The Amazon Affiliate Program is one of the easiest ways to make money online in 2021, but if you want to take part in this easy side-hustle, you need to begin by first signing up! Unlike many affiliate programs, there are not very strict requirements for signing up. In fact, you don’t even need to own your own website, as Amazon allows for social media accounts to be used to promote products as well. However, that doesn’t mean that everyone who applied automatically gets approved. You need to make sure that your platform meets their criteria.

Amazon Affiliate Program Acceptance Criteria 2021

If you are applying to be an Amazon Affiliate in 2021, you need to make sure you meet the following criteria

• All content is original and recent
• You own your website (free websites like wordpress.com qualify)
• If you are promoting through an app you created, if must follow the Mobile Application Policy.
• If you are promoting on social media, it must be either on Facebook (including open group pages and fan pages, but excluding personal pages), Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or Twitch.tv.
• The content must be open and available (no private pages or groups)
• Your content cannot be obscene. This is where people might find the most issue, as Amazon’s definition is broad, at times contradictory, and admittedly up to their discretion. However, if you are focusing on making honest, robust product reviews, this shouldn’t be an issue.

How To Start Using Amazon Affiliates

Once you’ve checked the above list to make sure your content and platform as acceptable, you need to sign up for the amazon affiliate program here. You should be approved in 12-24 hours. Now to start posting links! What you DO NOT want to do is begin spamming your social media accounts and content platforms with links that no one cares about. You are looking to add value to people’s lives by showing them where they can purchase the product that led them to your site. There are a lot of people who say things like ” please support my channel/account/business by clicking on the amazon affiliate links” but IMO that’s kind of a grey-hat tactic and I recommend only posting links when you are directing people where to purchase or check prices.

Examples of Ways to Share Amazon Affiliate Links

Just because you can’t spam doesn’t mean you can’t aggressively market towards your audience (no matter how small), here are several of the ways (this is not an exhaustive list)

• YouTube Reviews
• List Articles outlining the Best (e.g. best coolers, best mostiquto nets, best toothbrushes made from bamboo). The more niche’d down the better, especially if you are a small content creator
• Emails newsletters including links to products you have talked about
• Facebook group or fan page posts talking about products that are a really good deal
• Instagram Reviews
• Twitter accounts dedicated to markdowns
• Instagram pages dedicated to a specific niche with links to buy the products in your Link Tree

Again, this isn’t even close to the complete list, just a few ideas to get you started. If you are going to be considering using YouTube to start.

How to Create Amazon Affiliate Links

How do you create your first Amazon affiliate link? Easy! Once you have your account approved, you can go to the home page and create your first link.

Just type in the product you want under the “Quick Links” tab and it will create the link for you. You can even use this same process on mobile, although you’re going to have to resize the screen to be able to copy it. From there, you paste the links wherever you need to, and hopefully, you begin making money! The cookies (how amazon tracks a person’s account when they make a purchase) are only valid for 30 days and some people specifically don’t want Amazon to track their purchased with cookies, so you aren’t 100% guaranteed to be making money off everything they purchase for the next month, but it’s the best thing we’ve got so we might as well take advantage of it.

Final Points

• It will take a few days after the product is ordered for your affiliate commission to show up
• Clicks, Products Ordered, and Products Shipped are all tracked
• If you want to create different reporting profiles for different websites/accounts, you can do so under the same Amazon Affiliate account. It makes it easy to see which of my social media channels are performing the best and which I need to work on without the need to create multiple accounts.
• Many people see how little money you can earn from this and get discouraged, but the real value comes from the quantity of sales rather than the quality of any individual sale. You are looking to cast as wide a net as possible while still providing concrete value.

I hope this blog post was helpful! Consider subscribing to my How to Make Money Online YouTube Channel for more helpful content like this!