Where do I get started?
Getting started can be easy, but it can be difficult as well, depending who's products you plan on promoting. As mentioned in the introductory post, Amazon is a good place to start as their marketplace is endless and they generally accept anyone onto their affiliate programme.
Companies that prove to be harder are the likes of Curry's PC World, Bet365 and more. These companies are very particular about who they let onto their programmes and will happily reject you if you cannot show them a website that already has plenty of traffic passing it each month. They will often decline a social media page as an acceptable method of promoting!
Enough of the bad news though, lets get back to Amazon!
To sign up to Amazon's affiliate programme you can register here. Once registered and verified you will be given you own unique code to append to any links you share. It will look something like this:
wo0e-21
Now the affiliate back-end you log into will more than likely have a place where you can generate your affiliated URL but that is a little slow to generate for each and every product so it's best to understand how these URL's are generated.
Lets take an Amazon Echo for example. We have decided we know a great place to advertise this product and think we can get plenty of people clicking through and purchasing!
Standard URL:
www.amazon.co.uk/amazon-echo-3rd-generation-smart-speaker-with-alexa/dp/B07P4DKX14
Affiliated URL
www.amazon.co.uk/amazon-echo-3rd-generation-smart-speaker-with-alexa/dp/B07P4DKX14?tag=wo0e-21
The observant ones will have noticed that I have simply appended the URL with ?tag=wo0e-21. That is all you have to do. The customer will be taken to the exact same landing page and your click will have been tracked!
Now your link is out there you can keep an eye on the back-end portal you recently logged into and track clicks and commissions.
It is as simple as that! The hard part is getting people to click...!
Please read on to find out where is best to advertise your link by clicking here
