I have read so much about how affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money online. By joining an affiliate program, all you had to do was promote a company’s products and you would get paid a commission for every sale. I had always wanted to try affiliate marketing and the Amazon Associates Programme seemed the best way to start.
Becoming an Amazon affiliate is an easy process. You can sign up for the program if you already have an Amazon account. You are given an Associate ID once your account has been approved. Amazon then allows you to use special URLs with your Associate ID that you can use on your website that link to Amazon product pages. Amazon pays you a small commission if a customer buys a product through your URL.
I signed up for Amazon Associates because I read many books and tend to write book reviews. If I like a book, I will recommend it to my readers. I thought that if I continued to make recommendations, I might as well set up some affiliate links and receive some small compensation for doing so.
When you join the Associates Programme, Amazon gives you up to 180 days to make 3 sales or your account will be closed. After the first month of joining Amazon’s affiliate program, I made my first sale! Someone purchased a book through one of my affiliate links on my blog and I was very excited!
The commission was very small, but I felt motivated to continue driving traffic to my blog. I thought for sure that I would make even more sales as I created new blog posts every week and included affiliate links.
However, three months passed, and I did not make any more sales. Amazon kept sending email reminders that I needed to make more sales, or my account would be closed. That was a lot of pressure coming from Amazon. As hard as I tried, I could not get customers to click on my affiliate links and make a purchase. I followed the rules, I promoted my blog posts with my affiliate links on social media, but still could not make a sale.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, I received the following notification from Amazon in my email inbox:
“We are writing to notify you that your Amazon.co.uk Associates Programme account has been closed due to a lack of activity. It is our programme policy to close accounts that do not register three sales within 180 days of account creation.”
I was so surprised when I received the above message and was very disappointed. Being an Amazon affiliate was not easy, but I thought that I started pretty well by getting my first sale about a month after I joined.
I tried everything I could to get more people to click on my affiliate links, but it did not seem to work. I promoted my blog posts with my affiliate links but there was no increase in traffic to my website.
When I received the notification from Amazon that my account was closed, I was disappointed at first. When I joined the Amazon Associates Programme and made my first sale, I was very excited. I was looking forward to making more sales and receiving a commission, but trying to get website visitors to click on my affiliate links was challenging! And the fact that Amazon kept sending me reminders that I hadn’t made any more ‘qualifying purchases’ was putting a lot of pressure on me.
So now, I’m glad that I am no longer an Amazon Affiliate. Although Amazon mentioned that I was free to reapply to their program, I have decided not to. I would rather concentrate on creating and selling my own products on my website rather than subject myself to the pressure of recommending Amazon’s products and getting a small pittance of a commission.
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