Amazon announced changes to its affiliate program sometime either yesterday or overnight or something.
Predictably, certain haunts are proclaiming that this is the literal end of the world and affiliate marketing as we know it.
It’s not… the fundamental nature of affiliate marketing hasn’t changed. Despite Amazon’s size and power, it won’t change. This is just the latest in the long line of “sky is falling” moments for bedraggled bloggers and terrified affiliate marketers everywhere.
Easy read version: If you’re worried about this, then change affiliate programs. If Amazon affiliates is your major source of income, then you should have diversified earlier. Ultimately, if you have a valuable affiliate marketing business, then the actual “offer” you make a commission on is a tiny part of your business anyway.
Here’s why.
The Power Of Affiliate Marketing
I’ve written numerous times about Amazon affiliates and a lot of my sites use Amazon’s affiliate program as a starting board for getting a new site up.
Interestingly, the niches I’ve targeted on Amazon haven’t really been affected by the rate changes. moral of that mini-story is that if you’re targeting the same niches as everyone else is doing, then eventually you’re going to get cut out.
Now, I’ve also mentioned that there are better alternatives out there and you should try and find other affiliate programs with better commissions. Obviously you’ll want to do that wherever you can.
But that’s not what I’m going to talk about now. What I’m going to talk about now is what you’re doing as an affiliate marketer.
What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do?
Think about it really: What does an affiliate marketer do?
(I’ll take it you’ve thought about this and aren’t just skimming my article right now.)
A lot of people jump into affiliate marketing thinking they’re going to create a cute and quick blog post and skim off the top. Some of them don’t even think they need to do that much; they’ll buy a domain name and then put up one of those Amazon template stores.
Then they complain that they get squeezed out.
If you do affiliate marketing correctly, it’s very hard to squeeze you out.
What you need to do is understand your value as an affiliate; you’re connecting A and B. A is the company selling something, B is the innocent web-stalker turned customer.
Your value as an affiliate derives from your ability to do the above job. Get someone to become a customer of a company.
To that end, you’ll hopefully build something of value: a web funnel, a website or something else entirely.
What’s The Issue Here?
The issue with the above is that it’s absolutely inevitable that Amazon are going to try and change up their affiliate program. If you look at the new changes, you’ll see that they’ve decreased pay-outs across a range of niches: tech, toys and the like.
They’ve also increased some niches.
That’s because Amazon want their affiliates to help their business. They don’t need anyone to send potential customers to markets they’ve already cornered.
But we little affiliate marketers aren’t in it to help Amazon’s billion-dollar bottom line. We’re just trying to make our ends meet.
To that end, you cannot rely simply on Amazon.
If you build a niche blog with just Amazon as your supplier, you’ve basically got a boss with no pension or workplace benefits. You’re dependent on the money they pay you every thirty days.
The way around this is simple: Don’t base your income off just Amazon earnings.
Find better affiliate programs. Build different revenue models. Build into each blog or email list multiple streams of revenue – both affiliate and otherwise – and Amazon can make whatever changes it wants, you’ll be less effected.
It All Comes Back To…
… the key role of an affiliate marketer, which is building something of value as a middleman.
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got an Amazon affiliate site or a sales page which you send traffic to for some weight loss product: You can’t just skim off the top without doing anything. There’s no resiliency in that, there’s no barrier to entry and every business on the planet hates you for doing that.
On the other hand, if you build a good website that’s valuable in its own right, then places will be happy to do business with you. If you create a mailing list where people open up every email and respond and buy where you tell them to, then you won’t care about losing the 1% commission fee from whatever company cuts the purse.
In fact, it won’t bother you at all because when you hold that ability to make money, you’ll always have different offers knocking on your door.
Amazon/Google/Facebook Aren’t Everything
Having been in internet business for a while, every so often the end of the world comes around.
It’s amazing to me how many “big baller internet entrepreneurs” collectively lost their lunches over this change in Amazon’s terms.
However, it’s no different to when Kindle Unlimited 1.0 came to an end. It’s no different to when Adsense stopped being a gold mine or when Facebook said, “You know… we aren’t going to accept those “MEET HORNY BITCHES TONIGHT” ads anymore.” Or when Google did the whole Panda/Penguin update which stopped spam from ranking.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, if you’ve designed your business in a way where you bring value and you decide what to promote, then you won’t be worried.
Even if you are worried, understand that whilst the sky literally fell in and the world ended every single time one of these things happened, whilst there’s still Company A trying to sell to Customer B who has the money to buy from Company A, there’s still business to be done.
If Amazon stops its affiliate program entirely, it’s not like there isn’t going to be a need for a person to put A in touch with B. And whilst that’s the case, Companies will always pay for that person to help them find their customers.