How to Build a Successful Amazon Affiliate Site (Step by Step)

Lots of people make money with Amazon affiliate sites. But for every success story, there are plenty who never quite get there. For example, this person on the /r/juststart subreddit claims to have hit $1K/month from Amazon within just six months:

The Amazon affiliate program (Amazon Associates) lets people earn money by referring sales to Amazon.

When you sign up, Amazon gives you a unique tracking ID that looks something like this: yourname-20. You can add this to any Amazon product URL to create an affiliate link. Example: amazon.com/dp/B01K1C94E4 → amazon.com/dp/B01K1C94E4?tag=yourname-20 When someone clicks your link and buys something on Amazon within 24 hours, you'll be paid a commission on the sale. Even better, they don't have to buy the product you recommend. If you send them to a kitchen knife and they end up buying a tennis racket, you still get a commission. If they buy the kitchen knife, a tennis racket, and a bunch of other things, you earn commission on everything. This is partly why the affiliate program is so popular. Amazon sells most things, so it's not unusual to see a good chunk of commissions come from products you've never even heard of.

Follow these steps:

During signup, Amazon will ask for your website address. Although you can enter a social media profile link here, you'll want to set up an Amazon affiliate website if you're serious about making money with Amazon Associates.

Amazon affiliate sites promote products for sale on Amazon in their content. If you've ever Googled something like "best [product type]" or "[product] review," then you've almost certainly come across one of these sites. Just take a look at the top-ranking result for "best coffee grinder":

These folks researched the best coffee grinders, summarized their findings in a blog post, and included Amazon affiliate links for visitors to buy the recommended products. It's a similar story for a query like "aeropress review."

Both of these types of posts are useful for readers because they make life simpler and save time. If you're in the market for a new coffee grinder, you can't test dozens of products yourself. You have to rely on the research and testing done by others.

Making money from an Amazon affiliate site requires traffic (visitors). Without traffic, nobody will click your affiliate links, which means no commissions. Now, there are tons of ways to get traffic. But most who experience success with Amazon affiliate marketing get the bulk of their traffic from SEO. Here's why: If you promote your blog on social media, or in a newsletter, you'll get a spike in traffic. But once your audience has seen your post, traffic drops back to zero. This is known as the "spike of hope," followed by the "flatline of nope."

SEO has the opposite effect. If you rank in Google for keywords that people are searching for month after month, your traffic will be consistent—and should improve over time.

It's possible to get the same effect using paid ads, but there are a few problems with that:

With that in mind, let's look at how you can build an Amazon affiliate site that makes money month after month.

Everyone has a different idea of success. For some, it's a site that makes $1,000/month. For others, it might be a more ambitious goal of $10,000/month. Whatever the number, the steps to success are the same.

Have you heard of The Wirecutter? It's owned by The New York Times and is perhaps the most popular Amazon affiliate website. It has reviews for everything from knife sharpeners to standing desks and gets an estimated 3.9 million monthly visits from Google alone.

Many who are new to Amazon affiliate marketing see sites like these and try to replicate their success. Don't make this mistake. Big sites like The Wirecutter have deep pockets and talented SEO teams. Trying to compete will be an uphill battle. Instead, you need to choose a niche to dominate. Here's how:

Loss of motivation is arguably the most common reason why people fail at affiliate marketing, so it's important to choose a niche that you find at least somewhat interesting. So, grab a pen and paper and note down a few ideas. If you're struggling, this huge list of affiliate marketing niches might help. Alternatively, take inspiration from The Wirecutter's categories.

Amazon's commission rates vary by product category. Here's the current structure:

If any of your niche ideas fall in the 0% category, cross them off your list. There's no point in promoting products for no reward. I would also rule out categories with commission rates of 2% or less because it'll take a lot of traffic to make decent money from those.

Generally speaking, you'll make more money on expensive products. For example, if someone buys a $4,000 PC, your 2.5% cut ($100) is going to be way higher than if someone buys some new RAM for $40 ($1). But this doesn't mean you should enter an expensive niche. People are less impulsive when it comes to high-ticket items, which means that fewer clicks will turn into sales. This is known as your conversion rate. Now, there's a lot of talk about the sweet spot when it comes to product prices, but the consensus seems to be an average between $30-$300. Go higher, and conversions will start to suffer. Go lower, and your cut will suffer. To get a sense of prices in your niche, search for a few products on Amazon.

