How to Become an Amazon Influencer: Complete Guide + 13 Strategies

With more than half a trillion U.S. dollars in annual revenue, Amazon is the uncontested largest online shopping platform on the planet, making it an ideal place for finding and selling products.

If you’re an influencer who wants to leverage Amazon’s popularity, product selection, and shopping experience, the platform offers the opportunity to turn your social media presence into sales through the Amazon Influencer Program. It’s designed for influencers who want to monetize their following and turn it into commission-based earnings.

But what is an Amazon influencer? And how to become an Amazon influencer?

Read on to discover what it is, why it’s a great opportunity for influencers, how it works, and strategies you should follow to achieve success.

What is the Amazon Influencer Program?

37% of all traffic on Amazon comes from Amazon influencers. Since its launch in 2017, the influencer program has become an integral part of how Amazon generates traffic and sales.

It’s an extension of the more established Amazon Associates Program, but is designed to provide influencers with the tools to promote offers and make sales without having their own website. The program provides influencers with a customizable Amazon Storefront where influencers can showcase products, curate lists, and even create Amazon Posts.

For influencers, it’s a great way to monetize their social media following by recommending products from the huge selection of options on Amazon. The Amazon Storefront acts as a website where influencers can direct their social media traffic, providing an on-brand experience and earning commissions through sales.

Key Features

The Amazon Influencer Program offers a range of powerful features that make it easy to set up a storefront and earn commissions. Here are a few of the main features that people with a social media presence can leverage:

• Customizable Storefront. Influencers can create a personalized Amazon Storefront that includes curated product lists, creative content, and a vanity URL (e.g. amazon.com/influencer-name), making it easy to display, share, and promote products to audiences on social media.
• Amazon Posts. Showcase products in Amazon-native Instagram-like posts, designed to capture attention and make it easy to buy your products. The posts will then be placed on Amazon searches, details pages, and feeds, getting your store in front of people searching for similar products.
• Monetization Possibilities. Amazon offers a variety of ways to earn money. The most direct option is to earn commissions from sales, with most products earning between 1% and 10%. But it’s also possible to boost earnings through the Amazon Bounty Program and Amazon Live.

Why Become an Amazon Influencer?

Having a social media presence comes with many opportunities to make money. But few can match the advantages offered by partnering up with an ecommerce giant like Amazon if you want a convenient, lucrative, and scalable way to turn your followers into earnings.

Leverage Amazon’s Credibility

72% of consumers trust Amazon when shopping online. The ecommerce platform is widely recognized all over the world and has earned consumer trust as a reliable, fast, and convenient way of getting almost anything one could need.

For influencers, that trust can be very appealing. Instead of building their store or promoting less-known third-party sellers, they can take advantage of the fact that people are used to buying on Amazon.

Plus, Amazon offers fast shipping, competitive prices, a wide range of products to choose from, and great customer service, which can make people much more confident when purchasing something you recommend.

Vast Amazon Catalog

Amazon has over 600 million products listed on the marketplace, with 12 million of these items sold by Amazon itself. That’s a huge catalog of products to choose from, giving influencers complete freedom over what they want to promote to match their brand, the audience needs, and earnings goals.

Even though some specific products may be unavailable for promotion, you can usually find similar options, giving you the ability to curate an exclusive list of products and update it regularly to keep your audience coming back.

Engaging Storefront

Amazon offers the opportunity to create customizable Storefronts for influencers who take part in the program. These influencer Storefronts serve as your central hub on the Amazon marketplace, going well beyond merely displaying products that you choose to promote.

You can also showcase your brand, curate product collections, and share expertise using content that will then be promoted by Amazon, serving as a way to generate traffic and sales on the platform itself rather than just on your social media profile.

The Amazon Influencer Program Requirements and Application Process

Before you can figure out how to become an Amazon influencer, it’s important to gain a solid understanding of the program’s requirements and the Amazon Storefront application process. The good news is that it isn’t too complicated and that people with a social media presence have a pretty good chance of being accepted.

Let’s go over the key aspects that will help you figure out how to get an Amazon Storefront and become an influencer on the platform.

Eligibility

Amazon doesn’t allow anyone to join the program and has a few requirements that you’ll need to meet. Before investing your time into learning more about how to be an Amazon influencer, you need to figure out whether you can even be accepted.

Here are the main criteria:

• Location. To be considered for the program, you will need to either live in or conduct business in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, or India.
• Social Media Platforms. You will also need the account you apply with to be on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, as these are the only social media platforms that Amazon is looking to promote its products in through the influencer program. If you are using Facebook or Instagram, you’ll also need to have a Business account.

