I Tested the Amazon Influencer Program — Here’s What it Actually Pays

I Tested the Amazon Influencer Program — Here’s What it Actually Pays Speaker 1: Most people assume that in order to make money on Amazon, you have to be an Amazon seller. But I've made over $100,000 in profit on Amazon without ever selling products, managing inventory or shipping anything, including drop shipping. I don't run a brand and I don't do FBA. Instead, I make all of this money from Amazon product review videos. I'll show you what these look like in a minute, but the gist is that my video goes on the Amazon product page. If a customer watches that video and then buys, I get a commission. I've done the Amazon Influencer Program for two years and have posted thousands of these simple shoppable videos. This library of videos now generates me hundreds of dollars of semi-passive income every single day. The really incredible part about this is this is something that anybody can start with no upfront costs. In this video, I'll tell you how the Amazon Influencer Program works, how to get approved, and at the end, I'll tell you some tips to scale it into a meaningful income. Many Amazon Influencer beginner courses charge hundreds of dollars, but I'm going to tell this to you for free. My name is Claire and I help Amazon Influencers scale their income to thousands per month. Whether you've noticed them before or not, there are Amazon influencers making money on almost every single product page on Amazon. There are a few places where these videos can show up, but here is the most common one. So you can see there's the brand photos here and then often there is also this video carousel. Inside this video carousel are all of these Amazon influencer videos. All of these videos under related videos are Amazon influencers. So you can see this girl Carly made a minute long video about this cake stand. Here it says she earns revenue. So every time somebody watches her video and then buys the product, she's earning a commission. But not everybody can just post these videos to Amazon willy nilly. There's an approval process to become an Amazon Influencer. If you're interested in getting started with the Amazon Influencer Program, you'll need to go through two different approval steps. The first step is getting approved to have a storefront on Amazon and the second step is getting approved to earn commissions on those shoppable videos on the product page. You apply to have an Amazon Influencer storefront here on this webpage. In order to be approved, one of your social media accounts has to be approved. You can use any of these social media accounts And at first, I would recommend just trying the accounts that you already have that you've been using personally or for business. If it's approved, it will prompt you to start filling out your storefront. And if it's denied, it will tell you that you're denied. If you do get denied on this first step, don't panic. It's actually super easy to get approved after this. You just need to know what Amazon's looking for. Amazon is looking for high engagement on that social media post because they want these Amazon influencer videos to also get high engagement from customers. So if you're not approved, then go start a brand new TikTok account. We're choosing TikTok because it's the easiest to get a high level of engagement quickly. On that brand new TikTok account, warm it up for a few days so that you don't get banned by TikTok. But then you want to focus on posts that get a lot of comments. One super easy way to get a lot of engagement and comments on these TikTok posts is to do some kind of guessing game. So this could be something like, guess how many candies are in this jar? Or guess which dog breed this is? Or guess where I'm hiking? To get approved, you will likely need a minimum of at least 12 posts on this new account. There is no minimum follower count to get approved for the Amazon Influencer Program. I have even seen one of my students get approved before with zero followers. So just focus on the comments and you will be fine. You can also do this approval step to try to get your social media account approved as many times as you'd like. It's an automatic process so you can apply once a day, even multiple times a day if you really want to. Applying itself doesn't get you approved, but for example, if you recently got at least 12 posts on that social media account or if you recently got a lot of comments, that would be a great time to try and apply. If you're trying to get approved and it's just not happening and you want more in-depth advice than is just shared in this video, I'll link my beginner's guide for the Amazon Influencer Program below. I am confident that you will get your social media account approved and when you do, you will be prompted to set up your Amazon Influencer storefront. You did the first step of the two-step approval. The next step is that you need to be approved to make commissions on the Amazon product pages. In Amazon Influencer lingo, we call this on-site placement or on-site commissions, as in you are on the Amazon website. In order to get approved for onsite commissions, you need to upload three audition videos to your Amazon Influencer storefront. Amazon doesn't call them audition videos, but that's what I call them because that is exactly what they're for. Amazon will then review these three videos, make sure that they are up to their standards and if they are, then you'll be approved to post as many videos as you want to your storefront and start making money on those Amazon product pages. When you're making these audition videos, I really want you to be able to get them approved the first time that they are posted and so there's a few important things to keep in mind. First of all, Amazon is going to be checking that you're following their rules. Amazon has an extensive list of rules and I recommend that you read through all of them in the Terms of Service and the Creator University that you'll have access to after you create your storefront. Here are some of the most common things that people get dinged for in their videos. So these are the most important things to keep in mind. You can have children in your shoppable videos, but for these audition videos, I would recommend not having any kids in them and also don't have any kids in your profile picture. You also want to be careful with health claims. For example, you can't say that something will definitely help you lose weight. So for these first three audition videos, I would recommend not doing