Hello Wealth Builders!
Once again, I want to thank you for taking your time to visit our community. My hope is that this article serves well in adding value to your life.
Today’s article will focus on different ways to make money on Amazon just by using your computer.
Friends, Meet Amazon.com
The humble beginnings
Amazon.com was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994. Believe it or not, but Amazon.com is originally just an online bookstore! Today, Amazon.com is the most valuable company in the world – bigger than Apple and Microsoft in terms of market capitalization. Amazon.com is also dubbed as one of the “Four Horseman” of technology; Google, Apple, and Facebook also belong to this list.
From a simple online bookstore, Amazon diversified into selling video download/streaming, software, video games, etc. At present, Amazon.com is now known to be a multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud, computing and artificial intelligence.
What is Amazon known for?
Amazon is best known for its online retail stores but it wouldn’t be there without affiliate marketers, contractors, and individual and small business sellers. Amazon became a technological giant by being a middleman.
How Amazon (online retail shop) makes money?
Amazon has few products of their own, so they rely on individuals who are engaged in “product arbitrage” business. They charge these individuals a fee for storage, selling, shipping and handling, and customer service for the products they are trying to sell through Amazon.
They don’t have sales associates that are paid hourly to sell their online inventory instead they pay affiliate marketers a 6-8% commission for each successful transactions that they can make. They also use word of mouth to build brand awareness so more people will buy from them.
Other services Amazon offers
Most of us are familiar with Amazon as a massive online retail store, but I wonder how many of us also know about the other services Amazon offers that we can use to generate extra income. Some of these services include, but not limited to, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Handmade, Merch by Amazon and Amazon Trade-In.
How To Make Money On Amazon
Now that we are now more familiar with what Amazon.com is, let us start discovering different ways on how to make money on Amazon.
As a reminder, all of the things that I will share actually works, BUT this article is not about how to get-rich-quick. In contrary, I will blatantly say that all of these ways will take time and you will have to put a lot of initial work before you can see income as big as the income of Mexican drug lords. (Nah, just dream on – their income is way t0o big)
How To Sell Items On Amazon
Expectation
Selling on Amazon.com is a 1-2-3 step. In theory, all you need to do is register an account with them, choose an Amazon seller payment plan that suits your business objective/s then ship products that you want to sell on Amazon’s one of many Amazon fulfillment centers then finally, wait for your paycheque from Amazon while Amazon do the selling, shipping, and customer service. This type of online business is also known as “fulfilled by Amazon” or F.B.A.
For more information on how to open an account, please read my article on “ How to Sell On Amazon“
Reality
Too good to be true? Well, I haven’t told you the hard part yet. Yes, this is the hard part but I am not saying it is the impossible part. Truth be told, it is actually really straight-forward.
The hardest part that you need to overcome is building brand awareness or in other words building your seller’s reputation. Think of it this way. When you go to Amazon Shopping, to whom do you usually buy from? To a seller with 3 and below stars ratings or to a seller with 3 and above stars? Well, you will most likely be going to buy to a seller with higher stars right? And that, my friend, would be our biggest wall to overcome as a beginner – improving our seller’s rating.
The other thing that you need to learn is to know what products are easy to sell (even if you have a low star), what is profitable and has little or no competition at all. We cannot just send random products to Amazon because, depending on your plan, you will end up paying a lot for storage or you will end up reaching your allowable free storage without being able to sell anything.
The good news is all of these are learnable. You can search the web for tips and how to videos on how to do an F.B.A. business. uDemy is also one of the best and safest places to get a “How to do F.B.A.” courses for a very low price.
You can also search the net and find individual bloggers who are selling their own courses. Just be careful of those people who promise you that their program will get you rich in just a few days or weeks because that is obviously false and a certified scam.
Remember that no business in the world can make you rich overnight unless you are very lucky or you are doing some shady business. It will take time but I am confident that it is worth it. If you want to become successful in “fulfilled by Amazon” business, then you will need to do a lot of learning and researching, plus trial and error.
Resources
Here are some of the resources that might be helpful to your new career. There are also books on “How to Sell on Amazon” that you can buy from.. well… Amazon. Here are some of the one that has the highest reviews.
Well, look at that. Most of these books are free if you have Kindle Unlimited. Why not challenge yourself?! Stop wasting your money buying foods that are not good for your health, instead, buy foods for your brains!
Sign up for a Kindle Unlimited account here and pick your Kindle eReader today!
Still not convince F.B.A. is profitable?
Watch this video from CNBC about ” This 29-year-old’s company makes millions buying from Walmart and selling on Amazon“
Link To Amazon Sellers Site
How to Make Money On Affiliate Marketing
Expectation
Okay, maybe your budget is tight and you do not have the luxury to buy hundreds of clearance items from Walmart or Target. If this is you, do not worry, there is another a way to make money off Amazon and this is through affiliate marketing! This time Amazon will pay you a commission for successfully selling their merchandise on your blog or social media accounts through the affiliate links that they provide.
