What started as an online bookstore has turned into one of the largest companies in the world covering businesses that range from transoceanic shipping to video streaming. It also empowers entrepreneurs to make a great deal of money by providing a powerful online shopping platform.
There are many different ways to make money with Amazon. The most popular programs for deriving income through Amazon include selling on Amazon, Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA), the Amazon Associates program and Kindle Direct Publishing.
Selling on Amazon
Selling on Amazon is simply that; listing a product for sale on the Amazon website and fulfilling orders that are placed by customers. It costs money to use Amazon to sell your products, but the cost is dependent on how much you sell.
Top Tips for How to Succeed:
- Target physical products that match your niche and website keywords
- Link to products within your content such as a landing page or blogs
- Display product images and make them clickable
- Link to Amazon.com multiple times on your website
- Review products on your website that have historically high conversion rates
Fulfillment By Amazon
The lure of the Fulfillment By Amazon program is that Amazon takes care of the shipping and handling. The benefit of this kind of arrangement becomes obvious when a seller has orders that surpass what a single person can process by themselves. Did you sell 10 items? That might not problem for a single person to package and ship. But what if you’ve sold 10,000 items? Do you have room to store the inventory? Can you process and ship 10,000 orders in a day? Probably not. This is where Fulfillment By Amazon shows its true value.
Joining the program is as easy as creating a Selling On Amazon account and adding the Fulfillment By Amazon function. From that point, you can list the products you want to sell and ship the products directly to an Amazon fulfillment center. From there Amazon will receive the orders, pick, pack and ship them while crediting your account for the sale. As an added bonus, Amazon provides customer support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Of course, there are fees when using Fulfillment By Amazon. These can include a flat fee for order fulfillment based on the product’s dimension and weight and a storage fee determined by the space and time taken up by the product in the fulfillment center warehouse. There are other optional fee-based services provided by Amazon such as the addition of bubble wrap or other packaging materials to the product, product disposal or return, labeling services and so on. Fulfillment By Amazon can be a good option for sellers with large volumes and little storage space or someone who wants to remain relatively hands-off when it comes to shipping and handling.
Top Tips for How to Succeed:
- Register as a professional seller to avoid being charged a .99 cent transaction fee per sale
- Create product bundles to increase profits
- Be the lowest price including shipping for popular products
- Find unique products not being sold on Amazon and be the first to list
- Answer customer emails and communication promptly
Amazon Associates
Amazon Associates is an affiliate marketing program whereby you can make a commission by placing advertisements on websites linking to products that are sold by Amazon. When someone clicks on one of your advertising links, they are transferred to the product listing on the Amazon website. If the product is purchased a referral fee is paid to the person whose ad was clicked on.
There is no cost to sign up as an Amazon Associate. Amazon itself provides some simple tools to help you add text and/or image links and banner ads to your website. Amazon also provides what it calls Native Shopping Ads which are stylized in a format similar to Amazon’s own website lending the referral website an air of trust and familiarity for frequent Amazon users. At the same time, there are plenty of free and paid-for proprietary tools available on the Internet that can make posting referral links an easier process.
As an Amazon Associate, you will have access to daily reports allowing insight into what kind of ads are most effective, what kind of products customers have bought using your links and what types of other products they have bought. Amazon also keeps an ongoing list of its bestsellers, which can influence the type of ad links you should display. Once again, beyond these free tools provided by Amazon, there are plenty of free and paid-for apps available on the Internet that can streamline your report analysis.
Top Tips for How to Succeed
- Learn basic HTML to be able to insert images and create links on your website
- Build links to Amazon that include your affiliate ID
- Promote your site through online communities and business networking sites
- Create blog categories to help users quickly find products they are searching for
- Sign up for Google Adsense for additional revenue opportunities
Publishing with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
Are you a writer, blogger, novelist, or poet? Have you ever dreamt of publishing a book but have never been able to find a publisher willing to take on your work? In the era of Amazon, no longer is it a substantial financial risk to self-publish a book. Amazon makes it easy to publish electronic books and even provides the ability to publish paperback books with their print-on-demand service. Without the costs associated with printing, storing and shipping an entire run of paperbacks, Amazon’s print-on-demand service has created a financially risk-free environment for self-publishing physical books.
There is no upfront cost to sign up with Kindle Direct Publishing. Simply create an account, upload your book, give it a description, choose which categories it belongs under, pick a price and it can end up in Kindle stores around the world in a couple of days. You continue to own the rights to your book and you’ll receive 70% of the sales. Of course, marketing the book will be up to you, but Amazon allows you to publish your work, experiment with different variations and test the market without the usual costs associated with self-publishing.
Top Tips for How to Succeed:
- Write interesting, captivating book descriptions
- Research top selling books for new content ideas
- Generate reviews to build credibility and buyer confidence
- Post an interesting biography on your author page
- Have your book cover professionally designed
There’s no doubt that Amazon has created a new retail environment affecting both consumers and retailers worldwide, but it has also created a whole new way of making money for marketers, writers, entrepreneurs and people who can learn how the various Amazon programs work. Whether you pack and ship goods sold on the Amazon site, utilize Amazon’s services to do the packing and shipping for you, provide links and gateways to products already for sale on the Amazon site or publish and market your own creations via Amazon’s self-publishing services, there is serious money to be make by aligning yourself with the Amazon brand.
At havebigplans.com we are fortunate to have coaches that specialize in selling on Amazon!
About Have BIGplans, LLC
HaveBIGplans virtually, conveniently and affordably connects entrepreneurs with certified business coaches. As the first-ever text business coaching platform, Have BIGplans has revolutionized the business coaching industry by providing unparalleled dialog between certified business coaches and small business owners in the digital age. Founded with the mission to promote economic growth by helping small business owners, especially women, to build a business that fuels their soul and their bank account, Have BIGplans works with businesses large and small, new and established, in many different industries. For more information, please visit www.havebigplans.com.
