Our rules for success

We've seen our fair share of Amazon affiliate marketing sites, and from that we've seen what works and what doesn't. From our own experiences, we've come up with the following rules that need to be front of mind as you build your affiliate marketing empire:

• Focus on the problems/needs of your audience first and foremost. Do not start by looking at the different commission rates that Amazon pays depending on the product category. Your role as an affiliate marketer is to genuinely help your audience address the pain points in their life, which is not at all alleviated by getting a fatter commission for flogging a product that's completely irrelevant to the needs of your audience.
• Ideally, you should only ever promote products you have actually used. Now of course this might not always be possible, but you at least need to have comprehensive knowledge of any product you promote so you can confidently recommend it to your audience, and highlight any quirks about it that you wouldn't find in its promotional material.
• Even though it's not your product, you should actually treat it as if it were your own. Again, from the perspective of your audience you are an expert on the product you're promoting. So you not only need to be very familiar with it, but you need to use that knowledge to help your audience understand how they stand to benefit from purchasing it.
• We'll repeat it again... TRUST IS KING IN THE WORLD OF AFFILIATE MARKETING!!!!!!!!!! The internet can smell bullshit from a mile away! Your reputation is on the line if you are not honest or transparent to your audience in any way! It may also be a legal requirement in your country to disclose that you'll be earning a commission from the links or checkout codes in your content, which you'll see examples of later on in the training material.
• You should consider the commissions you earn as a measure of how helpful you are being. All of the content you produce should always come from a place of serving your audience, which they will keep coming back for again and again. Coming from a place of trying to make a quick buck will never work!
• Look for opportunities to differentiate your content from everyone else. For example, if there are lots of blog posts about your product but not that many good video reviews of it (or those video reviews may be missing vital points about the product), it’ll absolutely be worth doing a video review.

tip

If some of these don't seem entirely clear right now, that's ok! You'll see how these rules apply in a practical sense as you continue on with the training.