3 Ways to Make Money Using Amazon

Many people want to make money without having to work a 9 to 5 job. Or, they hope to supplement their job by working online. By using the tools that Amazon has, you can boost your income or make enough so that it can take the place of a full time job and then some.

Amazon offers three great ways for anyone to be able to make money. Some will allow you to tap into your creativity, while others allow you to earn money based on recommendations to others.

Affiliate Marketing as an Amazon Associate

You can make money on Amazon by becoming an affiliate marketer. This is known as being an Amazon Associate. It’s an easy (and free) program that lets you suggest products to your audience and earn a commission.

You might recommend something that your blog reader might find helpful to make their life easier or something that they’ve been seeking for entertainment purposes, for example.

At its most basic level, affiliate marketing using Amazon is just helping others meet a need. It’s good for anyone to use – including bloggers who already have a following or want to build one.

It’s a good program for niche leaders or someone who focuses on a specific topic like camping, cooking, health and more. You can use the program if you’re a stay at home mom and blog about products you and your family like to use.

For people who are looking for part time work or something they want to build into a full time income, affiliate marketing is a good way to do that. It can be used by college students or anyone who wants to make some extra money without having to work on a set schedule for someone else.

The way it works is simple. You just have to go to the Amazon page and scroll to the bottom. Locate the Make Money with Us heading and under that, you’ll see the Become an Affiliate link.

Click on that and you’ll be walked through the steps you need to accomplish to sign up. Read through the Terms of Service so that you know about what violates their rules.

The last thing you want to do is get started and begin seeing success, only to have your account shut down. You’ll also be able to learn about their fee schedule and commission rates through the program policies.

Amazon has an approval process before you can get started. You have to have a website, page or blog where you’re going to be promoting the items you want to feature.

You can get a domain and hosting and set up a simple WordPress blog with some starter content to get approved. If your site is something that violates Amazon’s policy, you won’t be approved – but that’s not something that happens often.

Once the approval comes through, you’ll log in to your Amazon affiliate account and copy the product links to post onto your site or in your blog posts where you want to promote them.

Some affiliate marketers post the links on their social media sites, which is allowed by Amazon. But you don’t want to place links inside of PDFs that you give away – because that’s not allowed.

Another way to grab links is by going to a page on Amazon when you’re logged into your affiliate account, and clicking on the Amazon Associates’ Site Stripe, which lets you quickly and easily grab text links or share the page on Facebook or Twitter with your code included.

You can link to a specific product you’re reviewing – or link to a search results page, such as the results when you type in “dog bowl.” Or, head to the bestseller page for your niche topic and link to that, since you know those products are proven to convert.

As with any endeavor, there are ways that you can make sure that you’re successful. Your audience should trust your opinion. This happens when you tell the truth about products and not only advise them what to buy, but warn them of what to stay away from.

You want to promote items that appeal to your readers and those that can help them that they may not be aware of yet. You don’t want to just start promoting anything and everything – because then you’ll lose their trust.

Promote within your niche. For example, if you have a dog niche, you won’t want to throw in some links for cookware unless it pertains specifically to the niche, such as cooking dog treats for their pet.

Some people promote cooking food for dogs. In that case, you would want to promote cookware that could be used for that. You could also promote cookbooks that have recipes for dogs.

As long as it’s related directly to your niche, then you should promote it. With the cookware, if you saw a particular type of pot being used to make one of the recipes, then you could have an Amazon affiliate link and mention that the pot used is similar or is the exact one you’re showcasing.

It can be tempting to look at the links and pick the item that has the higher price tag because you’ll get a bigger commission. But promoting more expensive items isn’t necessarily the best move.

Your commission level actually increases based on the volume of items that you sell. So even if it’s a smaller priced item, your commission percentage will increase faster because you sold more of them.

Larger and more expensive items might be harder to convert. Some of the items can be bulky and take up more space, so they don’t move as fast. Plus, people don’t always tend to buy the most expensive items that often because everyone wants a good deal.

Instead, what you want to do is look for inexpensive items that have a huge volume in sales. Let’s take the toy niche, for example. You might be eying a trampoline as a big ticket purchase – but a good example of volume sales would be something like the Fidget Spinner.

