- Tapping into the Amazon Affiliate Program: How it Works
- Top 5 Tips to Maximize Your Amazon Earnings With Affiliate Marketing
- 1. Vet and Select Affiliate Partners Carefully
- 2. Make Your Outreach Count
- 3. Give Partners Everything They Need
- 4. Create Exclusive Affiliate Promotions
- 5. Build Long-Term Relationships With Your Affiliate Partners
- Maximizing Your Amazon Earnings With Affiliate Marketing: Key Takeaways
Last Updated on April 3, 2025 by Ewen Finser
Not generating the kind of revenue from your Amazon store that you’d hoped for?
Forming strong affiliate partnerships with online creators may be the answer.
We’ve spent a ton of time testing all of the useful tools and practical strategies designed to help you unlock a whole new marketing channel and start driving qualified buyers to your store. Maximize your success as an Amazon seller by following these top tips for making the most of affiliate marketing.
Tapping into the Amazon Affiliate Program: How it Works
The Amazon Associates affiliate program lets content creators, bloggers, and influencers earn commissions by sending buyers to products available through the company’s massive eCommerce ecosystem.
The way it works is pretty simple:
A creator produces a piece of content mentioning a specific product on Amazon. They then head to Amazon, log into their affiliate account, and visit the page for that product.
From there, they can grab a unique link to that page which they can embed in their content.
A visitor reads that content, clicks on the link, and purchases that product.
When they do, that blogger earns a commission.
You can probably already imagine why this is such a good deal for anyone selling their products on Amazon.
You don’t have to pay for expensive PPC campaigns, invest hours in extensive eCommerce SEO strategies or any of that stuff. Just connect with a creator who can send qualified traffic your way and let them take a cut of the sale.
So far, so straightforward, but if it’s really that easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?
The truth is that utilizing affiliate marketing with any degree of success still requires a fair bit of strategic planning and forward-thinking.
With that in mind, let’s dive into some key strategies to help you make the most of your affiliate partnerships.
Top 5 Tips to Maximize Your Amazon Earnings With Affiliate Marketing
1. Vet and Select Affiliate Partners Carefully
After all, a micro-influencer with 10,000 highly engaged followers in your niche can often drive more conversions than a general influencer with 10 million followers who may or may not care too much about your specific niche.
When it comes to finding affiliate partners, quality matters much more than quantity.
For example, if you’re using Amazon to sell high-end coffee brewing equipment, a smaller audience of passionate coffee aficionados is much better than a bigger audience who rarely think about the stuff outside of their usual morning brew.
So, where do you find these partners, and how exactly can you sort out the most suitable partners from those who aren’t a great fit?
The best way to do that is to use a tool like Levanta, which is an all-in-one affiliate platform designed for Amazon affiliate marketing.
Why we’re recommending Levanta to help you maximize your Amazon affiliate earnings vs using Creator Connections or other Amazon affiliate tools:
- Creator Connections only has a 24-hour attribution window, while Levanta has a 14-day attribution window
- Brands have direct access to creators and can choose who actually promotes their products, unlike Creator Connections, they do not allow that
- With Levanata, brands have full control over how much they pay creators, unlike Creator Connections, Amazon decides what a brand will pay a creator to promote your products
- Amazon views the Attribution Links (you create with Levanta) as an external traffic source (this is another organic ranking factor that improves your overall organic ranking in Amazon)
- For sales driven through that external traffic, brands can take advantage of a 10% kickback from Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus
To get started:
Head to app.levanta.io/ and opt to create a Seller account.
Next, complete the sign-up form and finish by connecting Levanta to your Amazon seller account.
Once you’re logged in, click Discover Creators.
From there, you can browse the Creator Catalogue, which is a huge directory of all the publishers and content creators signed up to the platform.
Use the filtering tools to help you find creators who are a good match for your brand and its products.
Ideally, that means looking for potential partners who:
- Have an audience that closely aligns with your target market
- Show that they consistently publish authentic, high-quality content
- Have a proven track record of driving traffic and engagement
- Show a genuine passion or expertise in your product niche.
2. Make Your Outreach Count
Now that you’ve found potential partners, it’s time to convince them to get on board.
If you’re using Levanta, you can do this by tapping on any publisher and sending them an invite.
Although you can send an invite without attaching a message, we don’t recommend it.
Seriously, as digital publishers ourselves, we’ve received our fair share of affiliate partnership pitches, and we can spot generic outreach templates a mile away. For one thing, emails that are clearly using a template rarely capture a reader’s attention.
For another, they’re nowhere near as effective as a highly personalized message that speaks directly to the brand, creator, or publisher you want to work with.
So, when you first click the invite, tap Add message to invite and craft a unique outreach message to each potential partner.
This message should:
- Show that you know the brand: Do your homework. Check out their content and mention specific posts that are best suited to your products. Right away, you’re demonstrating why the two of you are a good fit. What’s more, you’re also helping to get that creator on your side by showing you know their work.
- Prioritize value over requests: Explain to your potential affiliate partner what you can offer them, not what you want from them. Highlight how your product fills a gap in their content or could benefit their audience.