The rules of the game are simple. First, you need an account with Amazon Associates – Amazon’s affiliate marketing network. Next is to find the products that you want to sell. Then, get the affiliate link of the product. Finally, create a content that is related to a product/s that you are trying to sell and make a call to action to make your readers buy the product
You can visit my article on, ” How to Make Money On Amazon Affiliate Marketing” to learn more about how to join Amazon Associates.
Reality
Before you can use an Amazon’s affiliate link, you have to have a medium to show it. Most people use affiliate links on their blogs, others on social media, while some use both blogs and social media.
Another thing that you should expect is getting your article and/or your website rank high on Google, Yahoo and Bings’ search engine result takes time and needs a lot of INITIAL work.
It takes time because you are competing against hundreds of thousands of other inspiring bloggers. Google and other search engines use algorithms known as PageRank (P.R.) to sift through the blogs uploaded every second and rank them according to their relevance and trustworthiness. Naturally, sites that are older and have posted a search engine optimization (S.E.O.) friendly blogs tends to rank higher on search engine results pages.
If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing then please read my article, “How Do Bloggers Make Money From Blogging“
Resources:
Learn the basics of Affiliate Marketing with Wealthy Affiliate
Link To Amazon Associates Site
Amazon Self Published Books – Can You Really Profit From It?
Expectation
Are you a creative writer? Do you like writing stories or maybe a manual/ guide/ instruction? Maybe you like sharing your personal experience for others to learn from. If this is you then why not start writing a book and self-publish it. Yes, self-publish it with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.
It is really and simple. Just open a Kindle direct publishing account, write your book, upload, then collect up to 70% royalties! Amazon will do the publication, advertisement, and selling for free! Wowoweee!
Reality
Marketing, marketing, marketing. Assuming that you are good at writing a book (actually even if you are not), the biggest hurdle that separates you and from your potential income is marketing. You have to face the truth that there lots of people who are also wanting to make money by self-publishing their own book. In other words, there are thousands or even millions of inspiring authors that want to take advantage of this business model.
Wait! Before you give up, you have to understand that it is not impossible. All you need to do is to market your product to the right people and kaboom… unlimited cash flow. You do not even need to be a good writer, you just need to be a good advertiser. Think about this, nowadays most song artist produces trashy songs yet they are famous while those who are really talented can’t get a break. What do you think separates between the two? Yep, you guess it right. Marketing!
So here are a few of the many ways that you can do to market your self-published book.
- Create social media and build a large following then sell your books in there.
- Create a blog or even a landing page for your book then promote it to different forums
- Partner up with social media influencers.
Resources:
Kindle Direct Publishing provides sets of training for free! Here are the links to those pieces of training.
Link To Kindle Direct Publishing Site
That’s All What About You
Okay, ladies and gents. That is it for me… for now anyway. I really hope that this article added value to your life. If it did then please make sure to join our Pinterest community (click the icon on the upper right) and/or our Facebook community (click here or the icon on the upper right as well.)
Before I end this, let me ask these questions to you and I encourage you to share your thoughts on the comments section down below:
- What did you like the most about the articles?
- Do you have any questions about what I have shared? What are they?
- Do you know more than what I shared? What are they
But Wait There Is More!
Yes! There are more ways to make money on Amazon that I will soon cover as soon as I get more information and/or I understand the process on how to do it. In the future, I will write a guide on the following:
- How to Make Money With Amazon Mechanical Turk?
- Can You Sell Handmade Items on Amazon?
- Make Money with Amazon Merch
- What is Amazon Trade-In Program?
So Again Please join our Facebook or Pinterest community or even leave your e-mail address so I can update you as soon as I am able to write these contents for you!
Peace! And Happy Wealth Building!
Last time when I joined the Amazon Affiliate, my account was terminated because I didn’t had a single sale in 150 days. That’s the policy but I have one question, suppose we made a sale in 150 days , will this policy continue for the next 150 days or our account will active lifetime?
Thanks,
Hi,
Unfortunately, I never had this problem even when I was starting and had no clicks or whatsoever on my Amazon Associates.
I searched the Amazon forum and someone posted the same problem but this time it is 365 days of inactivity.
With regards to your question, yes you are right. If you made a sale within 150 days then I am pretty sure that the expiration time will reset.
Cheers,
JG
Amazon has grown so much over the years and they seem to just keep going and going. It is so amazing of the many ways money can be made on Amazon. Persons have literally made millions from selling their products including ebooks.
Hi Norman,
Yes, you are right. Although the initial work of starting your very own Amazon-based business is a bit hard, it is definitely not impossible.
Regards,
JG