4 Simple Ways to Make Money with Amazon

Though Amazon.com is the world’s largest online retailer, it also provides opportunities for others (i.e. you) to get in on the action. Here are four simple ways you can get a piece of the Amazon pie.

 

1. Sell Your Stuff on Amazon

Amazon has created an online marketplace that consumers can trust. You can use that reputation to help sell your own items with the Selling on Amazon program.

To sell your stuff, simply find the Amazon listing for whatever item you want to sell and add yours to the list. When Amazon shoppers find the item they are looking for, on the side of the page they see a “More Buying Choices” widget that displays third-party offers. This is where your listing shows up.

Rather than having a yard sale, this can be a good way to get rid of some stuff around the house that you aren’t using anymore. For some items, such as books or video games, you can get a better price on Amazon than at a yard sale because of the scale of the marketplace.

With a little more effort, you could develop this into a business model of its own. If you have a supplier, or if you are a supplier of something yourself, the Amazon Seller program provides several features to help you liquidize your products.

 

2. Create Your Own Stuff to Sell on Amazon

In addition to selling other products, Amazon provides a few options for marketing original content.

• Kindle E-books — If you are a writer, it is relatively simple to sell your e-books through the Amazon Kindle Store. When you upload your book, you set the price and get a percentage of every copy that is sold. To get started, check out the Kindle Direct Publishing website.
• Blog Publishing — In addition to e-books, the Amazon Kindle can also deliver blog subscriptions. If you are a blogger, Amazon’s Kindle Publishing for Blogs is an easy way to monetize your site. Simply register your blog with Amazon, and when your readers with a Kindle subscribe you get a percentage of the monthly subscription price.
  
• CreateSpace — To reach a wider audience, you can have your content printed in traditional book format with CreateSpace. This self-publishing option is notable for its print-on-demand feature, allowing copies of your work to be published as they are ordered instead of several hundreds or thousands at once.

 

3. Do Stuff for Other People on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Computers and machines have made a lot of routine, mundane tasks a lot simpler by automating the process. It’s cheaper and easier for companies to have machines doing work than human beings. However, there are some things that computers and machines just aren’t good at. This is the gap Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is trying to close.

Companies or individuals (requesters) come to Mechanical Turk with some work that needs to be done. These tasks (called HITs) can be anything from answering a survey to writing a blog post to transcribing an interview. The requesters set the reward for each HIT based on the difficulty and time required to complete it. Workers accept HITs and have a time limit (also set by the requester) to complete and submit them. If the work is accepted by the requester, the reward is credited to the worker’s Amazon Payments account.

Mechanical Turk probably won’t make you rich, but it’s a pretty simple way to make a few bucks.

 

4. Advertise Stuff for Amazon

The Amazon Associates Program is one of the biggest affiliate programs on the ‘net. Depending on your location (sorry, Californians), this can be a great way to make money online. Like many other affiliate programs, Amazon pays associates a commission (or an “advertising fee,” as Amazon calls it) for products purchased on Amazon through your affiliate link.

With the Program, there are several ways to get people to Amazon through your links. There are banners and widgets that are pre-coded and made available to associates to put on blogs and other websites. You can also create your own links to any page or product to put in your articles and blog posts. The Site Stripe feature also makes it easy to spread your affiliate links through social media sites Twitter and Facebook.

 

Make Money with Amazon Today

With all of these services, Amazon makes it even easier for you to make money online. Take any of these methods, put it into practice, and start making money with Amazon today.

Have you been earning with any of these methods? Leave your comments below.