Is Affiliate Marketing Still a Viable Business Model In 2024?

Even getting into 2024, affiliate marketing is one of the simplest business models that beginners can jump into.

Promoting products on your site and collecting a commission as an affiliate allows you to quickly setup websites, test the waters, and start making money without requiring a huge financial investment from you before you start seeing returns.

With so many other business models that beginners can follow, we strongly stand behind becoming an affiliate marketer and earning through Amazon’s Associates program because of how easy it is to get started, as well as how quickly you can scale your earnings once you have an understanding of what you need to do.

There are other affiliate networks currently available, but Amazon, in our experience, provides the most stability.

Networks like Rakuten, ShareASale, CJ, ClickBank, and JVZoo all have great offers, but we’ve found that those offers tend to be short-lived and pretty volatile in comparison with products that are selling on Amazon. 

Through Amazon, there are typically multiple sellers offering the same item, so even if one happens to go out of stock, you don’t have to worry about the links you’ve created on your website becoming broken, because other sellers will still have inventory.

Through other networks, if those products or offers become unavailable, you may end up sending traffic to a landing page that isn’t set up to pay you a commission, but one that is setup to generate the affiliate network increased earnings.

In other cases, the links that you’ve created to those offers could become completely broken, creating a ton of work for you when you thought you were finished, by having to find new offers that are relevant to the content you’ve created, or finding another network with the same offer so you don’t have to change your content.

If you don't know where to start looking for affiliate offers, we recommend OfferVault.

How To Become An Amazon Affiliate

Getting started in affiliate marketing through Amazon’s Associates program is one of the simplest business models you can run, and has the added benefit of earning more money as time goes on, while requiring less of a time investment from you.

Whether you’re just getting started, looking to expand your business model and branch out into other areas, or you have an existing portfolio of websites that you’re looking to scale, using Amazon’s Associates programs is, hands down, the best way to grow your income.

Here’s how...

There are 6 steps that you’ll want to follow while building your next Amazon Affiliate website.

Following these steps will help you make your way through the beginning stages with a plan to follow, where most people tend to throw in the towel.

You’ll also learn what it takes to start driving traffic to the site so you can start earning, and four of our favorite strategies.

And, finally, you’ll get an idea of what the end-game looks like and how you can continue to scale your business as you start seeing your income grow.

Step 1: Decide On A Niche

This is one of the areas that most new and prospective affiliate marketers get hung up.

They believe choosing a niche is a decision that could make or break their success which, in some ways, it is that serious.

However, choosing the right niche is actually fairly simple.

There are two signs that you’re looking for, to determine if a niche is worth jumping into with your new website.

If you take the advice we’ve already given you about looking into Amazon’s Bestsellers list, you can get cues on both of these signs without having to dig much deeper.

The first thing you’re going to want to look for are products that are actually selling. You can tell that by the product’s placement on the bestsellers list, and how many reviews each of those products have.

If they’re placed higher on the list, you know that the seller is selling more inventory, which means you have a chance to make money by helping them sell even more.

If they also have a high number of reviews, it typically means that the customers who are purchasing those products are passionate about the product, which means that you have plenty of ways to generate new content to help tap into that passion.

Choosing products that you, yourself, may have purchased before helps give you even more insight into what makes people buy them, and helps you connect with those buyers through the content on your website later on.

The key on deciding a niche to pursue is to not overthink the process.

You can use external tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to determine how competitive the niche that you’ve chosen is but, in our experience, there are always new angles you can take to squeeze your way into an “ultra-competitive” market.

So while finding niches that haven’t been targeted by huge, authoritative sites for ye