- Offer incentives: Perhaps propose a trial period where affiliates can earn higher commissions for the first 30 days of your partnership. Not only does this appeal to a creator or publisher’s sense of opportunity and reward, but it also encourages them to emphasize your products in their short-term content strategy, meaning more immediate visibility and potential sales for your brand
3. Give Partners Everything They Need
So, you nailed your outreach and you’ve now got a small army of eager affiliates enthusiastic about promoting your product.
To help them do that effectively, make sure you equip those partners with all the resources they’ll need.
If you’re working with product reviewers or social media influencers, this might mean that you provide them with a free sample of your product.
In an age of AI and the influence of Google’s influences, fake reviewers (where people pretend to have used your product for the sake of getting affiliate income from it) just won’t cut it.
Remember, consumers are savvy. It’s easy to tell when a review has been cobbled together without first-hand experience, and at best, those reviews are going to be ignored. At worst they could damage your brand’s credibility and lead to lost trust among potential customers.
By sacrificing a few units, you give your partners the opportunity to really demonstrate their experience with that product and show their audience what it’s actually like to use.
This can result in more authentic, compelling content that drives higher engagement and conversions.
If that’s not an option, then at the very least, you should be providing things like:
- High-resolution product images from multiple angles
- Detailed product specifications and key selling points
- Comparison charts with competing products
- Success stories and testimonials from satisfied customers.
And anything else that makes it easier for affiliates to create compelling content around your products. The easier it is, the more likely they are to promote them regularly, and the more they promote them, the more sales and revenue you generate.
4. Create Exclusive Affiliate Promotions
The more you dive into affiliate marketing, the more one thing becomes clear:
It’s all about personalization.
Just as tailoring your outreach message to each publisher helped convince them to get on board, tailoring your promotional offers to each individual partner can likewise make your products feel more valuable and relevant to their audience, ultimately meaning stronger engagement and more sales.
For example, in Levanta and other affiliate tools, you can set up unique deals and promo code offers exclusive to each affiliate’s audience.
Or how about creating limited-time bonuses where affiliates earn extra commissions for hitting certain sales milestones?
Whatever you decide, tailoring exclusive offers to each partner benefits everyone.
- You get a trackable code that can make it easy to determine how each affiliate is performing
- Affiliates themselves are more incentivized to promote your product
- Audiences have a compelling reason to make a purchase via special offer.
It’s a win-win-win.
5. Build Long-Term Relationships With Your Affiliate Partners
Here’s an important point to keep in mind:
You’re not the only seller out there encouraging content creators to promote products for them. Big publishers especially are deluged with offers for affiliate deals and other types of promotional content, though even micro-influencers receive more than their fair share of invites.
The reason we mention this is simple:
If you don’t build long-term relationships with your affiliates based on mutual loyalty, you risk them forgetting about you or simply moving on to another offer.
Sure, links on existing content are still there, but if they stop producing new content about your products, sales will stagnate and revenue generated will eventually dry up.
With that in mind, take steps to grow those relationships, such as:
Incentivizing Top Earners
Use the reporting features on Levanta or your tool of choice to determine which affiliates are driving the most traffic and reward your top performers with higher commission rates or exclusive product launches.
Making these rewards public, such as through an email newsletter, can further incentivize creators to promote more as partners push to get the recognition and exclusive perks of being a top affiliate.
Keeping in Touch
Speaking of email, stay in regular contact with your affiliates through updates about new products, promotions, or commission changes. This offers a number of benefits.
First of all, your partners are regularly informed of new products and opportunities to earn commission revenue from your products.
Second of all, it helps to strengthen relationships and shows that you’re actively supporting your affiliates’ success.
Finally, it helps those creators produce timely, relevant content based on the latest updates from your brand.
Supporting Content Creation
Make yourself available. Offer to work directly with affiliates to develop high-converting content tailored to their specific audience.
Although that content should definitely be based on the creator’s experience and perspective, you can still offer suggestions on the kind of key messages that should be included to best meet audiences’ needs.
Build a community
Run regular webinars or Q&A sessions where affiliates can ask detailed questions and get hands-on guidance on the best way to promote your products.
This not only allows you to provide valuable support to your partners, but also fosters a sense of community, and that can go a long way in bolstering loyalty as affiliates feel more connected to -and, ultimately, invested in- your brand.
Maximizing Your Amazon Earnings With Affiliate Marketing: Key Takeaways
If you followed this guide from start to finish, you’ve now got a simple step-by-step strategy for making the most of affiliate partnerships as a profitable marketing channel for your Amazon seller business.
While each step contains a lot to think about, the key to success ultimately comes down to key factors:
Treat your affiliates like real partners –
Whether you’re crafting a personalized outreach email or tailoring promotional offers to the audience of each publisher you’re partnered with,nurturing strong, collaborative relationships with affiliates helps to ensure they feel valued and motivated, leading to higher engagement and better performance in promoting your products.
Use tools to simplify, streamline, and strengthen the process
From finding the right partners to managing your campaigns and tracking their results, affiliate marketing platforms like Levanta can serve as a useful tool to help you work more efficiently and effectively.
Decided Levanta isn’t right for you? Check out our recommended alternatives in our guide to the best affiliate platforms for Amazon sellers.