You can promote an expensive item like a trampoline and maybe end up with a handful of sales on it (let’s say 5). Or, you can promote the less expensive item – but because it sells more, you actually end up with hundreds of sales and your commission level climbs because of it.

You can even it out and have a nice mix of small commission and large commission items so that the smaller ones boost your commission level, and in turn, provide you with a higher amount of profits on the big ticket items.

You can also use the affiliate links to create lists so that you can promote multiple products at once. For example, you could create a post titled 7 Gifts for Every Dog Lover and then you choose the seven items from Amazon ranging from small ticket to big ticket items.

You can write comparison articles on your blog. This is where you list the pros and cons of whatever item it is that you’re promoting and pit it against another product.

For example, you can compare one type of treadmill to another type and then you would link to both treadmills on Amazon. There are plugins that even help you create charts for comparisons.

What some affiliate marketers do is create a resource page on their website and they have links to their own favorite products that they use. For example, someone who has a cooking niche blog might link to her favorite cookware or kitchen counter appliances.

If you’re someone who has a niche in stress relief, then you could list products that you’ve used that have helped you. It might be aromatherapy machines or even a book that taught you deep breathing.

Don’t promote items that have an excess amount of bad reviews and low ratings. If you do that just to make a commission, then your audience will realize that it’s not about you helping them but it’s about you making money regardless of what’s best for them.

FBA or Fulfillment By Amazon

Selling items on Amazon is another easy way that you can make good money online. It can be done by anyone who has the time to put into finding the right resale goods to list on Amazon.

You can do it whether you’re a young person or retirement age. It’s perfect for someone who needs a job or wants to leave their job. Once you build your inventory, you can easily earn enough to replace the income that your job brought in.

Some people picture this sort of like selling some of the stuff they have around the house. But that’s not really what FBA is all about. It’s not an eBay marketplace for used goods in most cases.

This isn’t something where you clean out your garage and list the things you don’t need anymore. What FBA is all about is finding products and inventory to sell and buying them so that you can then turn around and sell on Amazon for a profit.

Some people source products from manufacturers that they can resell on Amazon and others literally just go shopping for good deals and turn around and sell those bargains at a higher price on Amazon using FBA.

There are some instances where a particular retail store may not exist in another city or state, so you can buy good deals there and resell them to an Amazon audience who can’t get there locally.

Sometimes people don’t want to buy products by going out to the stores if it’s a personal item or it’s just too inconvenient. What you do is you go shopping at all your favorite stores.

You want to look in drug stores like Walmart, Target, BigLots and other places that have good quality items that are sold at a discount. For example, sometimes BigLots will put entire seasons of popular shows in a bin for $4.00 per season.

You buy all five seasons for $20. You then list the seasons individually or as a complete set on Amazon using FBA. You could list the show for $10 per season or $50 for the set and you’ve made your money back and then some.

You would shop stores that are having deals on products that you know are in demand on Amazon. This is especially popular at Christmastime. Not every city or town has a high end retail store.

You could shop there for clearance items and turn around and sell the items that are brand name and top end on Amazon. The steps are pretty easy. You first locate whatever it is you want to sell.

Knowing what would be a good sale item is easy, too. You can use an app such as ScanPower on your smartphone to check the price of something on Amazon. When you’re shopping, you scan whatever item you’re thinking of buying to see how it compares to what Amazon is selling the same product for.

That way, you’ll see at a glance if buying that product is going to earn you a decent profit or not. Once you have your product, you put it on your FBA site – but until Amazon receives the item form you and it’s put the warehouse, it won’t show up for sale.

Once Amazon lists it, then it’s available for people to buy. To get started, you go to Amazon and sign up. You’ll need your social security number or a tax ID number.

Understand that when you first sign up, some departments may be off limits to you until you’re established as a seller. Once you’re good to go, you’ll put a barcode on your items and then mail your products to Amazon.

They warehouse everything, so you don’t have to store stuff in your garage. Amazon handles the listing, putting your product on their site, the shipping, packaging, the payments and any returns or problems.

