This one is for the newbs.
KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid
There are tons of posts, methods, twists, etc to making money, the basics are simple:
- Generate traffic
- Generate profit from that traffic
I recently wanted to see just how easy and low effort I could make some side money, so I took these basics to the extreme.
What you need:
1.An Amazon Affiliates account
2.A niche
3.A subreddit in that niche that allows affiliate links
4.A decently warmed-up Reddit account (I use one with over 50k Karma)
My target subreddit has under 20k subs, and under 200 active people on at any time. What you want to do here is to find people who are WARM. In marketing, this means they are already ready to buy something, with a wallet in hand. My target sub also meets this criterion.
Find lightning deals or other steep discounts on Amazon and grab your affiliate link. These deals should be loosely passably related to your niche. Post your link to the subreddit of your choice, with a descriptive title of the deal. Add in "thought this could be useful to you guys" or other similar text and don't just spam your link. Try to also be somewhat active in the sub as well prior to your first post. just open it a few times a week and comment on some reply chains. If you do this, mods are less likely to ban you for spamming. Look like a real person and you'll be treated like one.
That's it! Doing this exact thing has generated over $7000 in affiliate Amazon sales in the last week, with an average of about 3% commission. I posted a total of maybe 10 links over that period. The goal here is NOT to get people to buy whatever you link. The goal is to get your affiliate cookie on as many people's devices as possible because you get a commission for ANYTHING they buy within the 24 hours that they click on your link. If you can get them to add an item to their cart, it lasts even longer (so look for those "Add to cart" deals on Amazon!). Find deals that make people CLICK, not necessarily buy.
Taking this a step further, you can purchase upvotes and engage on your post with alt accounts, making it seem well received. I have also found someone who runs an affiliate website that seems to scrape deals in my niche automatically. All I have to do is go to this person's site, grab my own affiliate link to those products, and post them to the subreddit! Send a few upvotes and disappear. Takes all of 20 minutes. I posted NOTHING for 3 days (Sat, Sun, Mon) and those links were still working hard!
These stats do not include the last 24 or so hours' worth of sales, where I have some more sales which push me to the numbers stated. Keep in mind, you only get your commission once the item is shipped, so half of my commission is still not even accounted for here!