Amazon’s affiliate program, known as Amazon Associates, is one of the most popular affiliate programs in the world & it’s the program that we recommend for all beginners.
By becoming an affiliate of Amazon & joining their program, you can earn commissions by recommending products or services from their website.
So to help you get started in doing that, we’ve put this step-by-step guide together, which explains how to join the Amazon affiliate program.
We’ll dive into it in just a moment, but first, let’s run through the requirements to join the Amazon affiliate program to make sure you’re actually eligible to apply.
Amazon Affiliate Program Requirements
The good news is that Amazon doesn’t have a huge list of requirements. To join the Amazon affiliate program, here are the requirements:
- You must have published at least 10 pieces of content (such as blog posts)
- Your content must be recent (you must have published new content within the last 60 days)
- You must be able to prove that you add value to the sales process (by providing high-quality how-to guides or product reviews, etc.)
- You must drive at least 3 qualifying sales within the first 180 days of approval to remain active
In short, Amazon looks to approve content creators who already have an audience & who publish high-quality, helpful content.
An example of an affiliate that would get approval into the Amazon affiliate program would be a YouTuber that publishes high-quality, regular how-to videos.
Or alternatively, a blogger that regularly buys products & writes in-depth, helpful reviews on them.
What Amazon doesn’t want are people who are just looking to join their program with the intention of spamming their affiliate links on social media or sending them to friends in private messages, etc.
So if that’s you, we’d recommend holding off applying & instead, starting a blog or building a website first.
But if you’re good to go, let’s take a look at how to actually join the Amazon Associates program.
How To Join The Amazon Affiliate Program
Joining the Amazon affiliate program is really simple & the application takes around 5 minutes to complete.
To begin with, you need to start by visiting the Amazon Associates website for the region that you’d like to promote products in.
For example, if you wish to promote Amazon products in the USA, you would need to join Amazon Associates USA.
Similarly, if you wish to promote in the UK, you’d need to join Amazon Associates UK.
As those 2 are the most popular versions of Amazon Associates, I will provide the links below:
Upon visiting the Amazon Associates homepage, you’ll then need to hit the big button that says “Sign Up”.
From there, here are the steps you’ll need to follow:
Step 1: Create Your Amazon Associates Account
The first thing you’ll need to do is simply create your Amazon Associates account. If you already have an Amazon account, you’ll be able to choose that from the list.
If you don’t have an Amazon account, they’ll require a name, email address & postal address.
Step 2: Add Your Website or Mobile Apps
If you’re going to be promoting Amazon products or services through a website or mobile app that you’ve created, you’ll need to tell Amazon about them in this step.
Step 3: Choose Your Associates Store ID
In this step, you’ll need to create an Associates Store ID. This is the ID that’ll be contained in your affiliate links & usually, this would be the same as your website name.
Step 4: Add Details About Your Traffic Sources
You must tell Amazon exactly how you plan on generating traffic to your links.
For example, if you plan on promoting via social media, then you will need to provide details of your social media account.
If you have a blog or plan to promote via a website, you will choose the “SEO” option. This stands for search engine optimisation & means that the majority of your visitors will be arriving from search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing.
Step 5: Submit Your Application & Await Approval
After entering your details & the details of how you plan on generating traffic to your Amazon affiliate links, the final step will be to submit your application.
Once approved, you will be able to login to the Amazon Associates dashboard & get access to your affiliate links to begin promoting.
Can You Join The Amazon Affiliate Program Without A Website?
Yes, it’s possible to become an Amazon Associate & join the Amazon affiliate program without having a website. However, it’s not a good idea.
In fact, in another blog post, we explain why you should never do affiliate marketing without a website.
You see, even if you’re able to generate traffic from other sources such as YouTube or Instagram, a website could help you make so much more money.
The reason for that is that it can act as a centralized hub for all of your promotions.
So the ideal way to do affiliate marketing is to promote products/services via content on your website, then use your other sources of traffic (YouTube, Instagram, etc.) to feed through to your website.
Just like how you see many people promoting via a Linktree page, having a website is essentially like having a Linktree page on steroids.
How To Get Amazon Affiliate Links
Once you’ve been approved into the Amazon Associates program, the next step to start earning commissions is to get your Amazon affiliate links & start promoting them.
To generate Amazon affiliate links, simply login to your Amazon Associates dashboard & then navigate to “Product Linking” -> “Product Links”.
That will take you to a page that looks like this:
From that page, you can create Amazon affiliate links.
You can either link to favourite destinations from the first screen, or you can change the tab to link to search results or link to any page.
If you click “Link to Any Page”, you’ll be able to paste a link to any Amazon product, give it a title & generate a unique affiliate link to promote it in return for commissions.
The Bottom Line
As you can now see, joining the Amazon affiliate program & creating Amazon affiliate links is easy stuff.
The more difficult part is generating traffic to send through to your affiliate links & making sales so that you can actually start earning money.
But thankfully, we’ve got you covered.
In our free step-by-step affiliate marketing course, we teach you exactly how you can begin making money with the Amazon affiliate program.
So if you haven’t yet done so, we highly recommend signing up for our free training before you leave.
But whatever you do, we hope that this guide to joining the Amazon affiliate program helped you out & of course, if you happen to have any additional questions or comments, feel free to leave them below.