Their storefront is open 24/7 and all you have to do is find products, list them for sale and sit back and wait for Amazon to send you your paid your earnings. It’s a great way for people who like to shop for deals to make money on their smart savings!

Kindle Publishing on Amazon

Another way that you can make money using Amazon is by using their Kindle Publishing platform. It’s simply a book publishing platform with no up front costs and no requirements for an agent, publisher or editor.

You have to pick whether you’re going to use KDP Select or Kindle Direct Publishing. The difference is that if you choose the Select, you’re not allowed to upload your book for sale on any other site, such as Barnes and Noble.

You’re giving Amazon the exclusive right to sell it for increments of 90-day periods, at which time you can decide whether or not you want to keep it in the program.

One of the differences is that if you choose Select, your book can go into the Lending Library and you make money every time someone borrows the book. Kindle Publishing has great profit potential for anyone who wants to sell a book.

You don’t have to be a professional author and you can sell in either fiction or nonfiction. However, just because you may not be a professional writer doesn’t mean that your book shouldn’t be professional.

It’s pretty easy to put a book on Amazon. But before you do that, you want to use some tools to help make sure that it’s ready to be uploaded. You can look at your book through the Kindle Previewer tool that’s offered without charge by Amazon.

What this does is it allows you to see what your book is going to look like once you’ve uploaded it. The reason you want to use this tool is so that you can catch any glitches like spacing or weird formatting.

The Kindle Publishing program uses MOBI formatting, so you’ll need to convert your file to that format using the KindleGen tool that Amazon also provides for you – or just upload a Word document.

Once you’re ready to put the book up, you sign in, go to Create a New Title then enter the details, the content and the pricing. You’ll do this whether your book is nonfiction or fiction.

Then you set the price. Keep in mind that the amount of royalties you’ll get won’t be the 70% if your book doesn’t fall in the required price range of $2.99 to $9.99. You’ll get just 30% if it’s under $2.99.

Make sure that you put your book in the right categories, too. If you wrote a romance novel, your book might categorized as books>romance>contemporary. If it was a paranormal romance book, then the word contemporary would be the paranormal category instead of contemporary.

After you’ve done everything and uploaded it, Amazon will make the book available in a period from 12 hours to up to 3 days. While using Kindle Publishing is a great way to make money, there are some steps that you want to take to make sure that your book is successful.

You can study the top selling titles in the niche you’re publishing in to see what’s worked for them and what buyers expect. If your book is nonfiction, you need to have a good understanding of the subject matter.

If you don’t, then you need to do plenty of research before you write on the topic. The book has to be factual or something that worked for you – especially if the topic is on medical information, health, or self-improvement.

Check the length of the book. You can have it as short or as long as you want, but just make sure that people are getting their money’s worth if it’s short and if it’s long – make sure it’s concise and that you didn’t ramble on needlessly.

You’ll need to make sure the writing is of good quality so that you don’t suffer backlash in the ratings and reviews. You don’t have to be a professional writer to sell well on Amazon, but you do need to have a book that’s as error free as possible in spelling, grammar – and if it’s fiction – with coherency of the plot.

If you’re not good at editing, hire an editor. Regardless of whether or not the book is fiction or nonfiction, you need a good cover. You can outsource these pretty cheaply.

If you’re not comfortable writing the book, you can outsource that as well on sites that offer freelance writing services such as Upwork. Outsourcing your Kindle books is also a good way to quickly build a portfolio.

You can pay attention to whatever topic is trending and put out a nonfiction or fiction book based on that. Make sure you fill out your Amazon author profile, claim your book title and add selected phrases from your reviews.

You can take the profits one step further and list your books for sale in paperback form, too. Amazon has paired with CreateSpace to quickly and easily allow you to offer a print version of the book where CreateSpace and Amazon fulfill the order so that you don’t have to order copies ahead of time and possible get stuck with them.

There are many ways Amazon allows the average citizen to make money using their services. You can take advantage of trends or look to an evergreen niche and build an audience of buyers in a professional marketplace that helps you promote the products using the massive exposure they have above the retail competition.