A Great Tool for Amazon Affiliates

If you are using a Wordpress site to promote Amazon products, you may want to consider using the Easy Azon Wordpress plugin. It is relatively cheap and can save you a lot of time.

Basically, Easy Azon allows you to search for Amazon products, get your affiliate link, and put the link on your site, all without leaving the Wordpress dashboard. No more switching between Amazon and your Dashboard and clicking around on Amazon to get your link. As you can see, this plugin can save you a lot of time.

Read a more in-depth review of Easy Azon right here.

Building Your Store

Fresh Store Builder Does Everything For You

Once you have chosen your niche, building your store is easy.  Just follow these steps:

1. Buy a domain name.
• If this is your first site, simply utilize the free domain you get when buying a Bluehost hosting account.  This will simplify matters as you do not have to point your domain to your hosting.
• If you buy a domain name from Godaddy, you need to change the nameservers so that it points to your Bluehost account.  This is easy.  In Godaddy, click on account, go to your domain, find the option that allows you to change the nameservers and change them to: 
ns1.BlueHost.com
ns2.BlueHost.com
2. Buy hosting.
• Bluehost is the best all-around host; you can't go wrong with it.  Buy the cheapest hosting plan, $4.95 a month.  
3. Purchase Fresh Store Builder.
• The Fresh Store Builder site has instructions on installing the Builder on your site.  The quick-and-dirty is that you download the Builder file, upload it into the File Manager of your site (found in the control panel when you log into Bluehost), and then unzip the file.
4. Build your site.
• Once you have installed Fresh Store Builder, go to your site's URL and follow the instructions. Use the Quick Setup process to make categories and populate your site with Amazon products.  This should only take you an hour or two, after which your site will be ready for customers.

Finding Your Niche

Niches

Niche research and marketing is the most important part of this endeavor.  The niche is where you will be making your mark, it is area in which you choose to market a subset of products.  It is the topic of your website and the general focus of all your products.  You want your niche to be popular but low on competitors.  This guide will help you find your niche.

Thinking small

Your website can't sell everything.  Amazon already does that; they've cornered the coveted Everything niche.  You want to corner your niche.  You want your website to be the first result on Google anytime someone Google's your niche.

So, say you like backpacking in the wilderness (instead of sitting at your computer, like me).  So you wonder, is backpacking a good niche?  No, it is not.  It is too big.  You have to think smaller.  Well, what about backpacking tents?  That is a good start, but maybe you can go even smaller.  "Backpacking tents" is already a crowded area in Google.   I've got it, you say, how about cold-weather backpacking tents?  That's perfect.  That is a good niche.  A certain subset of the subset of the subset of people who want to go backpacking will Google something like "good cold-weather backpacking tents," and they will find your site, and they will go on it, and they will buy something.

If you want to market for other backpacking supplies, make more websites.  One for warm-weather backpacking tents, a couple more for sleeping bags, one for stoves, one for dried food, one for those extendable walking sticks, whatever you want!  I know, it sounds counter-intuitive.  All these things could be on one website, but those websites already exist.  Just Google "backpacking supplies" and look at all the entrenched websites you would have to compete with for space.  It seems counter-intuitive, but that is how niche marketing works.  And believe me, niche marketing works.

Niche Research

Once you've thought up an idea for a niche, you need to do some research to see if your idea is actually a good one.  Your main focus will be on competition and how many people search for that niche every day.  This is alternatively called keyword research, because you are researching the keywords people use on Google to search for things in your niche. This can be a complex process, but there are products out there that simplify it.

Personally, I use Market Samurai.  You can buy it here: marketsamurai.com.  It costs $149, which is pricey, but it is goddamned powerful, and nearly invaluable   And its leading competitor costs $249, so it seems like that product area is just a little inflated.

You don't need Market Samurai; you can do the research yourself using Google keyword analysis.  I've never done it that way and I don't really know how.

