My Experience with Amazon Associates: How I Fixed My Affiliate Links
I think I just got busted by Amazon. They did it very nicely in this mass-automated email, but I do know from this that I am in quite a bit of trouble with Amazon. I am an Amazon affiliate or an Amazon associate—that’s how they prefer to call us. What that means is that I have an account where I can put links into my YouTube channel descriptions and blog posts. It even means that I can put those nice, boxy Amazon product boxes. When you click on one of those links, I get a small, very small percentage commission from what is sold. Amazon makes it very, very clear to everyone doing this that you are supposed to declare this. I absolutely knew I’m supposed to say if you click on this link, I get a bit of commission, but I didn’t know the exact wording. Well, I know I haven’t worded it correctly because I got this email. It’s totally clear, and I completely get that I’m supposed to declare it correctly. Because if you don’t do this, Amazon can absolutely shut you down, and then I will have hundreds, literally hundreds, of pages and posts with links that don’t do anything.
So in this video, I am going to fix absolutely everything, and I’ve got to do it quickly before I get another one of these emails. I’m going to show you how I’m fixing my Amazon associates links. I’m probably going to go through about 200 videos. I’m going to show you the exact wording, the exact disclaimer, that you’re supposed to write every time that you use one of these links. And through all of this, I’m going to show you exactly how much money I earned this month from Amazon Associates. So you’re going to see my entire revenue for how much money being an Amazon associate brings in for me. By the way, hello, I’m Neil Mossey. I’m a development producer, helping high-achieving creators and performers just like you to get ideas out of your head to make more people happy right here on YouTube. Oh my goodness, do we need your ideas. Look, here’s some footage of me in trouble before, trying to keep up with a movie star who’s well off his face in a speeding limo that’s well over the limit. Now we’re going about 70… 75. What’s the limit? 65. I had hair back then. Not for much longer.
The Friendly Reminder from Amazon Associates
So let’s first look at this very friendly reminder that I get from Amazon associates. “Hello associate.” That’s nice and personal. This is a recurring reminder that any time you share an associate link, it’s important to disclose that to your audience. Maybe I need some more serious music under this [HAPPY MUSIC]. You must include a legally compliant disclosure and identify yourself on your site as an Amazon associate with the language required by the operating agreement. I can’t even say it. So on your site, does that mean in my channel description? I guess it probably does. Now, it says a clear disclosure could be as simple as “paid link” or “#ad” or “#commissionsearned.” It should be placed near any associate link or product review in a location that customers will notice easily. In some places, it says you must put this disclaimer just before the link, never after the link, but here’s where I’m going to play it really safe.
The following statement is clearly and conspicuously appearing on my site: “As an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.” I should put a bit of echo on that, shouldn’t I? “As an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.” I know this is me wanting too much, but I wish that whatever link triggered this email, I wish they could hint at which post, which blog post, which link, or which YouTube video has triggered this. It would be so helpful.
Fixing Amazon Associate Links
So, let’s go into my YouTube studio dashboard, and we’re going to click on videos to see how much damage there is. I’m not looking forward to this at all. I’m going to do a search on the word “Amazon,” and if you click on this upside-down triangle, it brings up this menu. We’ll go down to description, and then we want the description to contain the word “Amazon.” Let’s see how many there are—oh, it’s 117. 117 videos to check and change. The other cool thing that we can do is to click on date. If you click on this arrow, it rearranges this list to bring the earliest videos first. Let’s dive into this first one just to see what’s here. This is from my video of how to remove marker pen, but if I go into the description, I’ve already done this one. I’ve got to go through every single video to check that it’s got this wording: “As an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.” Let’s run some music and speed this up a bit: [MUSIC].
