As the battle for e-commerce sales becomes increasingly competitive, Amazon sellers are constantly looking for an edge to boost product promotion and sales. I started my first FBA business several years ago with no prior e-commerce experience, but was eager to start generating sales.
Once my Amazon sales started to increase, and less work was required, I set out to find an additional way to earn money online. I came across content websites monetized through affiliate programs and ads.
After purchasing a content site and learning the ins and outs, I decided to see if I could use my content website to increase the sales of my FBA products…and it worked!
In the paragraphs below I’m going to explain how you can use a website to increase your product sales while also increasing the affiliate income your website generates.
Having Synergy Between Your Website And Products
The content site that I purchased was in the technology niche and two of my FBA products happened to be tech-related as well, so there was a commonality between the two. After seeing the potential of combing these two assets, you may want to consider purchasing a content site that is in your e-commerce niche or vice versa.
For example, if you own a website that writes cooking reviews and sell dog leashes on Amazon, I believe it would be hard to transition your website readers into Amazon customers, but on the contrary, selling cooking-related products would make for a seamless transition of linking the website reader over to Amazon.
As an example, below is a screenshot of a very well known content website.
Having a website and FBA business that are similar opens the door for many possibilities. On your website, create a banner ad promoting your Amazon product(s) as you know your readers are already interested in these products.
Taking it one step further, if your content website receives a significant amount of organic traffic then building an e-commerce part of the website may be beneficial. If you do employ this, then you are picking up revenue from all angles.
You’ll be earning the advertising revenue from the website traffic while receiving FBA sales and/or direct e-commerce sales. The one downside to having an e-commerce part of the website is order fulfillment.
Amazon makes online selling incredibly easy and simple, however, it may be advantageous to your bottom line to sell some products direct to consumers. I suggest you create a projection before spending the time and money to roll out a dedicated e-commerce feature.
Using Search Engine Traffic To Increase Sales
As mentioned above, creating banner ads to promote your Amazon products can be a great way to increase sales, however, you can increase the overall traffic to your website while increasing sales at the same time.
When I first had this idea, I used popular SEO tools to analyze the keywords related to the products that I was selling. At the time, I was selling fire-resistant bags and found high search volume for people searching for “fire bag review” on Google.
I created a 1200 word article reviewing my own fire bag and targeted the keyword phrase “fire bag review” throughout the article. All of the content making up the review was true, accurate and delivered value to the reader.
Within the review were “Buy on Amazon” buttons and other call to actions so the reader could easily take the next step to purchase if they resonated with what they read.
Since the keyword phrase that I was targeting had very little competition, it took only about 30 days for my review to appear in the top ten Google search results for the “fire bag review” phrase.
In just three months this article drove over 1,200 potential customers to my Amazon listing. At the time I was not running banner ads, all 1,200 clicks came as a direct result of the review.
Let’s turn the 1,200 clicks into potential earned dollars. I think it’s reasonable to assume that at least 20% of those people turned into paying customers, as someone who is reading a product review is very close to purchasing. 1,200 x 20% equates to 240 extra customers.
At a $15 profit per unit, that works out to be an additional $3,600 in profit over three months from spending two hours creating a well-informed review!
In a separate case, I wrote a review for an electronic globe that I was selling FBA. I sold the website shortly after creating the review, but while I was still able to track the clicks, 82 potential customers went to my product listing from the review.
I made roughly $80 profit per globe sale, so even 15 extra customers per month would earn me around $1,000 profit for little effort.
Monetizing From All Angles
Linking to an Amazon product from a website has several positive qualities. The first, of course, is the profit you make as an Amazon seller when someones buys your product. However, if you use Amazon affiliate links within your content site you can earn money even if your reader decides to buy your competitors product.
Within my content site, whenever I would link out to my Amazon product, I would use Amazon affiliate links. Side note, you must be part of the Amazon Associates program in order to be able to do this, but it’s free and easy to set up.
This means that if someone clicked on my product link and was re-directed to Amazon, a cookie was attached to their web browser. So at anytime in the following 24 hours, if that person is to buy my product, my competitors product, or a product not even related, I would be credited a commission for being the affiliate.
There were many times that I checked my Amazon Associates report, which shows all of the products you helped sell, and saw my competitors products listed. This meant I made money for my website even without selling my own product. Look at the image below, my affiliate link within the review caused me to sell eight competing products while still generating income.
The Amazon Associates report is also a good way to track if you’re losing sales to one main competitor as you can see the final conversions.
Tailor Your FBA Products To Your Website Content
If you have yet to start an FBA business but have a website, consider sourcing products for FBA than can be easily tied into your website’s content. Most affiliate programs offer good analytics, so you should be able to identify the top purchased products that your website is linking to.
If these products are generic and can be replicated, you may be able to significantly increase your profitability if you are to sell these products yourself rather than just being an affiliate. This won’t be possible for every product you’re linking to, but small improvements in this area can have a huge effect on your monthly profitability.
If you desire to increase profitability for either your e-commerce business, website, or both, then put critical thinking into how both assets could be used to benefit one another. If you don’t have a content website currently, and don’t plan to buy one, then consider pitching the owner of a content website to post a review of your product, in which they could place their affiliate links.
Then they make money on the referral and you increase sales at no extra cost. I believe it is important to think smarter and not harder, as some of the most simple business tactics can be most profitable.
I challenge you to tie your website and FBA businesses together and to take the time to write a review or create a banner ad. If nothing comes of it then you wasted a few hours of time, but in my experience, an increase in sales will come of it. I hope you’re able to take these ideas, implement them into your own businesses and then add a personal layer of creativity.
Zach Zorn is the owner of Money Nomad and an enthusiast of all things tech. Zach has extensive experience building, managing and purchasing pre-existing Amazon FBA businesses. To learn how Zach helps Amazon sellers click here.