Market Samurai is a little imposing when you look at it, so I'll put some links to tutorial videos to help you out:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVjTUPpNi80

And here is a video on keyword research in general, to help you wrap your head around the process:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gv83xCvH1U&list=PL66297AA0978B6191&index=5&feature=plpp_video

Essentials

Your Tools

1) An Amazon Affiliate Account

You can sign up for one right now.  It is completely free.  Simply visit this site: 

https://affiliateprogram.amazon.com/gp/associates/network/main.html

2) A Domain Name

A domain name is the address of your site.  It is what everyone has to type into the address bar to visit your online store.  The domain name is not to be rushed into.  You should decide your domain name after you decide what you want to sell, and what you want your store to be called.  The domain name should, of course, be related to what you are selling.  It should also be easy to remember and not too long.

Domain names can be bought separate from hosting, or together as a package.  I recommend the latter, if this is your first site.

To buy separate domain names, I recommend Godaddy.com 

For a hosting and a domain name, I recommend Bluehost.com

3) Hosting

A web host is where you put your site; it is where you upload all your files and pictures.  It is the server in which your site lives.  Web hosting usually costs around $8 a month, in some places $4 a month.  Cost depends on how big your site is and how many people visit it each month.  Web hosting sites usually have different cost structures depending on how much hard drive space you want.  In our case, the lowest or mid-range plan will work just fine.

For hosting, I recommend Bluehost.com.  They are the most popular hosting company, and one of the most reliable.  It will cost you only $4.95 a month.

4) Fresh Store Builder

Fresh Store Builder is a product that I used to make my Amazon Affiliate sites for me.  It is cheap relative to the time I saved learning how to build sites from scratch.  With Fresh Store Builder, you won't need to know HTML or CSS, and you can make as many stores as you want.  This is a real time saver.  I had five stores running in my first month, and now I have eleven.  The sites were built for me in minutes, so I had more time to advertise my sites and get them ranked on Google.

You can buy Fresh Store Builder at Freshstorebuilder.com.

That's all the things.  You don't need any more things.

For every site you build, you will, of course, need another domain name and another hosting plan.  This seems like it costs a lot of money, but you will make it back with successful stores.  The domains cost $12 each per year, the hosting plans cost $120 each for the first two years, and Fresh Store Builder costs around $60 (I don't remember exactly how much it costs, it has been a while).  That is almost $200 to get your first site up and running.  But think about this: my least successful store right now made $230 last month, and my most successful store made $4,220 last month!  So these are powerful tools, and they pay for themselves.

Getting Started

What Does it Mean to be an Amazon Affiliate

Amazon affiliates are people who promote Amazon products and earn commissions any time a product is purchased from Amazon using their affiliate link.  An example might be a blogger who puts Affiliate links in
her blog posts that her readers click on, taking them to related products on Amazon.

Why You Should Become an Amazon Affiliate

Many people use Amazon as their exclusive means of earning income.  Others supplement their income with Amazon Affiliates.  The bottom line is that becoming an Amazon Affiliate is an effective way of earning a living, provided that you put the work into it.

The good news is that making a living off of Amazon Affiliates is not very difficult.  It takes dedication at the start, but once your business is up and running, you don't have to touch it.  Amazon takes care of everything for you.  They process the purchases, ship the products, and then mail you a check.  This is called passive income.  Imagine making money while you are on vacation, or just sitting at home watching TV.  Once you have a website that gets traffic and promotes Amazon products, the process is streamlined and automated so that you do not have to do anything else.

So ask yourself what your goals are.  Do you want to quit your job and live off of a passive internet income? Or maybe you just want a second income stream, so that you can have some financial security, like a second job that runs itself?  Either way, this website can help you.

What This Website Will Teach You

This website will not help you build a blog and promote Amazon products to your readers.  That is not a passive income.

This website will help you build a standalone website, an affiliate store, that caters to certain niche customers.  More specifically, this website will guide you through the process of choosing a niche market, building a website that promotes products in that niche, and getting traffic to that website through Google.  If you follow the guide, you will have a website that generates true passive income, and you can just sit back and relax.