Is The Amazon Affiliate Program Worth It For Making Money?

One of the biggest questions that comes up frequently that I get asked a lot is about the Amazon affiliate program.

Is it worth it?

Is it worth promoting products on Amazon?

Can you make money with the Amazon Affiliate program?

Well, yes, and no.

I don’t like Amazon personally, because they don’t pay enough.

Their commissions are too low.

I’ll explain in detail why later in this blog post.

Having said that, a lot of people do make money from the Amazon affiliate program, it’s my personal view that there are BETTER alternatives.

I’ll show one of those alternatives later in this article…

But the ‘elephant in the room’ question still prevails….

Is the Amazon Affiliate Program Legit?

The Amazon Affiliate Program is officially called “Amazon Associates”, but throughout this blog post, you’ll hear me refer to it as the Amazon Affiliate Program, just keep in mind, I’m talking about the same thing.

The Amazon Affiliate program is definitely legit, in fact it’s one, if not THE oldest affiliate program online.

It’s also one of the biggest on the planet.

But in my opinion, it’s not worth it in terms of the time or effort, as I’ll show you in this article.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people do very well with Amazon.

But for me, to make any decent money with Amazon, you’ve got to have a very large reach.

You need to have a lot of traffic coming to your website.

If you’re just starting out, you are going to struggle a LOT to make any money from Amazon for Months, even years before you start to see any decent returns into your Affiliate business.

That’s the cold hard truth. Amazon is TOUGH to get any traction.

Because Amazon, depending on what Category you choose to promote on Amazon, their commission, their percentage that they pay in commission is around the 5% – 12% mark.

(although Amazon has recently reduced this band even lower).

Let’s look at the facts.

This is the commission Structure from Amazon for their MOST popular categories:

As I’m in the UK, I can only view the structure for the UK Associates program, but the payout is roughly about the same wherever you are in the world.

I’ll warn you…it’s not much!

And for this example, I’m going to choose their Health & Personal care category, which as you can see pays out the princely sum of 7% commission.

So now, lets go over to the Amazon Associates Marketplace and choose a product within that category to promote.

For this example, I’m going to choose this one:

It’s very clearly a Dieting product.

It’s a 3 day Juice Cleansing diet for those who want to detoxify their body either in preparation for or during a Weight Loss diet.

And it’s received over 1,000 4 star reviews on Amazon. So you know it’s a quality product.

PRO TIP: The most important thing in Affiliate marketing is choosing QUALITY products to promote on your website or email list.

So, if you go to Amazon and you want to promote a product like this in a very popular category, it sells for $68.

If you remember from the screenshot above, Amazon pays 7% affiliate commission.

And this is almost their HIGHEST paying category. 🙁

That means, for every one of those products you sell, you’ll receive 7%.

So….

Is The Amazon Affiliate Program REALLY Worth It?

Well, let’s do some really quick “Match Box” math:

As you can see, by my calculations, if I was to promote that product, I would make approximately $4.76 for each one I sold!

That’s pathetic if you ask me and hardly worth it!!

As you can see, you’ve got to sell a lot of that product to make any sort of money.

To replace your income, you’ve got to sell about 100 of these things every week just to make a decent income, pay your expenses and a few nice things.

I’m aware of people that make money with Amazon, but in my opinion and I’ve had this conversation with them, in my opinion, it’s not worth it.

What if I told you, there were better programs to promote the same sort of things for much higher commission?

Well, that’s exactly what I’m going to show you right now.

There are other programs that you can promote that will pay you a lot more than what Amazon do.

One of the sites that I like to use is Clickbank…

In fact I LOVE Clickbank.

Clickbank is really a HUGE repository of affiliate programs with products that you can promote, in a lot of different niches.

And they pay a LOT more than what the Amazon Associates Affiliate Program pays.

If you’re in the fitness niche like I am, there’s a ton of high quality products to choose from.

There are lot’s of other Niches like pets and animals products on Clickbank.

If you like dogs, you can promote dog training products.

Wealth products, personal development products, education products.

You name it, Clickbank has got everything.

And their commission typically pays between 50% and 75% of the total product sale.

So Which Is Better…Amazon or Clickbank?

Amazon Vs Clickbank.

Let’s stick with our Amazon “Juice Cleanse” product we chose above and see if we can find a similar product to promote on clickbank.

To do this, head over to https://clickbank.com/marketplace

And from the left sidebar, you’ll notice Categories.

Select “Health & Fitness”

Then from that dropdown, click on “Diets & Weight Loss”

Once you click on this, you’ll a whole bunch of products on the right hand side.

Next SORT these by “Average Sale Price”.

And straight away, we can see a very interesting product.

See screenshot below:

Let’s look at the first result a little closer…

And this is the product:

As you can see it’s a very similar product to the product we found on Amazon.

However, this product sells for $75 and on clickbank, you’ll receive at least 50% commissions. (please note: I have no connection or affiliation with this product, I’m just using this as an example)

So that means, for every sale you make of this product as an affiliate, you’ll earn at least 50%.

Let’s do the math:

That would give you $37.50 PER sale!!

I don’t know about you, but to me that’s a better deal than the $4.76 you’d get from Amazon, promoting almost the same product, at the same price point.

This right here, is why I HATE Amazon and it’s why Amazon make so much money, they hardly reward their affiliates.

So straightaway, straight off the bat, you’ve gone from 7% commissions selling something on Amazon giving you just under $5…OR you can promote a similar product, that’s virtually the same price for 50% commissions on Clickbank and make $37.50, minimum.

It’s NO BRAINER!!

When you look at it like that, to me, when I ever get asked the question, is it worth it? Is Amazon affiliate marketing worth it?

Whenever I get asked these questions, I try to say to people, do you know what?

Yes, you can make money with the Amazon Affiliate Program, but it takes more effort than the reward is worth.

People think because Amazon is so big and the money that they make, they’re gonna make a lot of money as well.

Now the reason Amazon is so big and they make a ton of money because they keep the lion’s share.

As you can see in the real-world example above.

If I’m going to promote a product, if I’m gonna promote anything using my own time and my own dime, I’m gonna want a lot more than 7% and you should want a lot more than 7% as well.

I’ve got a free report that you can go and download and that will explain to you the way I do things.

And I can’t really speak for Amazon too much because I don’t promote Amazon products.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t promote Amazon products.

I’m not saying that at all, but what I am saying is you should consider other revenue streams.

Amazon is one revenue stream (a bad one) out of a lot of revenue streams.

A lot of revenue streams that you can make a lot more money for the time that you invest.

You can go Google and search for a lot of different ways to make money as an affiliate, but I can only speak for the way I do things.

I’ve been doing Affiliate Marketing since 2012.

That’s approximately 8 years at the time of writing this.

I know what’s worth doing, what’s not worth doing, what to stay away from and what to do, step by step.

I recommend that you download my free “Affiliate Marketing On Crack!” guide, you can get it here.

And it’s totally free, I’ll send it directly to your email inbox.

If you’ve got any other questions, you can contact me here.

I read all my emails.