a killer for advertising.

Also, if your traffic is very low, don’t bother. It would take you way too long to earn a worthwhile amount.

It’s very similar to AdSense where you paste code into your site and they display ads. You choose how much you want to earn for every 1,000 impressions, or you can let Amazon suggest the amount for you to optimize your earnings.

In order to get accepted, you must apply for the Amazon Associates program first. Once you’re in, you can create ads from that account.

#4 Amazon Video Direct

Did you know you can get paid for uploading videos to Amazon? Much like the YouTube partner program, you earn money for video views (or streaming in this case).

The one thing to keep in mind is that people search Amazon a lot differently than they search YouTube. So the same kind of content that performs well on YouTube might not perform as well on Amazon.

They seem to market the program for episodic content, but you can upload almost anything you want.

Your videos must have a closed caption script or they won’t be approved. You can use a service like Rev to create the file. Others have figured out a way to use their YouTube captions for the service as well.

Sign up here.

#5 Merch By Amazon

This program is a lot like Spreadshirt, RedBubble, Zazzle and other print on demand affiliate programs.

You upload a design, add it to a T-shirt, and any time a shirt is sold, you get a commission. Amazon handles all the shipping and customer service.

Being a big fan of this monetization model (check out my recent Spreadshirt video), you KNOW I’m sitting here waiting anxiously to get in. 🙂

You’ve got to love the fact that the Internet provides us the opportunity to sell shirts without even having to handle inventory. Sure, you sacrifice bigger profits compared to selling them directly, but it’s worth it for the convenience.

I’m not interested in running a full-blown T-shirt business, and these kinds of services are PERFECT for people like me — and probably many of you too.

Right now, Merch is an invitation-only program and unfortunately it can take months before they get to your submission. I’ve heard some say it took over a year to get in. Yikes! 🙁

I even included a link to my Spreadshirt store to display my art when I applied, hoping that would speed up the process. I figured it would have little impact, but a girl can try, right?

You can apply here.

So how many of these have you tried? Hope you learned something new today! 🙂

Comments

  6. Amazon definitely is among the absolute most reputabled companies on the web, so I am actually discussing this along with all my squeaks (like consistently).

    Fantastic introduction from the courses Lisa. I enjoy the brand-new design you are actually making use of for your guides as well as outros.

    Thanks.

    Reply

  7. Hey Lisa. What an interesting post you have. I do online marketing these two years, and the strategies you share here are very useful for me. Thanks Lisa.

    Reply

  9. Hey Lisa,

    Nowadays affiliate marketing is the best we can have. People are trying to use the affiliate program of Amazon and making money.

    The FBA program may also be something I would like to try. The 5 ways defined by you can really be helpful.

    Thanks for letting us know.
    Enjoy the day.
    ~Ravi

    Reply

  11. Thank you so much, Lisa! You always provide great information. I’ve started to seriously dive into the world of internet marketing, and I love it! You’ve really helped motivate me to try building out niche websites and helped give me ideas to go back to my old blog to optimise things better.

    I’m currently only doing amazon affiliate links, but definitely going to get into FBA in the future. I think for now, I’ll just concentrate this. 🙂

    Reply

  12. Hello Lisa,
    First of all thank you so much for teaching us about online websites and how to earn money out of it. Lisa, as ablocker use is increasing day by day, do you have any suggestions to deal with it?
    I have also seen people using don’t know any kind of plugin or what like they put a pop up to disable adblock then only u can see content.

    Is that good or limits our website.

    Looking forward to hear awesome answer from you. 🙂

    Thanks
    – Brenda

    Reply

    • Hi Lisa. Hi Brenda,

      Adblock is also my concern. Lots of people are using this tool or other similar tools to avoid the ads. Consequently, we cannot earn much money.
      I wonder if there are any ways to unlock those ‘adblocks’ from the blog and other pages having videos.
      Could you please share with us, Lisa?

      Thank you so much for your help in advance.

      Reply

    • Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about adblock. It’s only going to get more popular as people get sick of ads. Blocking ad block is not really a good solution either because you can end up annoying your visitors by affecting their viewing experience. The solution is to diversify and look for other ways to monetize such as courses, products, affiliate programs, etc.

      Reply

      • Thanks so much for your response, Lisa.

        So with adblock, we almost have adapt ourselves to stay with it.

        Maybe improvement of the contents, making videos and attractive links to affiliate program also work somehow, i think.

        Reply

    • Thanks for the video. Also I have Zazzle and I’m barely making money and it’s been about two years. Should I give up and go to spreadshirts?

      Reply

      • Hey Toni,

        Remember earnings from Zazzle and Spreadshirt are driven by your designs getting found in the marketplace. So maybe try creating different designs for different niches.

        My earnings from Spreadshirt are largely because I have a site that drives traffic to my store. The marketplace is secondary to my direct sales.

        I say experiment with other networks with different niches and see if you can discover if certain kinds of designs sell best in the marketplace.

        Reply

  13. Making money with Amazon affiliate is difficult, my account has been closed by Amazon at time I have a good commission.

    I have applied for Merch Amazon and Amazon have approved my application. Now, I have not resource to do. Would you like to show me some guides?

    Thanks,

    Reply

  14. Hi Lisa – I enjoyed this post and took a look at your T-shirts. I wonder if you have any sort of affiliate program for those – I have a page on one of my sites that receives many visits from women reverting to natural hair after experiencing damage caused by weaves etc. I’m sure they’d love your shirts. Please do email me if interested 🙂

    Reply

    • Thank you Christine! I’m honored. The best thing to do is create a free store yourself and use my designs. Spreadshirt doesn’t have a traditional affiliate program where you can sign up and get paid for link referrals.

      So once you setup a store, you can use other people’s designs and you get a 20% royalty on everything sold.

      I appreciate your interest.

      Reply

  15. Lisa: Your timing is superb. On my To-Do list for this week is learn about the t-shirt program through amazon. I would have been extremely disappointed once I did the research to find out there is such a long waiting list to get approved. I’m so glad you told us about Spreadshirt. Thank you!!!

    Reply

  16. Thanks for this post Lisa! Never knew about the Video option. I love Amazon’s Affiliate program as well, last month I made $1000 bucks, not bad at all. You definitely do have to have traffic to be worthwhile, when I first started out I usually only made about $20 or so.

    Reply

  17. Lisa, I learned a lot! I never pay attention to the spam, err, announcements from my Amazon Associates account, so I missed learning about VideoDirect, Merch and CPM.

    As a purely investigative endeavor, I learned about Amazon’s FBA awhile ago. The entire process is fascinating! But, as with anything, I had to rein in my SOS tendencies and stay focused on what I do. (That’s not hard, since I have zero traffic!)

    Thanks for the cheesy truck and fun info!

    Cheers,

    Mitch

    Reply

  19. Great overview of the programs Lisa. I love the new style you are using for your intros and outros. But I still missed seeing your beautiful smile in front of the camera 🙂
    Amazon really is one of the most trusted brands online, so I’m sharing this one with all my peeps (like always).
    Thank you.

    Reply

    • Awww thank you girl!! Don’t worry there will be plenty of talking head videos to come. Working on one in just a few as a matter of fact! Gotta schedule those around good hair days. lol Sad but true.

      Reply

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