a lot of content creators aren't making the kind of money they used to because they just don't get the kind of traffic they used to AI has completely changed the game and then Google didn't do us any favors did they this video today is being sponsored by cloudways cloudways is the only hosting provider that I use for all of my websites and when I work with clients if I can convince them I move their sites over to cloudways too it is by far the best deal for the Fantastic service the fantastic product that they provide if you need to host a website WordPress or otherwise cloudways is the place to do it now what if I could tell you that there's a way that even without you driving a bunch more traffic to your own content you could still make quite a bit more money and depending on what you like maybe have a lot of fun in the process let me show you [Music] how for me this started about a year ago when I made this video in this video I was essentially just telling a story of how I upgraded my canned food storage system at home and I was talking about this particular product I didn't think a whole lot of it at the time it was a product I already owned which is pretty cool makes it really easy to talk about I didn't have to go spend a bunch of money but if you've heard me talk for a while you may have heard me suggest that a lot of times as a content creator early on if you want to talk about products you often need to spend some of your own money and buy some of your own products especially in the early days so that you can make really good review content because most review content on the internet is really bad it's created by people who have never actually touched the product so if you can create something good and useful you can really stand out well the same is true today except there were more people getting their hands on the product but they're still doing a really bad job and it's really easy to stand out in this video I stood out enough to the point where a few months ago the company that makes this product reached out to me and they wanted to do a campaign with me the way that it worked is they actually sent me some more free product which is what I meant when I said depending on your personality and what you like if you like getting stuff stuff that you would actually use you like getting it for free this is really really good it's going to work for you but here's the way the campaign worked it was run through Amazon and it was run through their creator connections um and Creator rewards system the way that those work is that the seller of the actual product they pay to increase the commission on the products for a certain window of time and then you join those campaigns and if you make a referral on those products you're going to get higher commissions if you're used to getting commissions on Amazon of 1 or two or 3% check out some of this stuff here's Creator connections I'm not filtering at all these are just what's showing up right now at the top but some of these products 30% Commission on a physical product 10% 15 10 I saw one just yesterday at the top that was 50% but a lot of these are 10 15 25% that's pretty crazy we never see those kinds of commissions or almost never on physical products not on Amazon not anywhere else but you can during these windows of time for example this one here is running December 18th through February 19th so for 2 months if you make any if you make any sales of this product you can get a 25% commission what I like to do is I like to filter this down using their filters or um searching specific keywords to find things that are relevant to my Niche to my IND IND and then I can go sign up for those things now in order to do this you need to get on Amazon you need to start becoming an affiliate for Amazon and you need to become an Amazon influencer this is the next level up so step one become an Amazon influencer now to do this you can't just have a Blog you need to have a social media presence I've been telling you for a while how important it is to build up your brand so that you're seen in other places to build up credibility and get people to want to come over to your website and social media is the way to do that for the Amazon influencer program they want people who are influencers on social media but you don't have to be a big influencer if you have a Facebook or an Instagram or a Tik Tok they're actually pretty easy to build up enough of a following um often times if you can get like 500 followers and you can do that pretty quick if you just focus and dedicate yourself for a couple of weeks to an Instagram or a Tik Tok you can get enough followers to get accepted to this now one of the best ways to incorporate social media as well as your Amazon storefront and everything is to link all this stuff from your website and have all of these things linked back to your website you'll notice that in my storefront here I'm able to link to all my social profiles absolutely do that from all your social profiles make sure you're linking back to your website try to steer people to be able to see the presence that you have across the entire web and on your website make sure that you're featuring all your social profiles but also you may find that it's beneficial to go ahead and have a recommended products page page and there you might feature as part of that page your Amazon storefront now if you're doing social media and you don't have your own website yet I highly recommend you start one go check out cloudways today start a website you can actually go ahead and start building it for free for the first few days you don't even have to pay anything you can just try out cloudways and see if this is something you can do what I found even though Amazon doesn't give us any specific numbers as to the requirements they just say that you need to have a reasonable besides following I found that it was when I hit 2,000 subscribers that was the point where I got accepted you can apply as many times as you want and I did I applied several times I applied right before 2000 and then as soon as I hit 2,000 literally I had exactly 2,000 subscribers I applied and was immediately accepted since then I ran that campaign here I did a couple of dedicated videos to three different specific products that they sent me and then I did a live stream I went for about an hour live on Amazon and in doing so people that were shopping for that product were able to see that I was live that I was talking about the product and answering questions I could answer their questions and then if they watch my video even if they just watch my video on Amazon they never even have to come to my YouTube channel or my website if they just watch my video and then make the