Amazon's success almost certainly wouldn't have been possible if the company hadn't launched an affiliate program in 1996 that rewards advertisers who drive paying customers to Amazon.
Anyone can sign up for the Amazon affiliate program for free and receive a commission on the cart value of each order. The requirement is that the customer is referred via an affiliate link from Amazon.
The affiliate program works quite simply:
- One creates a free account with Amazon Associates.
- After logging into the account, you will find countless advertising materials for almost every product that Amazon has in its store.
- One creates an affiliate link that has a unique identifier of the affiliate, so that the affiliate is clearly identifiable.
- Finally, the link is embedded in a website and leads visitors from the website to the advertised products in the Amazon store.
Once the affiliate link is placed on the website, you just take care of the potential visitors, direct them to Amazon through the link and wait until someone buys something and you have earned a commission through the referral, which is transferred to your bank account once a month along with other commissions.
It is important to know that Amazon is very picky when it comes to advertising platform. So you should already have a website that has visitors at best if you want to work with Amazon as an affiliate.
You can't just pick up an Amazon promotional link and place it anywhere on the internet on other people's websites. As soon as Amazon notices that, the partnership is over, because the advertising platform has to belong to the affiliate, who is also the contractual partner.