My journey to unlocking Amazon Affiliates

Affiliate programs are amazing. All you have to do is point people to someone else’s amazing product and bam, you get a share of the cut. Many sites have affiliate programs, more than you would probably think. One of the behemoths in this space? Amazon. Amazon has such a wide variety of items to recommend as well as a solid and trustworthy reputation that it’s rather easy to get people to buy off Amazon.

The application is straightforward. When you sign up for an affiliate account it will ask you some simple questions:

The only free response question is how you describe your website. This is important, but don’t lie because the folks who check will go to your website and find out for themselves.

Once you’ve completed your application, you have to wait for it to be processed. It will not be processed immediately. You must make 3 qualified sales in order to get your application reviewed.

I was amped when I reached the front page:

Nothing beats the feeling of making it to the top of HN and watching the visitors pour into your site.

I was ready to make that sweet, sweet cash. I had been on my own for a couple months at this point and hadn’t made a single dollar. I quickly realized, based on the analytics, that I was likely to get quite a few referrals.

The Amazon Affiliate website only updates their analytics once every 24 hours, but that didn’t stop me from refreshing the page every 5 minutes.

Finally the results came in and I had made ~$300 in one day with a great conversion rate. The next day I realized I had to update my application to my new site and describe what it did.

I waited anxiously for my application to be reviewed. You can probably guess what happened next or else I wouldn’t be writing this article.

WHAT!

Yes, they had reviewed my old application and had checked out lensradar.com, which never existed.

And as quick as I had signed up for an account, it was gone. I couldn’t sign into it; I couldn’t see my previous analytics.

I immediately created a new account and complained to support. They understood the issue and said they’d re-submit it with a note attached. The next day I received an email saying that it was impossible to review closed applications and that I’d have to start over.

This was one of the most de-motivating experiences while working on ThingsOnReddit.

There had been a few comments on HN and IndieHackers questioning whether or not I’d be accepted into the program.

In response, I added a blog to my site and posted a few interesting tidbits that I had learned from doing this exercise. For example, did you know that one of the most popular books mentioned on /r/Christianity is “God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships”

It took me longer to get my application reviewed as the traffic to my site was starting to plummet. When I did finally make the cutoff, this is what I got:

Not enough unique content. Hard not to get a little disenchanted at this point.

So the third time around, I did finally get my approval. Over a month and half later. Applying to Amazon Associates program is very much a black box, and I cannot say what did or didn’t get me accepted, however I’ll go over the changes I made to my site, and the wording I used in my application. Hopefully you can use that as a data point for building your own Affiliate website.

I first buckled down and created some original content. I didn’t create a lot, but I did write reviews for some popular items that I either had bought myself or had read the Reddit comments to gather some insight on it. My landing page then featured those things with their custom reviews

The initial version of the site aggressively linked users to Amazon.com. I significantly changed the way the flow worked so that users would stay on the site longer and only be directed to Amazon if they explicitly wanted to. The thought process was: users (and the Amazon reviewer) would be more likely to see the comments from other Redditors about the product, adding value and original content to the site.

Before

After

The “View on Amazon” is now much more subtle.

I added more posts this time; I had only 1 post when my second application was submitted. I’d recommend to anyone trying to get approved to include a blog. The Amazon Affiliate program resource center has articles titled “Five reasons to start a blog,” which indicates to me that this can only help your application.

Throughout this entire process, I had seen multiple sites that seemingly did the same thing as me and had gotten approved. I wished I knew what they wrote in their application. To those trying to get approved, here’s what I wrote:

To recap, I’ll list out some of the lessons I learned going through this whole process.

Now that I’m approved to start making money via Amazon Affiliates, I’ve made my first $11. I’m focused on getting users to the site. I’m receiving about 10–15 visitors a day, and slowly increasing traffic.

I’m working on improving my Google search ranking so that when someone Googles “best reddit X” my site will come up on the first page. Here’s my search console graph for my page ranking on Google:

Good luck, and hope you get approved!

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