decision to buy I get the commission now this was really cool because not only do I get to do that through the Amazon influencer program which once you're in you can do that all the time and get regular commissions on all sorts of sales but on top of that because they were running a Creator connections campaign and because I had accepted that campaign there was an increased commission for that window of time so on all of those sales instead of making a few percent I was making something like 15% now Nathan on our team has been doing this for months now and he's just been making lots of content he's at the point where he's literally receiving numerous packages of free product on Amazon every single day and then he makes little videos about it shows the use of it and then posts them to Amazon and that's it but he made really good money last month and is on track to do really well again this month because he's just creating content literally on Amazon now how does this fit into your overall strategy yes it's a great way to get monetized it's also another way to get a lot of free stuff from Amazon but what does it do for your credibility if you're just looking to try to make some money and get lots of cool free stuff even if you have a YouTube Channel or a social media presence in one particular Niche you can accept products about anything any type of product you can get all sorts of shoes and stuff if you want to that might not do anything to build your brand credibility but it's a way to make some extra money in the short term especially while a lot of us are still working on figuring out exactly how we're going to make our blog content work going forward but the approach that I'm choosing to take is that I'm only accepting products and I'm only working with companies that make products that fit with my Niche or that would be interesting or useful products for my intended audience that's just going to help strengthen my brand because now I'm across more platforms so while I have a YouTube channel and yes there's an Instagram and a Facebook associated with it they're not really the primary place where I'm posting content but I have those because that's where some people are but now I'm also on Amazon under my brand name Pantry preparedness let me tell you about another thing that I did I made this video this was a video about these kinds of of gravity water filters these are three filters that I bought myself with my money with the intent to review them and do a comparison and because of that I was able to make a really good comparison video and as a result of that I didn't even have to go on Amazon I got a bunch of emails from different companies that wanted to send me free water filters to test I ended up taking this one it's a different style of water filter this is a reverse osmosis filter and I just made a video showing how the Filter Works did a little review of the filter and I got like this $300 filter for free now recently I've spent a little bit more time here in Creator connections looking for products that I felt like would be a good fit once you're in you can just do this you just come here to Amazon Associates so when you're on Amazon you click the site stripe you end up on the back end and there's influencers here so you can learn how to get started and see your storefront that's what I showed you here and it just shows all the posts that I've made with the different products that I reviewed haven't done a ton yet myself and even though I haven't done a ton I come over here under promotions to Creator connection and I see all these things I found some products I was interested in and then when you find one you like click view details here then you can send a message to the brand and I did that I messaged several Brands here and one in particular that I was interested in is selling this fire pit right here that's $130 now I knew that this one was available under Creator connections so I messaged them and just said hey I would love to test out this product for you and do a video review on Amazon but I don't have one would you be willing to work with me and even though I don't have a lot of history here on the Amazon influencer program they reached back out and said yeah we'll work with you but would you rather have this one or do you want this one the $400 one that's bigger and honestly would be a better fit for my family and of course I picked the bigger one and now I have a brand new big smokeless fire pit ready to assemble in my living room well I'm not going to use it in my living room I'll take it in my backyard but it's literally I got it for free and all I have to do is I have to make a little video here for Amazon and then I have to post about it on my social media too that's what I agreed to and I get a Great Commission on anybody who makes a purchase after watching my video content creators people with any influence any audience at all who get signed up through this program they don't have to use their own traffic and that's what's beautiful if I click into this product I can scroll down to the videos for this product these are videos that people have made about this product mine is going to show up there too and so if my video is more helpful than this 7 second one and so somebody chooses to click on my video and see what I had to say about it and then they make the purchase I get the commission I get to take Amazon's traffic and monetize it for myself and I can use this to strengthen my own brand reputation if I do it right and use it to make a bunch more money than a lot of us are currently making right now from our blogs why not do this can't think of a good reason in fact this seems like a really great excuse to get yourself going on at least one social media platform to strengthen your brand now if you are an existing business selling specific products and you're working on getting into content to be able to promote that business promoting other people's products may not be the right thing for you that is a great reason to not get into this but if you are a content creator first this is a fantastic path to be able to make a good income I'm super confident that if you follow through with this you're going to have a lot of fun because you're going to be able to get a lot of cool stuff but also you're going to be able to make a good income and you can start doing this early on even if you don't have a lot of traffic even if you don't have tons of content take what you have repurpose it for a social media platform focus on one platform and then get yourself into the Amazon influencer program it's a great way to make some good money and to start doing that actually pretty quickly thanks for watching we'll see you again next time [Music]