How Much Do Amazon Affiliates Make?

This is probably one of the most asked questions about Amazon Affiliate with a lot of ways to answer it.

When it comes to Amazon Affiliate sites, they can largely be divided into two kinds of sites. Sites that use Private Blog Networks (PBN) and sites that don’t. If you do a quick search on Google, you can find a lot of people claiming they make thousands of dollars each month being Amazon Affiliates. When you dig a little deeper, you will see almost all of them use PBN.

On the other hand, there are people who manage to create sites that generate substantial income without building backlinks. What you need to do is to consistently publish articles and build authority sites.

I believe there are a lot of people who make good income without using PBN and they are just not sharing with other people about their activities and income. Why? Because it’s hard (it takes time and a lot of hard work) and it’s not sexy.

Quick and easy, which is what everybody wants, and let’s face it, people want “easy”.

OK, so how much do Amazon affiliates make?

It really depends on what your strategy is: no PBN? or with PBN?

Amazon Affiliate site income without PBN

Let me show you a calculation based on real numbers.

For most Amazon Affiliates like us, we basically create articles that will send users to Amazon and hope they will purchase something.

If you monitor your site’s Page Group Performance, you can easily find out roughly how much money each article you created is generating for you.

In my case, based on the year to date data I have for the ASS site, it generates $0.28/article on average each week. This means each article generates $14.56 per year ($0.28 x 52 weeks = $14.56).

Now, if I create 300 articles per year, the revenue will be $4,368 ($14.56 x 300 articles = $4,368).

However, the cost of article is $20 each, so $20 x 300 = $6,000

This means in the first year, I will lose money.

However, I can actually turn this around and make it a pretty profitable business. The video below explains how.

Amazon Affiliate site income with PBN

If you want to use PBN, you need to either build your own or pay for someone else’s. A small PBN can be done with 5-10 domains to start with. You will need to put 5-10 articles in each and make sure they are all hosted on different C-cluster IP addresses.

So let’s say you are going to create a small PBN with 5 sites. You need to first find expired domain with high authority. This will take a substantial amount of time and money (trust me, I have tried it before) and depending on the method you choose (do it yourself, hire someone, just buy them from someone), it’s pretty easy to spend several hundred dollars in this step. For the sake of argument, let’s say it costs $200 to get 5 top notch expired domains.

After that, you will need ot create 10 articles on each site (5 x 10 = 50 articles). Let’s assume each article costs $10, so 50 x $10 = $500.

Now you need to create the money site but since this is a PBN site, you can probably get away with 10 pages of content. Let’s say each article costs $20, so it is $200 (10 x $20 = $200).

Then let’s say you target a single page to rank on a keyword that has 1,000 monthly search volume. Let’s also say you manage to rank for the first position (since you are using PBN), and you send 20% of that traffic to Amazon, with 7% conversion rate. So it’s 1,000 x 20% x 7% = 14 people. Let’s say the average purchase price is $50 and the commision you get is 6%, so 14 x $50 x 6% = $42/month.

So in one year, it is $42 x 12 = $504

Now divide that by 10 articles, $504/10 = $50.4

Clearly the page performance is better than the method without PBN, but there is a maintenance cost for the PBN.

So the total cost is $900 and revenue is $504, I will lose money also but less compare to without PBN.

Just like in the without PBN scenario, if you stop working on the site, it will in theory continue to bring in $504 / year which means you should get all your money back and more in year 2.

You can also add more content to the site but you will need to build out more PBN to help boost ranking for those new content.

Conclusion

The amount of money you can make from Amazon Affiliate really depends on the strategy you choose to follow.

There are pros and cons for each strategy but no matter which one you choose, it will take at least 1 if not 2 years to really start seeing the return of your investment.

I personally prefer the “no PBN” strategy because I just don’t want to keep worrying about what Google would do next. I also am not a fan of spending time building PBNs because it’s something that does not seem to add value right away.

What do you think? Do you still think using PBN is the way to go?

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Tony

I am an SEO consultant who happens to be interested in affiliate marketing.
I build websites and use them for testing various SEO strategies and tactics.

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