them on products that are medically related at all. You also could get denied if any of your videos have a barcode in it. This could even be from a barcode that's on the product packaging. Just no barcodes. No swearing or using defamatory language about any of the products. And also make sure not to include any personal information. This is things like phone numbers, credit card address, Street name, license plate, even family pictures in the background could potentially set this one off. So those are all the things to avoid, but now here's some things that you do want to do. In general, keep these three audition videos between about 30 to 60 seconds. There's no magic number between 30 and 60, but in this range, it gives you enough time to talk about the product, but also not make too many mistakes. Make sure to actually demo the product. For example, if you're making a video about some tape, actually show the tape in action, like wrapping a box. Don't just wave it around and talk about it. For these first three videos, Pick products that you really love to talk about because that natural energy and charisma will come across on camera. It also can be easier if they are small products that you can hold in your hand because it's easier to get show the demo. Talk about how you personally, you yourself use the product and not how you anticipate the customer would want to use it. Talk about your own experience. Don't try to sell to the customer. Don't script. You don't want to sound like an ad. You just want to sound like You yourself talking about a product that you actually like. Your video quality doesn't need to be amazing, but you do want it to be decent. In your videos, make sure that there's not a ton of rumbly background noise. And if there is, when you film it, you can use a video editor to auto remove a lot of that background noise. You also want your lighting to be decently bright. So you could film facing a window or put a lamp or ring light in front of you. But there is no gear that's required to start making these videos. You can film them with your phone, use products around your house. You don't need to buy a special light or microphone right now. In order to check if these three audition videos have been approved yet, you want to go to your storefront, click Manage Content, Video, and then at this top right side, If you are approved for commissions, it'll look like this. And if you're not yet approved, it will likely have a blue lock on there. When you're approved, you'll likely get this confetti congratulations and congratulations, you are approved. After the second approval, you can go on to post as many Amazon Influencer videos as you'd like. These can be for all types of products that are sold on Amazon. It doesn't matter where you bought the product. If it's sold on Amazon, you can make a video for it. As a beginner, I recommend that you get to 100 videos on your storefront as quickly as you can. Try to do it even in a month if you can. There's no magic number about a hundred, but when you start to get to about a hundred shoppable videos, you begin to understand the workflow of creating a good shoppable video. Focus on making these videos quickly, not spending too much time in planning, filming, editing, but just shooting a quick video of you talking about what you like about the product. But the important thing that not a lot of people talk about is it's not really enough to just get into the Amazon Influencer Program. After you get into the Amazon Influencer Program, if you want to scale, you're going to need good strategies. There are three big things that you need to focus on in order to scale to thousands in the Amazon Influencer Program. These are efficiency, video quality and product selection. First, efficiency. Amazon Influencer data shows that the Amazon influencers who spend more time making each individual video don't necessarily make more money from it. You can make just as much per month spending zero to five minutes per video as you would spending 30 minutes per video. Because of this, it's important to just focus on good enough and get those videos out the door so they can start earning you commissions. If you'd like some additional help implementing these strategies to scale in the Amazon Influencer Program, check out my Build Past 1K course. The second thing you need to keep in mind in order to scale is video quality. You don't need fancy lighting, you don't need fancy gear or fancy editing, but your videos need to get watch time in order to be placed on the product carousel. Amazon cares about that engagement. You can do this through making engaging, happy, smiling videos talking about how you yourself authentically use that product. You can be helpful through answering questions, showing a demo of the product. The third thing that's super important if you want to scale in the Amazon Influencer Program is product selection. The two biggest stats that you need to keep in mind when selecting products is the sales volume of the product and how many Amazon Influencer videos are already tagged to that product. Many products on Amazon already have dozens or even hundreds or over a thousand Amazon Influencer videos already on that product. Amazon will only let about five to 10, maybe 15. Amazon Influencer videos on a product page at a time. So the more videos there are on a product page already, the more competition there is. Using an Amazon software like AMZScout can be a huge help in seeing more stats about the product. For each product, AMZScout will show you the monthly sales and also the total revenue or the sales times the product price. AMZScout also let me know that they are soon gonna be showing a count of the total number of influencer videos. So this will be super important to keep in mind. Another helpful feature that I love from AMZScout is that they have a resale rating on here. Oftentimes Amazon influencers will obtain an Amazon product in order to make a video about it and then resell it afterwards. So this can help have some additional information if you're considering that monetization route. I would love to help you continue to grow your Amazon Influencer income. You can learn more from me for free on my Amazon Influencer email newsletter and also on my YouTube channel. I also have a paid intermediate level course that teaches the full workflow, full system, full product research that you need in order to scale. I firmly believe that anybody can make hundreds or even thousands in the Amazon Influencer Program, but it takes intentional good strategy.