Review

After you’ve submitted the necessary information, Amazon will review your details and evaluate if you’re a good fit.

Amazon will also evaluate your application form, looking at the accuracy and thoroughness of the information you provide. Applicants need to show that they are serious, giving specific details about their social media presence, audience, and content strategy.

Here are the things that Amazon looks at:

• Social Media Presence. Since the program revolves around promoting products on social media, it makes sense that participants must have an established social media presence. While Amazon doesn’t disclose the minimum number of followers, you need to have an audience that’s engaged, on a platform aligned with the offers you want to promote.
• Quality Content. Merely having a social media presence is not enough. You also need to create high-quality content that showcases your expertise around the subject. Amazon wants influencers who promote relevant products, create a variety of content, and have high production quality standards.

Onboarding

Once an influencer is accepted into the program, Amazon makes it a priority to put them in a position to succeed. That involves a comprehensive onboarding process designed to provide the creator everything they need to figure out how to create an Amazon Storefront as an influencer and start promoting products.

Here’s what you can expect to receive once you’re in:

• Onboarding Resources. Amazon offers a range of materials that you can go through to learn how to set everything up. That includes tutorials, help articles, guides, and workshops for creating a storefront, developing content, and promoting products.
• Support. If you have specific questions or face issues, you can always reach out to the Amazon Influencer Program support team, who will answer questions and offer guidance.
• Tracking. You will also have access to tracking and reporting tools, which should help you see what’s working as you’re building your storefront and making product recommendations.

How the Amazon Influencer Program Works

The Amazon Influencer Program is designed to provide influencers with a range of opportunities to promote products on their social media profile as well as on Amazon. To have a better chance of succeeding, it’s a good idea to go over the main principles that the program is based on.

The Storefront

The Amazon Storefront is at the center of the entire influencer program, serving as a personalized hub where you showcase your influencer brand and curate product collections. Here’s what you can do with the Amazon Storefront:

• Use your storefront to introduce what your store is about, displaying products in a variety of ways designed to drive sales. For example, you can put together idea lists that are custom product categories based on any criteria you like. This allows you to create custom experiences that Amazon shoppers won’t find elsewhere.
• Personalize every aspect of your store, including the layout, color scheme, brand elements, and banner images. Having a distinct store can offer almost the same customer experience as a website, all in the trusted and familiar Amazon shopping environment.
• Showcase a variety of engaging content formats, such as product images, text descriptions, and even short video clips. Amazon makes it easy to display products and create more engaging product listings that are better matched to your audience.
• Keep the full attention of your Amazon Storefront’s visitors by not having to deal with competitor ads. Your products and links are the only ones present on your Storefront, eliminating distractions and ensuring that you don’t lose the commission to other sellers or affiliates.

Monetization

To make the Amazon Influencer Program attractive to the top influencers on social media, Amazon offers a variety of monetization options, with excellent commissions and multiple ways to earn money by engaging your audience.

• The most straightforward way to make money as an Amazon influencer is to direct traffic to your Amazon Storefront and generate sales. The commission rate for different categories of products can range from 1% to 10%, offering an excellent opportunity to generate a significant amount with each social media post you direct to your store.
• Another popular method for earning money on the program is to use the Amazon Bounty Program. It offers fixed commissions for getting visitors to register for various Amazon services, such as Audible, Amazon Music, or Amazon Prime. A huge benefit of the program is that you can get commissions for free trials, not just purchases.
• Amazon is making video a key part of its influencer program, incentivizing users to create video content with opportunities to make sales. You can upload pre-recorded videos or run live-streaming events on the platform, where you can answer questions, recommend products, and run promotions that earn you commissions.

Promoting Products

Since the Amazon Influencer Program is only accessible to people who have a following, it makes sense that the majority of promotions will happen on your social media profiles. Here’s how you can use different social media platforms to maximize your chances:

• Use Instagram to showcase high-quality photos of the products, together with engaging descriptions. Make sure to include a link in the bio to make it easy for people to find your store.
• Create short-form videos on TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram to get more views, introduce products, and showcase your personality to connect with viewers and strengthen your personal brand.
• Utilize YouTube and Facebook for creating long-form content that provides a more in-depth look at the products. You can also create and review product lists for specific purposes, which goes well with Amazon Storefront and its flexible product categorization.

How to Succeed as an Amazon Influencer: 15 Essential Strategies

Even though Amazon offers a range of tools for succeeding as an influencer, figuring out how to become an Amazon Influencer can be tricky.

