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In order to make money from the Amazon Associates program, you need to ensure that a click on an Amazon Associates Affiliate Link you’ve placed on your site will ultimately lead to advertising fees.

To do this, you just need to make sure your Affiliate Links are properly mapped. Plus, to increase the chances of conversion, you need to follow some guidelines for creating suitable high-quality content. Here, we provide an overview of these issues to ensure your site has a better chance of converting the visitors to your site into paying customers on Amazon. In this article, you will lean how to properly create Affiliate Links to earn advertising fees, about what kind of content helps with conversion, and some suggestions for improving your articles.

For a smooth allocation of advertising fees from Amazon, and to keep track of orders that have been directed to Amazon via your Affiliate Link, it is essential that the link includes your Tracking ID. This is the only way to ensure that an intial click on your link, as well as any subsequent order that may follow, can be properly assigned to you.

We strongly recommend that, when it comes to creating Affiliate Links, you use the tools provided by Amazon Associates program. If you use Amazon’s SiteStripe to create your Affiliate links – and when using promotional tools, such as banners or widgets, from Amazon Associates – there will be no problems, because your Tracking IDs are automatically included.

The same applies when using Amazon Associates Link Builder, Amazon’s official WordPress plug-in. This has the added advantage of enabling you to check your prepared Affiliate Link for possible failures with the help of the included Link Checker. However, there are other prerequisites that must be fulfilled so that a click on your Affiliate Link can lead to advertising fees.

For all orders placed by a visitor of your website via an Affiliate Link at Amazon.com, or placed in a Shopping Cart within 24 hours, you will earn advertising fees. This applies as long as the Shopping Cart does not expire (which usually happens after a period of 90 days) and the order is completed by the customer.

The 24-hour window opened by your Affiliate Link will close as soon as the customer has completed his order, or clicks on the Affiliate Link of a competitor. As soon as this window closes, you will not earn any further advertising fees from subsequent purchases. When the customer once again reaches one of your Affiliate Links to Amazon.com, a new 24-hour window opens.

If you find your site is generating a high number of clicks but these are only leading to a few orders – a low conversion rate – there are several factors which usually play a role in this. Many of these come down to your customers’ degree of trust in your understanding of the product you’re advertising. So, for example, if you advertise a product on your website but there’s no mention of it elsewhere in your reviews, this won’t escape your visitors’ attention. The obvious lack of familiarity with a product will most likely have a negative effect on your orders.

In addition to inadequate product descriptions, you should also make sure you don’t list inaccurate product information: eg, about the materials, sizes, colors and possible applications that the product advertised on your website is suitable for. Your audience will know that there are details which you can only know if you have first-hand experience of the product. You should, therefore, only really post Affiliate Links for products which you’ve worked with and extensively checked beforehand.

You should also be certain to avoid only mentioning the positive attributes of a product. If you do, you’ll be in danger of presenting an idealized view of it; whereas if you mention some negative properties and include them in your product description, your opinion will be more trustworthy and authoritative. After all, a glowing product rating on your website followed by a series of poor customer reviews on the same product on the Amazon website creates a contradiction, and increases the likelihood of an order being dropped by a website visitor.

Many visitors also prefer to take advantage of free shipping through the Amazon Prime service and usually only order products that have the Prime logo, or for which no shipping charges are incurred. If you mainly advertise products that are not available via Prime, this can be another reason for high click-through levels which ultimately lead to just a handful of orders.

Finally, if your website is not always up-to-date, other problems may arise. It’s possible that products are no longer available, or have been replaced by an updated model with different applications, features, dimensions and other product characteristics deviating from the originally advertised product. It’s best to regularly ensure all products you link to are available and your information is up-to-date.

As we said, ideally, you should have practical experience of all the products advertised on your website and have expertise about what you’re writing about. You should also choose a topic for your website which you know inside out, or at least very well. Visitors will quickly evaluate whether you’re truly familiar with a topic and will also spot if your website is merely repurposing existing content from the internet in a revised form. If the content on your website offers a real added value and if you can also provide your visitors with appropriate product recommendations, the chances are this will have a positive effect on your sales.

For example, if you’re the owner of a website focusing on slimming and weight reduction, then the best chance of success is to place your Affiliate Link for a set of scales within a well-written and well-informed article on the topic. It’s important not to just automatically select the best, market-leading set of scales, but to link to a more economical model that will still fit in with the aims of your visitors, or to focus on a model that will help them determine their bodyweight easily and accurately, with the minimum of fuss.

To match your links to your articles, first find out what bestsellers you can find on Amazon and whether you’ve already dealt with them in any of the articles on your website. You should always keep an eye on new trends and keep your content up-to-date. Also, keep an eye on Amazon Associates Reports. Perhaps your visitors are going on to order a particular product or category of products which doesn’t fit directly with the main theme of your website? Use the information about what your visitors are ordering to create a new website category.

Many visitors to your site are searching the internet for solutions to an individual problem. In the example above, they want to know how to lose weight quickly and easily. Answer their questions with your content: write a ‘how to’ guide, recommending a suitable dietary program to control bodyweight, and expand your content, for example, by mentioning sports products, perhaps in the home-gym equipment category.

So-called ‘WH’ (WHy, HoW) question tools such as HyperSuggest or Answerthepublic also help you to find out which questions are of relevance to your audience, or which questions are asked based on a specific term in a search engine such as Google. These tools are based on the results Google and other search engines suggest when answering a search term. By using them, you can easily find out which questions are relevant to a specific keyword. Tools like these can be a great help when compiling articles that are highly informative, targeted and relevant to your visitors’ interests.