Should You Become an Amazon Affiliate?
There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this new series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!
CapForge Founder and Owner Matt Remuzzi reacts to this so-called “lazy” way to make money by becoming an Amazon Affiliate.
Video Transcript:
Business Advice Video:
Side hustles I wish I knew about sooner part 1. This one’s good if you are broke and lazy plus it’s gonna make you a butt ton of money passively 24/7. Let’s go. First thing you’re gonna do is go to Amazon.com and scroll all the way to the bottom in the section that says “Make money with us”. You’re gonna click on “Become an Affiliate”. It’ll then bring you to a screen that looks like this, where you’re going to sign up for free. So then you’re just gonna search for a product to promote and for this example, I’m going to use this collagen powder. Then you’re gonna go to Pinterest.com and create a business account. Then you’re gonna hit create a pin once your account is all setup. You’re gonna come back over to Amazon and you’re going to save this photo as well as copy this entire description. And then up at the top where it says “Site Stripe”, you’re going to click on text and you’re going to copy this affiliate cause this is how you’re going to make commissions each time somebody purchases this product from your link. Then you’re gonna go to Pinterest and upload the photo, the description. Make sure you give it a title. And then you’re gonna post that affiliate link down here where it says “Destination Link”. And now when someone is scrolling on Pinterest and comes across your post, each time they purchase from your link you will get paid a commission for it. This is called affiliate marketing.
Matt’s Review:
Okay, well if you’re lazy you’re probably not gonna bother doing this. And I don’t know what a butt ton of money is that she’s promising you’re gonna make from this, but here’s the thing. You can write a software script pretty easily to take all kinds of images scraped off Amazon and then post them to Pinterest. And you could probably have that software put 40,000 images with 40,000 affiliate links on 40,000 pinboards and that’s fine, but unless somebody is looking at that and finding it and seeing it and clicking on it and making a buy decision from that, it’s not gonna make you anything. It’s gonna take a lot of time to do it if you’re doing it manually. If you can write the software to do it, great, but if you can write the software to do it so can a million other people. So now you’ve got a million people with vitamin gummies post a Pinterest.
And I would think if I was Pinterest I wouldn’t want all that affiliate spam on my site. So I don’t know if there’s a regulation where they look at stuff and decide to take it down. If it’s all just affiliate or if that’s breaking their terms of service. Regardless this is it’s a non-business. It’s a copy-paste to try to make a few bucks. But if you really wanna be in business, start a real business. And if you’re not really interested in putting any effort in, then there’s no free lunch. There’s no easy money. There’s no automatic cash flow that makes you a butt ton of money.
So to me, this is just sort of a waste of time idea, that makes her look like she’s giving great value and content, but it doesn’t really work. And it makes sense that it doesn’t work, right? Why would they pay you to do something that they could, I mean, for that matter Pinterest could spam their own boards with their own affiliate links and get money from Amazon. So this just isn’t a real business that doesn’t make a lot of sense. And I’d be shocked to find out if anybody’s really following this and making 40 to 50 thousand dollars a month.
