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Amazon Affiliate WordPress Site – Quick Guide

Robert Ryan
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Have you ever wanted to set up an Amazon Affiliate WordPress site? Heard about the potential riches being involved in the Amazon affiliate scheme can bring and want to try set a site of your own up? Well, then, this quick guide to setting up Amazon Affiliate WordPress site is for you!

First things first – I’m not an Amazon guru and have very little experience with affiliates but I do hope that I’m a quick learner and a good at relaying what I’ve learned. Last week I had the idea to set up an Amazon Affiliate WordPress site called PerfectChristmasPresents.com which, as the name suggests is about Christmas presents. With some luck I think that the site could do well. I like it because it’s the sort of site that won’t require year long maintenance but rather a 3 month heavy blitz with social/blogging promo and then 9 months of low-fi maintenance. The following are the steps I took to get the Amazon affiliate site up and running.

Amazon Affiliate WordPress Site – Quick Guide

1) Niche Selection
You need to define what you want your Amazon affiliate WordPress site is going to promote and sell. This is a key step and one that shouldn’t be overlooked. You want to try find a niche that has some good search volume as well as products that aren’t too cheap. I believe Amazon affiliates receive between 4% and 8.5% in commissions so when picking a niche bear that in mind, the higher the price of the products you sell the more you stand to make. Also, you don’t want to choose a niche that is too broad. Try really drill down into one specific niche and in this regard my PerfectChristmasPresents.com might not be the best example as it’s quite broad. One more tightly focused niche might be the category Christmas Gifts for Geeks for example. One final aspect to consider about niche selection is content. How easily will you be able to blog about the products that are on your affiliate site? For the Christmas niche there is a never ending supply of content that can be re-purposed and shared and so I should be able to get a lot of content on site to support all the product listings.

2) Hosting & Domain
You can’t build an Amazon affiliate WordPress site without some hosting. When picking hosting don’t go for cheap hosting and try get it so that the server is in the territory that you think might be most profitable for you. Domain wise, if you’re going very niche specific, you should try get a domain that includes some of your keywords for whatever small bit of extra SEO love Google may give you. The PerfectChristmasPresents.com site is hosted in Ireland as that’s where the bulk of our sales will probably originate from. The domain name itself is kind of long but it has some good keywords in it and the door is open for a long term branding project with it. For WordPress hosting I always use Spiral Hosting.

3) Amazon Affiliate Sign Up
Before you can sell any Amazon products on a WordPress affiliate site you need to have an affiliate account with Amazon. You can create an account for free here – https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/. The sign up process is straight forward enough with automated phone verification required for account confirmation. One point to note is the different affiliate regions (the flag in the top right of that page). If you want to sell items that are available in the .com or the .ca versions of Amazon then you’ll need to create affiliate IDs for those sites. For PerfectChristmasPresents.com (for example) I created affiliate accounts for UK, US, Canada & Spain. Note: Since setting up I’ve had issues with the .co.uk account as most products sourced originate from Amazon.com. To make sure you don’t run into same issues try pick just one Amazon affiliate to start with, get it set up and then start adding additional affiliates – best to hit the ground running.

4) Amazon Affiliate WordPress Site Theme & Plugin
So, at this stage the niche for your Amazon affiliate WordPress site has been nailed down, the domain and hosting are boxed off and you have your Amazon affiliate accounts. Now it’s time to build the site. There are a few different plugins and themes available for WordPress Amazon affiliate sites but the combo used on PerfectChristmasPresents.com are WooCommerce Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin in conjunction with WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates Theme. As mentioned at the top this is my first experience with an affiliates but the plugin seems extremely powerful. There was many a geeky chortle as I integrated it and got it up and running. I might do a video about the plugin at a later stage as it really is excellent. The theme, eh, kinda meh. It is a new theme and so has some bugs that the developers are working out and it is quite slimmed down feature wise. With that said though – that’s why I picked it. I wanted to be able to build the site quickly and a slimmed down theme makes that easier. There are a few pain points with the theme but I hope the theme developers will iron them out in time.

5) Amazon Affiliate WordPress Site Structure
One of the SEO goals for the site is for it to be somewhat self sufficient. Each of the different product categories – “Christmas Gifts For Mothers” for example have a tailored optimised URL slug containing “Christmas-gift-for-mums” and each product in added to that category will contain the same slug. The hope here is that I can straddle two main keywords “Christmas Presents” and “Christmas Gifts”. When setting up your Amazon Affiliate WordPress site see if you can use the categories and site structure to suck in some extra keywords.

6) Logo/Branding for Amazon Affiliate WordPress Site
If the Amazon affiliate WordPress site you’re setting up is purely going for sales with no brand in mind then no need to worry about this aspect too much. If however you think the domain has long term potential (and, I think PerfectChristmasPresents.com has a ring to it) then it might be worth in investing in a logo. The graphic designer I work with, Elena, did the logo design for the site and is the art director for all social site and graphics. Adding a clean looking brand and logo can help with peoples perception when they land on the site which may increase sales.

7) Social Media Set Up
So, by now you’ve got your domain and hosting sorted, Amazon affiliate accounts are set up and the Amazon Affiliate WordPress site is under development. At this point I think it’s time to get set up your social media sites. This step can be done at any stage really but it’s important not too overlook it. Social media can help with site traffic and referrals as well as possibly have some positive SEO benefits. PerfectChristmasPresents.com has been set up on Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest and I’ll use my personal G+ account to discuss it now and again. Once you have the accounts registered and secured you can then start to deck them out with profile images and start to build up a following.

8) Amazon Product Searches
At this stage your Amazon affiliate WordPress site should more or less be set up and now it’s a case of finding products to fill up your cyber shelves. This step is harder than it sounds and one that will take a bit of time. When looking for products I try find something that is highly rated with lots of positive customer reviews on Amazon. It’s also important to check the stock levels – if an item is sold out then you won’t be able to sell it as an affiliate. Another thing to keep an eye on is the supplier of the product. If it’s Amazon themselves for example then there is a much lower chance of an item being permanently sold out compared to a supplier like Fake Name Products Company for example. When choosing products it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the “products other people bought” as you can find some gems of items there. Amazon is also letting you know that those products actually sell and as an affiliate that’s what you in your site, products that actually sell.

Key Takeaways For Amazon Affiliate WordPress Sites

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