To fast-track your results and give yourself the best chance of success, check out this comprehensive list of powerful strategies you can use to leverage your social media audience into consistent sales and commissions on Amazon.

Define Your Niche

If you’re applying for the Amazon Influencer Program, chances are you already achieved some success on social media. But while it’s possible to grow an audience on social media without having a clearly defined focus or niche, it can be very helpful if you’re trying to monetize your presence and become a trusted authority people turn to for product recommendations.

That’s why a great place to start when figuring out how to become an Amazon influencer is to define the niche you want to enter and the types of products you want to promote. Then, you can consider how you can better align your brand to your Amazon Storefront.

You don’t necessarily need to make drastic changes or lose authenticity, but it’s a good idea to reevaluate the topics you’re covering, focusing on the most relevant content that can help you attract the people you want to recommend products to.

Choose the Right Products

Another key aspect to succeeding as an Amazon Influencer is choosing the right products to promote. Amazon has millions of products from a variety of sellers, so you need to have a process for balancing profitability, relevance, and authenticity to achieve success.

For one thing, it’s always easier to promote products that you can get excited about. Ideally, these are products you’ve tried and loved yourself, or at least want to try now. Having genuine interest will translate into your messaging, helping you create more engaging content that resonates with your audience.

You should also prioritize products that are high quality. Do your research and pick products that have good reviews and performance, as that will determine not just your sales numbers but also your reputation. For best results, identify a problem your audience is facing (and that you’re facing or want to solve as well), and then find the best products for the job.

Create a Beautiful Storefront

Your Amazon Storefront is the most important part of your business. It’s where you can show who you are, display your curated product selection, and separate yourself from all the other stores on the platform.

The best place to start when building your Amazon Storefront is to start with the essentials. Create a new storefront in your Amazon account and choose a profile photo, a cover photo, a page title, and a page tagline. These are key elements that will have to encompass your brand and key message, helping people instantly recognize where they are once they hit your store.

Make sure that your branding is consistent with your social media presence, and craft a tagline that clearly explains what people can expect.

Curate Product Collections

One of the best tools Amazon offers to influencers is the ability to create custom collections that showcase products you recommend based on curated copywriters. These collections offer countless opportunities for generating interest in your products while also showcasing your expertise through useful recommendations for a specific purpose.

Depending on your niche, these lists could include school essentials, new parent must-haves, camping checklists, coffee-making kits, small space living hacks, or anything else that’s relevant to your audience.

The great thing about collections is that they cover an entire theme, offering a specific solution using a set of products in your list of recommendations. People who are interested are much more likely to not just buy one or two products but the entire list, which can provide a huge boost to your earnings.

Leverage Your Social Media Platform

When you submit your Amazon Influencer Program application, you’ll need to choose the main social media platform you want to be considered. So while you don’t have to limit yourself to that single platform, it’s a good idea to think about how you could leverage its unique advantages to create more engaging content that generates interest in the products you promote.

• For Instagram, that could mean focusing on creating eye-catching visuals that display your products and show how they work.
• For a platform like YouTube, that could be in-depth reviews of the products, covering their features, advantages, and use cases.
• If you’re using TikTok, you could focus on short-form engaging videos around your products and collections. TikTok is also great for utilizing meme culture to create viral videos that boost your reach.

Engage Your Audience

If you want to get your audience excited about what you’re promoting, simply posting links to your products won’t be enough. Social media is all about conversation, so you need to find ways to engage your audience and get them to participate in the discussions.

One of the easiest ways to do that is to encourage people to share their opinions in the comments. You could ask them what they think or suggest sharing questions about the challenges they’re facing or the solutions they’ve tried before.

To take it a step further, you could even run live video Q&A sessions, answering questions as they come in, sharing your preferences, and guiding people looking for solutions. This works great on multiple levels, as you can establish your expertise while also showcasing your personality and establishing a more personal relationship with your followers.

Create Useful Content

71% of Gen Zers use social media as their go-to way to discover new products. But while some will be ready to buy once they see your posts, others will need to learn more about the products and the potential alternatives before making a decision.

If you want to stand out in your niche, you should balance promotional posts with content that’s more in-depth, educational, and focused on providing value. This type of content can generate a lot of interest from people who know they need a solution but don’t have a clear idea of which options they should choose.