Now that you know a bit more about the niche you want to enter, you can use that information to estimate how much traffic to "money pages" you'll need to hit your monthly financial goal. If you're not familiar with the term "money pages," these are just the pages on your site that contain affiliate links. With Amazon affiliate sites, product roundups tend to be the best "money pages." They're the ones that list the best products in a category like this list of the best robot vacuums from The Wirecutter:

Let's run through an example. Say you want to enter the coffee niche, and your goal is $1,000/month. Having gone through the steps above, you know that the average product price is around $40, and the commission rate for most coffee-related products is 4%. However, you don't yet know the average clickthrough rate (the percentage of visitors that click an Amazon affiliate click) of your posts, or your Amazon conversion rate (the percentage of clicks that turn into sales). So let's be pessimistic and assume a 10% CTR and a 7.5% conversion rate. Let's plug everything into the calculation:

Looks like we'll need ~83k monthly visits to "money" pages to earn $1,000/month. Of course, this is far from an exact science. We used pessimistic numbers for a reason.

Now that you know how much traffic you need to make the numbers work, you need to estimate whether the niche has enough search traffic potential. Here's an easy way to do this: Install and activate Ahrefs' SEO toolbar, then search Google for: best [product in your niche] inurl:best For example, in the coffee niche, our search might be this:

It gets an estimated ~210,000 monthly US search visits, and we can see from the domain name that it's a niche site focused on coffee. However, we don't know how much of this traffic is going to "money" pages. If most of it goes to irrelevant blog posts, that doesn't bode well for us. Luckily, we can get a better sense of "money" page traffic using Ahrefs' Site Explorer. Just paste in the domain, go to the Top Pages report, add the word "best" to the Include filter, and choose "URLs" from the "Any target" dropdown. You should end up with a filtered report of almost entirely product roundup posts.

There's no point entering a niche where you'll struggle to hit your traffic goal for years. So you need to make sure that there are some topics you can crack without too much SEO grunt work. SEO is a complicated game. There are many ranking factors and best practices. But one of the most important is the number of high-quality backlinks to your pages. Google talks about the importance of backlinks on their page about search algorithms.

Finding a niche with potential was the hard part; keyword research is comparatively easy. If you're feeling lazy, you could even just export the filtered Top Pages report from the previous step. That should give you enough profitable "product roundup" topics to keep you busy for a few months. However, if you want to be more strategic and find more keywords, do this:

Here's what that might look like if we wanted to enter the coffee niche:

Just to reiterate, product roundup keywords (e.g., "best coffee machine," "best coffee grinder") are usually the big money-makers with Amazon affiliate websites. So, we want to find product roundup keywords that have traffic potential and aren't too hard to rank for. To do that, add these three filters:

You should see a list of relevant, low-difficulty keywords sorted by their monthly search volumes.

Product review keywords are those like "aeropress review" and "baratza virtuoso review." Although things vary from niche to niche, these keywords rarely have anywhere near the traffic potential of product roundup keywords. You'll probably only find a handful worth ranking for. So why bother with them? Two main reasons:

To find these keywords, add these filters to the "All keywords" report:

Here's what we see for our coffee example:

Most Amazon affiliate sites don't only publish "money" posts. They also publish blog posts and other informational content. Just look at homegrounds.co:

Look for topics that are closely related to the products you'll review in your product roundups. For example, if your niche is coffee, then topics like "how to use a french press" and "how to make coffee" make perfect sense because you'll almost certainly be reviewing french presses and coffee machines.

Assuming that you've chosen a domain and put up a website, it's time to start writing and publishing some content. In this section, we'll talk about how to create three types of content:

Let's start with the important one.

Follow these four steps:

Product roundups review multiple products, but how do you know which products to review? Here are a couple of ways:

Let's face it: Amazon does a pretty good job of recommending the best products. Just look at the top few results for "coffee grinder":

Looking at Amazon is a good starting point, but it can be overwhelming. Another good tactic is to look for common inclusions amongst the top-ranking pages. For example, three of the top results for "best coffee grinder" mention the Baratza Encore Conical Grinder as one of the best:

To create a useful product roundup, you first need to know what product attributes matter to buyers. Here are a few ways to figure that out:

Look at a few of the products you're likely to include in your post and check the reviews. You'll soon start to get a sense of the things that matter to buyers. For example, within seconds of looking at the review below, it's clear that grind coarseness, ease of cleaning, and portability are all important factors when choosing a manual coffee grinder:

Skim a few of the top-ranking pages and look for commonalities. For example, both of these coffee grinder roundups talk about grind consistency:

A content gap analysis shows keywords that multiple pages rank for. By doing this for some of the top-ranking pages for your target keyword, you'll get further insight into the kinds of things people want to know. To perform the analysis, paste a few of the top-ranking URLs into Ahrefs' Content Gap tool. If we do this for three top-ranking pages for "best coffee grinder," we see that they're ranking for keywords related to coffee grinder types: burr grinder, manual coffee grinder, hand grinder, electric grinder, etc.

