Selling your products on Amazon in addition to your main business website is a smart way to expand reach of your brand and drive new sales opportunities. Once you’ve created your Amazon store, you’ll need to start attracting customers.
There are both organic and paid advertising options when selling on Amazon. If you’re just starting out with your business, it might be worthwhile to focus on awareness to get your brand in front of as many new shoppers as possible. Let's take a look at two features you can use to promote your Amazon store, Sponsored Products and Amazon Associates.
Sponsored Products
Amazon’s Sponsored Products Program allows sellers to pay per click to their product pages and bid on keywords that are relevant to their categories. It works similar to any Google AdWords or Bing PPC campaign by displaying your ads across SERPs and product detail pages.
The Sponsored Product setup is simple:
Once your campaign is running, Amazon offers reporting to measure the success of your campaign and opportunities to optimize clicks and ROI. This way you can enhance the relevance of your ads for targeted keyword searches.
The Sponsored Product setup is simple:
- Set a Budget: If you’re advertising a specific product or deal, you’ll want to set a budget and a time period for the ad to run. You’ll only pay when a customer clicks on your ad.
- Choose Your Keywords: Amazon suggests keywords based on your products and categories, or you can choose your own.
- Select the Products: Choose whether you’re including all the products in your store or selecting a few for additional promotion.
Once your campaign is running, Amazon offers reporting to measure the success of your campaign and opportunities to optimize clicks and ROI. This way you can enhance the relevance of your ads for targeted keyword searches.
Amazon Associates
Affiliate marketing is a simple way to earn additional cash from your website, but it can serve as double duty if you are linking out to your store and products from your site, blog, or social media.
Joining Amazon Associates is free. When website owners and bloggers who are Associates create links for their sites, and customers click through those links and buy products from Amazon, the owners earn referral fees. This program can serve as promotion for your own online store, so you are getting both the sale of the product and the affiliate fee.
As a store owner, you’ll have to sign up as an Affiliate and an affiliated store. From there, you choose the products to include, then you can add the affiliate links within your content and native shopping ads on your page.
Just like Sponsored Products, the Affiliate program tracks clicks and metrics so you can optimize your links or banners.
There are additional (and free!) ways to advertise your products and stores. Sharing your store links and featured products across social media and your website is a great start.
Joining Amazon Associates is free. When website owners and bloggers who are Associates create links for their sites, and customers click through those links and buy products from Amazon, the owners earn referral fees. This program can serve as promotion for your own online store, so you are getting both the sale of the product and the affiliate fee.
As a store owner, you’ll have to sign up as an Affiliate and an affiliated store. From there, you choose the products to include, then you can add the affiliate links within your content and native shopping ads on your page.
Just like Sponsored Products, the Affiliate program tracks clicks and metrics so you can optimize your links or banners.
There are additional (and free!) ways to advertise your products and stores. Sharing your store links and featured products across social media and your website is a great start.
Kelly AyresKelly is a freelance SEO consultant based out of Washington D.C. She has worked for Philadelphia marketing agencies and writes for several lifestyle sites.