Some good options to consider when creating informative content are:

• Problem-based videos or blogs that discuss different approaches for overcoming a specific challenge. You can break down the problem into actionable steps, show the best ways to approach it, and explore the best solutions.
• Review-type content that goes over the top products in a niche, covering the pros and cons, use cases, and anything else the customer might want to know before making a choice.
• Your own experiences with a product, especially over a period of time. Content featuring influencers who try out a product for a few weeks or a month and track their results is incredibly popular and can get your current followers interested while also casting a wider net on social media.

Utilize UGC

User-generated content (UGC) is 35% more memorable than traditional content. And while getting in front of the camera yourself can be very effective, you can get a significant boost in engagement and sales if you find ways to also feature your customers.

To get your followers to create content around the products you’re promoting, you could run a UGC contest, asking people to share photos or videos of them using the products and using hashtags to bring attention to your social media brand. You can then reshare this content on your feed to give your products a ton of credibility using social proof.

The most obvious benefit of featuring UGC on social media is that people will be much more likely to trust your recommendations seeing other users succeed with the products. But just as importantly, you’ll nurture a community that wants to interact with you, which will help you reach more people and discover what products they like the most.

Be Transparent

As an influencer, your biggest asset is your reputation. Building a loyal and engaged following takes a lot of time, so your main priority should be maintaining your image as a reputable source of information. And that requires you to be completely transparent about your intentions when promoting products through the Amazon Affiliate Program.

You need to disclose your affiliate relationship and clearly state that if they make a purchase, you will get compensated. However, you should also emphasize that you have a strict product selection process and that you won’t promote anything that you don’t believe in.

When promoting products, it’s all about providing value and being authentic instead of overhyping a product with unrealistic claims. Try to provide a balanced view and talk about some of the drawbacks as well, not just the things that make the product stand out.

Keep Tabs on Trends

Product trends on Amazon change at a rapid pace. There will always be products that remain popular because of their high quality, but new releases and changing consumer habits can shift the preferences of audiences in a matter of months, if not weeks.

As an influencer, it’s your job to stay ahead of these trends and be strategic in how you update your product selection to ensure you leverage the latest buzz in your niche. By spotting the rise of products early, you can tap into the initial excitement and become one of the voices that helps the product take off.

To track trends, monitor what products are generating sales and reviews in your niche, check out other social media figures in your field, and keep track of new product releases, evaluating whether they should replace some of the products in your Storefront.

Experiment with Content Types

Your success as an influence on Amazon will often come down to how well you’re able to capture the attention of people on social media. While you should have a proven content strategy on your main platform that’s helped you grow your audience and make sales, it’s a good idea to step outside your comfort zone and experiment with new content types.

For example, while you may not be used to doing live events as part of your social media presence, they offer many advantages for engaging your audience. Since Amazon has its own live stream platform for showcasing products and generating sales, it’s a great opportunity to consider if you want to create more partnership opportunities with brands.

Similarly, you should explore ways to boost your presence on other social media platforms. If you’re mainly on Instagram, consider creating long-form content on YouTube. If you’re mainly creating TikTok videos, you could benefit from cross-posting on other platforms where you could focus more on educating your audience.

Analyze Performance

The only way to improve performance is to understand what’s working. As an Amazon Influencer, you have many options for tracking your sales performance and optimizing for best results.

One option is to use Amazon’s built-in reporting features, which can offer insights into your earnings, orders, referrals, daily trends, and more. But you should also look at your performance on a broader scale.

That means tracking your social media performance and analyzing which posts generate the most engagement, clicks, and sales. It also means looking at product performance, both individually and as part of collections. For best results, keep optimizing your selection, looking for more best sellers to replace products that don’t generate enough interest.

Have a Long Term Outlook

At the most basic level, making more sales as an Amazon influencer comes down to how much traffic you can send from your social media profile to your Storefront. But at the same time, there are other things you can build on to maximize your results in the long term future.

One of the key ingredients of long-term success on the platform is staying consistent with your niche and building on it as your store and social media presence evolve. You should experiment with new product types and collections, regularly revamping your Storefront’s focus as the niche evolves and new trends emerge.

But perhaps most importantly, you should stay true to the vision you have for the type of audience you want to cater to, which will sometimes mean passing on potentially lucrative short-term opportunities if they don’t match your brand and the types of products you want to associate your store with.

Bottom Line

Becoming an Amazon influencer is one of the best ways to monetize your social media presence, enhancing your content with tailored product recommendations. Amazon’s vast product selection, together with advanced storefront customization options, make it a great platform to work with if you want to offer your followers products they can get excited about.

By following the strategies above, you can quickly figure out how to become an Amazon influencer and turn your social media presence into a consistent revenue source.