Okay, so it’s 191 videos. Let me show you how to put this onto your channel level. I’ve gone into customization in my YouTube studio and then basic info. This is the channel description. Maybe I’ll just put it here: “As an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.” I just changed 191 YouTube videos. It took well over two hours. I’m really glad, though, because at least I know that those are finished. So now I’ve got to check all the other places where I might have put these links. This is my blog. I don’t think the instructions are that clear because if you have these boxes, surely those are clear ads for Amazon. But just to be safe, I’ve put the declaration that Amazon associates want me to put there. I just need to do that about 200 times now. Don’t worry, I won’t make you watch that, but I have put this disclaimer on my actual website itself. So I’ve put the “As an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.” I’ve put that onto my website so that the website itself is super clear.
Amazon Associates Earnings
But I know what you want to see next. It’s this. This is the hallowed dashboard of Amazon associates. I’m going to show you how much I earn in a month with Amazon associates as an Amazon affiliate—like there aren’t enough A’s in those words. This is the cause of all my worry right now, and oh my goodness, I’ve just sold something quite big. So on the main dashboard, I’m showing my earnings overview for the last 30 days, a little bit similar to YouTube except on this graph, the green line that doesn’t go up very much. That’s where the money is. And if I hover my cursor over this one—this looks nice and juicy—£14.70. Now I get quite a small percentage, so that must have been quite a large item. The other thing to bear in mind is that Amazon associates has an Amazon associates in every single marketplace. So for pretty much every country that you want to provide links for, it has its own Amazon associates site, and you have to be approved by each territory one by one.
Analyzing Earnings Reports
But let’s go to my earnings report. So in the last seven days, I’ve earned £18. What is good is they’ve just introduced a thing so that you can see all your accounts in one place. So in the United Kingdom, I earned £15 in the last seven days, and in the US, I earned $4. What’s not to like about that? I wonder if I can change that to the last 30 days? Right, wow, that’s good. So in the last month on the US Amazon associates site, I earned $72. And here in the UK, I earned £22. I’m glad I’ve captured it on video with you. You can see more detailed reports, give you a summary at the top and fees. It’s a really misleading word, fees, because it implies that I owe them some money. But I believe these are the fees that will come to me if I don’t get banned and kicked off and busted by Amazon. So I think we’re good, right, Amazon? You and me.
The squiggly graphs show the clicks, so the red line shows the number of times my links have been clicked on. For instance, on the 13th of September, my links were clicked on 35 times, and one item was ordered from which I earned $1.01. Let’s go to this big one up here. My links were clicked on 18 times, 12 items were ordered from that. That’s quite a high ratio for which I earn, and it sort of adds it all up and gives you these figures. It’s not something I’m glued to; it’s probably something I only check every couple of months. My link clicks have been responsible for $2,020 worth of items being shipped, and that was on 461 clicks of my links. And 50 items were ordered, so that conversion rate, I believe, is 10.85 percent. What I love just browsing through is this table here because it actually lists every single item that has been bought. Some strange stuff there, which I haven’t put links to. But what happens is if someone goes to Amazon using one of my links and they don’t buy the item, but they then go on to buy something else, I believe I earn a commission on that instead.
If I click on this button here, earnings, this one’s a bit more understandable for me because it’s in order of total items shipped. I can reorder this list to see what brought in the most revenue. So if I click on total revenue, look at that, I sold a camera. Oh my goodness, and for that one camera, I picked up £29.92, so I’m really pleased with that. And I also sold an air purifier. So you know the goodness just doesn’t stop on this channel, does it? These are my squiggly lines for the United Kingdom sales. On the 5th of October, I earned £14.70 on two ordered items, which came from 18 clicks of my links. But what could it be? Let’s click on the earnings button and order it by total revenue. My link was responsible for the sale of one dehumidifier at £174.99, which meant that I received £12.25. I sold seven spool lines! If you’ve seen any of my videos about how much I earn on YouTube, my biggest problem right now is that I am a garden tools guy because my most popular videos aren’t about helping creators and performers just like you here on YouTube. They’re there to help you learn how to change a trimmer line for cutting down the weeds in the garden, and that brought in £2.85. This is probably why I really need to wind that down, and if you subscribe to this channel, you will see my ongoing story with how I am niching this channel. I think the next video is going to be about me deleting videos and removing videos, so if you want to come along for the ride for that, click on the subscribe button. Every subscription is really truly appreciated.
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