Most people who start Amazon affiliate sites don't test products themselves. Instead, they research the products online and pull points from other reviews. Although you can go down this path, it's not what we recommend for a couple of reasons:

So, if you want to create a truly useful site with longevity, and can afford to do so, it's worth reviewing products for real. Here are a few ideas to keep costs down:

Product roundups aren't like normal blog posts. You need to give people the information they came for right off the bat. In the case of product roundups, this is the winning product. For that reason, you should create a list post using the Inverted Pyramid format. Learn more about that here.

Much of the advice above for product roundups also applies to individual product reviews. You need to know what people care about and want to know, and you need to research the product thoroughly. That said, it's usually best to write individual product reviews in conjunction with a product roundup post. Why? Because when you create a product roundup post, what you're essentially doing is reviewing multiple products at once. It's just that product roundups summarize each product instead of going into detail. But the point is this: you've got to research the products to create the product roundup, so you might as well publish that research in an individual product review. Here are a few other reasons this approach makes sense:

Let's focus on that last point. If you've created a product roundup about the best coffee grinders, you'll already know that grind consistency and ease of use are attributes that people care about. Knowing that makes it easy to templatize a review style for all products in this category. Just use those things as subheadings and give each product a relative 1-5 score on each point. See these two posts, for example. Because you're using a consistent format for each product review, and already did your research when creating the product roundup, it shouldn't take too much time to create these posts.

Writing good blog posts is a whole other topic in itself. Luckily, we have plenty of guides about how to write blog posts so instead of going into this here, I'll just link up some useful posts below:

SEO isn't rocket science, but it's also not something that we can summarize from start-to-finish in this post. There are just too many elements. Instead, I'm going to talk about two important aspects to focus on, then link up some SEO tutorials from the blog.

Content hubs are interlinked collections of content about a similar topic. They consist of three parts:

Second, all pages in the hub benefit from each other's backlinks because of how PageRank works. How do you build them?

For example, say you wanted to create a content hub around a product roundup for "best coffee grinders." If you've already written reviews for some of the products mentioned on the list, just link to them from the hub page and vice-versa. Here's a real-life example: One of the products on this list of the best coffee grinders is the Baratza Virtuoso Plus.

Backlinks are arguably the most important Google ranking factor. They're the foundation of Google's ranking algorithm, and multiple independent studies have found strong correlations between the number of backlinks from unique websites and a page's organic traffic. For Amazon affiliate sites, you want to try to build links directly to "money" pages like product roundups and product reviews. There are lots of ways to do this, but here's just one idea: Product roundups review a particular type of product. It might be coffee grinders, standing desks, WiFi routers, etc. Think about the purpose of that product and ask yourself, what does it help the people to do? Here are some examples:

Now you've established a product benefit, look for blog posts about achieving that benefit that also mention your product. You can then reach out and suggest that they link to your product roundup to help their readers choose the best product for them. Let me explain with an example. If we Google "how to stay healthy when working from home," pretty much all of the results are blog posts with tips.

If you send similar emails to a few dozen people, that should gain you some quality links to your product roundups. But, again, this is only one idea. Check out the posts below for more link building strategies:

Driving clicks to Amazon is the name of the game if you want to make money because of the 24-hour cookie duration. I'm not going to go into great detail here because conversion rate optimization isn't something you should obsess over if you're just starting out. However, you need to make sure you have the basics covered, which are:

Once you're getting a decent amount of traffic to your site, check out the resources below to make sure you're getting all the clicks you can.

Building an Amazon affiliate site is still a great way to get started with affiliate marketing, despite the recent commission cuts. That said, once you get a decent amount of traffic, it's worth looking into other affiliate programs that may offer higher commissions on the same products. Although Amazon usually converts the highest, it's still often possible to increase earnings by joining other affiliate programs thanks to higher commission rates. Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.