I received my first Google Adsense check in November 2009. To top it off, I also received an Amazon check in the same month. Two checks in the same month. I’d have to say that November 2009 was indeed a good month for me, in terms of my online business venture. A number of people have asked me how do I get the check from Amazon. I promised them that I’d post about it in here.
So, to those of you who requested, this is how you can get Amazon to send you a check.
Register As An Amazon Associate
First and foremost, you need to register as an Amazon Associate. Head on over to the Amazon Associates website and register yourself as an associate by clicking on the “Join Now for FREE” button. Don’t worry. It’s F.R.E.E.
The only way to get Amazon to send you a check is by referring their products to others. When someone buys an Amazon product by clicking on your affiliate link (a link containing your Amazon Associate-ID), you get a commission from that Amazon sale. You get a check when your commission accumulates to a minimum of USD100.
Link To Amazon Products Manually
To effectively accumulate Amazon commissions, you will need a proper website of your own. Do you have a blog? If you do, you can create links to Amazon products in your blog posts. If you noticed, I’ve got quite a number of links to Amazon products on various posts in this blog.
Here is an example, the following link will take you to a book on Amazon titled “Make a Fortune Promoting Other People’s Stuff Online: How Affiliate Marketing Can Make You Rich (Paperback)“.
To create a link as above, you first need to have the url as follows:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0071478132/kodeexiinet-20
The link above contains two important entities:
- ASIN Number – The ASIN Number of the product you are refering to. In the above sample, it is the number after the /ASIN/ part of the url – 0071478132 in above example.
- Your Associate-ID – This is your Amazon Associate ID. kodeexiinet-20 in the above example. This tells Amazon to credit your account with commission if a sale is made from visitors that click on your link.
Amazon has created a tool to verify that your link is valid. If you are ever in doubt about your links, you can use Amazon Link Checker to verify.
Where can you find the ASIN Number?
The ASIN Number is displayed for every product on Amazon at the product details section. If you are promoting books on Amazon, then the ASIN Number is the ISBN-10 number for the book. The following two images shows you where you can find the ASIN Number from the Product Details section.
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Amazon’s Link To This Page Utility
Amazon’s “Link to this page” is a utility provided by Amazon to help you create links to any Amazon web page automatically. It’s an excellent utility for you if you want to quickly generate a referral link to a page in Amazon.
Just click on the “Link to this page” button at the top of any Amazon web page. Follow the steps provided in the shown screen and you will have a html script that you can then copy and paste into your blog or web site.
Using the Link to this page tool, you can create referrals like the one you see over on the right side of this post. That’s Ewen Chia’s book on how he made his first million on the Internet. It’s a good reference if you are just starting up in Internet Marketing. I use it as a reference in my marketing journey too.
Choosing An Amazon Product To Promote
One of the most important factor to succeed as an Amazon Associate is the product you choose to promote on your blog or website. Seriously, you can’t just go and promote any product from the millions available in Amazon. If you want to be successful, you need to choose your product wisely.
The best products to promote are the ones related to the topic you are posting about in your blog or website. As you can see, in this particular blog post, I am promoting products related to Internet Marketing – specifically Affiliate Marketing.
Relevancy is the keyword here. You stand a better chance of making a sale if the product is relevant to the content on the page. Don’t be promoting toys for toddlers if your page is about Internet Marketing (like what I just did here). This will not get you much, if any, sale.
Go Do It Now!
Alright now. That’s the first few steps you need to do in order to get a check from Amazon. Indeed, there are a plethora of other ways to make commissions from Amazon. However, I recommend that you go and do the steps I’ve covered above first, before dwelling into other advance methods.
I’ll cover the other advance methods in another post in here.
Let’s recap the steps you should do right after reading this.
- Create a blog if you don’t have one
- Register as an Amazon Associate
- Find Amazon products relevant to your blog topics
- Generate the Amazon product link
- Put the links into your blog posts.
Once again, if you really are interested to be successful in online business, here are some good reference books on the subject that I recommend.
Go grab them now!
Note: Making money from Amazon is a long term project. Do not expect to get your first check in the first few months or perhaps first six months.
I made my first check after almost one year of promoting Amazon products. The second check took me 3 months. From then on, it’s a monthly paycheck without doing much. Just update your website with new articles every now and then.
Don’t let the above statement discourage you from doing it though. Start building your links in your posts now. You will start to accumulate more Amazon commissions as your blog or website start gaining traffic and visitors. Work hard now, reap the rewards in the future on autopilot.
If you want fast rewards.. Try the local Sports Toto or Lottery.