Nine months ago, I started my blog Native Mommy Lawyer. Every month, I share an update to document the first year of my blogging journey. This month, I am super happy to share that I made my very first Amazon affiliate sales! It’s very exciting because I thought it would never happen.
My journey to getting my first Amazon affiliate sales is probably similar to a lot of newbie bloggers. I signed up as an Amazon affiliate way too early and didn’t make the 3 qualified sales within 6 months. Therefore, my account was denied. When this happened, I remember feeling like the biggest blogging failure.
Fortunately, I did not give up and decided to keep trying. The turning point for me was letting my site and articles age so that they started ranking on Google. Once I started to see Google organic clicks, Amazon clicks and sales started to happen.
So, I hope you enjoy this article about my journey to Amazon affiliate sales! If you want to read more about my blogging journey, I’ve linked my past monthly updates below.
- Finding new content ideas after eight months of blogging
- Weathering a storm after seven months of blogging
- Trying new tools after six months of blogging
- Blogging for five months, update on the journey
- How to avoid writing burnout early on in blogging
- How to stay motivated after blogging for three months
- Newbie blogger mistakes I made after two months of blogging
- Ups and downs in the first month of blogging
Don’t sign up as an Amazon affiliate immediately
The biggest mistake I made was signing up as an Amazon affiliate too early. Amazon will reject your application if you don’t make the minimum qualified sales within 180 days. (Source)
Against the advice of other bloggers, I signed up within the first week of launching my blog as I figured that 6 months was enough time to make 3 qualified sales. I was absolutely wrong! Some bloggers even wait up to a year to sign up as an Amazon affiliate.
As that 180-day mark came to a close, I had not even made one qualified sale and Amazon swiftly rejected my application. This experience was disheartening and discouraging because I didn’t know what I was doing wrong and why I wasn’t getting sales.
After sulking and feeling like a failure for a few days, I decided to re-apply as an Amazon affiliate and started going through my articles to update links. This process took a few days and was very humbling.
My advice is to wait at least 6 months after you launch your blog to apply as an Amazon affiliate. Although you may get lucky early on, chances are that you won’t see any Amazon affiliate sales until you’re many months into your journey.
Read other Amazon affiliate blogs
When I first started placing Amazon affiliate links in my articles, I had no clue what I was doing. I didn’t know the first thing about promoting and marketing products.
The thing that helped me the most was reading other Amazon affiliate blogs, especially newer blogs. There’s a Reddit community where individuals go specifically to promote their blogs, so I would scroll through that subreddit and click on blog articles to read.
Reading other Amazon affiliate blogs taught me about ad placement, how to promote products without sounding too clickbaity, types of products to promote, and the various ad types that were available to me. Once I was able to see how other bloggers were promoting products, I was able to implement some of those ideas on my own blog.
Promote different types of Amazon affiliate ads
During the first six months as an Amazon affiliate, ie. those six months where I didn’t make any sales, I literally did not know about the different types of Amazon affiliate ads.
In the beginning, I used image-only direct product links on all of my articles. As I was redoing the Amazon links on my 65 or so articles, I started experimenting with different types of ad links, including text and image product links, Native recommendation ads, and Native search ads. Since I had to update all of the links anyway, I thought I would spice it up a little.
The Amazon affiliate dashboard also offers custom ads, banners, mobile popover, and links to specific pages.
Once you start making Amazon affiliate sales, you can start to analyze what works best for your site. Are your readers only clicking on specific types of ads? What ad placement works best for clicks? What products are you selling the most? Doing this analysis will definitely help with Amazon affiliate sales in the future.
Let your articles age and rank
Article age and Google rank are huge factors in making Amazon affiliate sales. If your article is not within the first four positions on Google, there’s a low probability that someone is going to click on your article, much less click on an Amazon link within that article. (Source)
Most of my Google organic traffic is driven by articles that are within the first four positions on Google. I definitely have many articles that don’t rank in those positions and I hardly ever see any clicks on those posts.
Once one of my Amazon affiliate articles ranked number one for its keyword this month, the clicks and sales started to come in. Currently, all of my Amazon affiliate sales are from that one article and this is an article that I wrote 8 months ago. So, it definitely takes time for articles to age and rank on new blogs.
Final thoughts on Amazon affiliate sales
Technically, nine months into blogging, I’m still at the beginning of my Amazon affiliate sales journey. This is the first month where I’ve seen actual sales and it took nine months to get here!
Thankfully, I made enough qualified sales this month for Amazon to approve my application, so gone are the days of worrying about getting enough qualified sales within 180 days.
If you’re like me and your application was rejected for not reaching qualified sales, don’t be afraid to get up and try again. Let me tell you, I even had doubts about getting qualified sales within my second application period, but I’m so glad I went for it anyway.
Throughout these nine months of blogging, what rings true for me is consistency, consistency, consistency. As long as you keep doing it, you will eventually see results.