The Power of Amazon Affiliate Sites

Shortly after I first saw an Amazon affiliate blog for sale on the Flippa marketplace for the first time, I spent a week researching the concept. Needless to say, I was impressed to find that entrepreneurs have built five and six figure side hustles with these sorts of websites.

Being relatively new to the Flippa marketplace, as a trend from my experience, web properties showing 6 to 12 months of revenue are purchased quickly, which led me to believe there was something interesting here to pursue.

For context over the importance of getting involved with an Amazon business here are 10 facts according to BigCommerce:

1. 9 out of 10 consumers price check a product on Amazon. (source)
2. 2% of Echo owners have purchased a product via Alexa. (source)
3. Amazon sells more than 12 million products. (source)
4. Amazon sells over 1.1 million home improvement products. (source)
5. 95 million people have Amazon Prime memberships in the US. (source)
6. $1.4K is the average spent by Amazon Prime members each year. (source)
7. FBA gives sellers a 30-50% increase in sales. (source)
8. Amazon shipped over 5 billion items worldwide in 2017. (source)
9. More than 50% of all Amazon sales come from third-party sellers. (source)
10. 80% of sellers also sell on other platforms outside of Amazon. (source)

How Do Amazon Affiliates Work?

On a high level, an Amazon Affiliate site is simply a blog that links to products for sale on Amazon.

The first step is choosing a niche to write content about on a WordPress blog. Once you have your niche and an Amazon affiliate account setup, you simply look for products to write about.

When readers click through Amazon linked products after reading your articles there is a cookie installed on their web browser. Normally, affiliate cookies stay active for 30 days, but with Amazon the cookie duration is 90 days. This long cookie duration means if a reader clicks through your blog’s link and purchases anything in 90 days from Amazon, you get a commission on that item. The logic is that you are sending Amazon high quality buyers who have already done their research and are ready to make a purchase and that you should share in the profits if a purchase is made within that 90 day window.

With the average Prime member spending $1,400 per year on Amazon and $350 in the length of your cookie duration, this is a pretty strong business model.

From my experience, the most successful Amazon affiliate blogs heavily focus on search engine optimization (SEO) to build up a strong foundation of organic traffic from Google. If you can manage to build strong organic traffic to your Amazon affiliate site, you will begin to generate steady revenue from commission, but this can also lead to additional revenue streams if you’re smart about it.

Revenue Stream: Sponsored Posts

When I first learned about Amazon affiliate blogs on Flippa, I was really impressed by the 90-day cookie duration and helping people learn more about products to buy. However, after actually operating my first Amazon affiliate blog, I learned there are multiple profitable revenue streams that can be taken advantage of in addition to affiliate commissions.

Once you’ve hired an SEO expert, downloaded the YOAST plugin on WordPress, and started producing keyword rich content, you’ll start to get inquiries from people in your niche.

For example, if you’re blogging about gardening equipment on Amazon and linking to corresponding products, people who are selling those products often begin to pick up on bumps in sales and tags on social media. In my experience tagging on social media when sharing new articles about products on Amazon attracts these Amazon sellers the fastest.

Once you’ve made contact with these sellers, you can begin to do sponsored posts on your blog each month. Setting up a relationship directly with sellers is easy and allows you to set up a baseline for monthly revenue. When you’re first starting out with a simple Amazon seller sponsorship, something like $100 for 4 articles per month in addition to commissions is a great start. This builds a base to hire a writer.

Revenue Stream: Display ads

In addition to sponsored posts and commissions from sales on Amazon, display ads are a great source of revenue.

In my experience, Google Adsense produces the most dynamic and targeted ads for readers on your blog. Making sure the display ads are targeted is extremely important to increase your click through rate on the display ads. Clicks are what will really generate a lot of revenue for your blog so making sure the ads are targeted is important. With that said, many bloggers will join different ad networks depending on their niche to increase the targeted ads from advertisers. There are hundreds if not thousands of competitors to Google Adsense but many prefer Google based on their size of advertisers, the ease of implementation, and their targeting features. 

Bonus: In addition to adding Google Adsense to your Amazon affiliate blog, you can also sell ad space to advertisers that reach out. For example, if there is an Amazon seller in your niche that is interested in sponsoring written posts, you can up-sell them on additional display ads that you approve of. Once they send you a display ad that doesn’t ruin the aesthetic of your blog, you can add it into your code directly, hire a developer on Upwork to do it, or download a plugin to help implement the manual placement.

If you don’t want to deal with manually implementing the ad, you can join something like BuySellAds where a snippet of code allows you to approve ads directly from advertisers. 

In Conclusion

Overall, Amazon affiliate blogs are an extremely versatile business to buy on Flippa. If you can find one that has been able to generate solid monthly revenue for 6-12 months and has healthy organic traffic through SEO, definitely give it a try. Many entrepreneurs that I’ve met run a handful of these affiliate blogs and use their sponsored post revenue to pay for hiring writers. Once you have a writer to create product reviews and articles about the Amazon linked products, you can really scale quickly. 

Bonus: The highest quality writers I’ve ever hired for my Amazon affiliate blogs have been from the subreddit /r/HireAWriter. Reach out to users directly with the messaging feature on Reddit and hire as quickly as you can obtain sponsored posts from Amazon sellers.