I’ve been a digital entrepreneur for over 12+ years, primarily making my revenue as a content creator. I started out on YouTube first, creating videos that documented our life and travels on multiple channels, but our largest one at that time was Being Mommy with Style.
Some of the information below includes affiliate links. When you click these links I may make a commission from your purchase. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Creating videos for YouTube was great fun, I met lots of amazing people, got extraordinary travel opportunities and was able to travel with both my family and by myself. We received invites to exclusive family events that were once in a lifetime opportunities. I was invited to attend a conference for creators at an International location and flew out of the country for the very first time on my own. It was a whirlwind, and it was a lot of good things.
Unfortunately, as with many things in life – with the good, comes a bit of bad. *This is my personal story of how I started being an Amazon Influencer. I do not represent YouTube, Meta, or Amazon in any way.*
Giving Up My Privacy
For whatever reason, as you build a community on YouTube it is both a good and a bad thing that your community becomes extremely invested in you. Good, in the fact that you always have this group of people that you feel like you can talk to and relate with. Bad, in that many times because of them being invited in to specific situations over the years, they feel like they should have all access to you. At all times, about all things.
Having started with YouTube, I didn’t have a clear vision of what working as a content creator looked like without giving up that privacy. I knew that it seemed like my blogging friends didn’t have to deal with quite the same level of intrusiveness – but I could quite shake that it seemed like quite the hurdle to just completely give up the format that I had been working on for many years at that point. (If you are stressed out about starting a blog as a YouTuber, check out my easy blog setup guide! It’s easier than you think!)
After returning home from one conference in 2019, I even paid an assistant to set up my blog for me, but I just couldn’t seem to shake the format of what I was most familiar with and kept doing things in a familiar format. Focus on YouTube video, occasionally post to a blog to point people to said YouTube video. Then, something happened…
*The Pandemic Has Entered the Chat*
The Thing That Changed
In 2020, my world came to a halt just like many people. I had just returned from the 2020 Disney Creators Celebration, where we were hosted at Walt Disney World and on Disney Cruise Line at the end of February 2020. It would be my last “normal” content trip for a while.
As a content creator that had started honing in on travel as a core topic (2020 was supposed to be my “year of travel”, ha), after March 16, 2020 I knew that life as we knew it was going to be upended for a while. I watched places that I loved close their doors with no definite reopening date. My world as a creator, wife, mother, and marketer, it was going to change.
During the pandemic, ad revenue, sponsorships were fairly light for creators, as I’m sure you can guess. Luckily my husband’s job was steady through that time and our family overall wasn’t impacted. I helped to save an institution that I had grown up with and had run out of money due to having to close their doors. By helping out on the Save Space Camp campaign and was able to put my energy into something that created an impact for the greater good. And for a time I held onto the hope that eventually things would get “back to normal”. Whatever normal is!
They say that small ripples can start to cause the biggest wave and that is exactly what happened for me during the pandemic. Prior to then, I hadn’t paid much attention to affiliate marketing, but that was all about to change.
Redefining How I Did Things
In early 2021, the creator landscape was still quite recovering and I was still plodding along waiting for things to get “back to normal”. (Again, whatever that is!) However one fateful day, I receive an email from Amazon, inviting me to their Amazon Live program. As a YouTuber, I suppose they thought “this person likes video!” and invited me to do lives on their platform. Truth be told, live formats have never been my favorite – I still don’t go live very often to this day. But given my additional free time and what seemed like a cool opportunity, I decided why not!
This opened me up to a whole new world that I didn’t even realize existed. Previously, I had been an Amazon affiliate making a sale here and there, but it wasn’t a consistent monthly revenue line in my creator income at that point.
After I joined the Amazon Live program and went live a few times on the Amazon platform, I realized that I still indeed did not really enjoy going live. I did however find out that being a part of the Amazon Live program also highlighted a number of other programs that Amazon was focused on at the time. The Amazon Influencer program and subsequently an Amazon storefront to go along with that. (Did you know that Amazon Live was a thing? It was really popular in 2021!!)
I started developing my Amazon Influencer storefront, and to me this was great fun! I could develop short videos that included information to help people shop, and I was approved for onsite placement of videos, which meant that not only would my audience see the videos, but also Amazon’s shopping audience too! And I could help them decide whether that item was right for them or not!
Creating Shoppable Content
This completely redefined what I did as a creator and truly how I viewed myself as well. I found that I was quite good at what is referred to as “shoppable videos” and shoppable content, and I was connecting with people in a whole new way.
Not only that, but this had started becoming a pretty significant part of my income as well. And that makes you pay attention to the opportunity.
There are some peaks and valleys to shoppable income, the holiday season being a big shopping time of year of course, but on a whole it was an amazingly steady opportunity. I still make shoppable content for Amazon and now on my LTK Storefront as well, but this helped me segway into what would be yet another phase of growth as a creator.
Becoming an Amazon Influencer was a great building block because it opened me up to new formats of content and new types of creators. And for the first time ever, I was now creating consistent passive income that I would wake up every day and be excited to see what revenue had been made the day before. Even from content that I had made maybe months prior. (Should be noted that YouTube can operate passively like this as well, but the Amazon revenues were a much more consistent day over day amount instead of the extreme peaks and valley shifts that happen with YouTube content.)
Tips for Becoming An Amazon Influencer
**I do not represent Amazon in any way. In this section I’m share my knowledge from having been an Amazon Influencer myself!* Now the Amazon Influencer program has become more mainstream and more people are finding out about this opportunity to make passive income from home!
It’s still a great opportunity, although it has definitely changed and become more saturated from when I started focusing on it in 2021. Now, in 2024, the recommendations I would have for you to start being an Amazon Influencer would be as follows:
- Make sure you’ve started with a solid content creation foundation. They don’t release benchmark numbers they are looking for, but I would aim to have around 2000+ followers on your main social media platform that you will be applying from. This can be a platform like Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.
- Visit https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/influencers to apply for the program.
- After you’ve gotten to accepted, you will want to feature Idea Lists and Photos of some of your favorite items.
- Upload (3) videos – no more, no less- to be considered for onsite placement.
- The review process for onsite placement varies by time of year, but you want to upload no more than three videos, because if you’re rejected the first time you have to upload fresh videos. And you won’t be able to tell which videos were rejected from your first round.
- After you’ve been accepted, start making great content to share with Amazon shoppers to help them determine if an item is for them!
- Over the years, I’ve found the best content is the content that is direct and to the point, answers questions that you know shoppers have about items, and isn’t too long. Best practices for shoppable video content is in the 30 seconds range to 2 minute range, and sometimes can even be effective with as little as 10-20 seconds!
Being an Amazon Influencer has been great fun, and it also helped me grow my affiliate marketing skills to move on to the next level!
The Next Adventure
As I grew as a creator, I realized that I could be doing more as an Amazon affiliate as well and I refocused on my blog, this time with more of an affiliate marketer mindset. The difference was night and day. I developed the Evergreen Income System to create revenue on autopilot and all of a sudden, I realized… I had found the answer to consistent income year round AND being able to do content without it being intrusive in my life!
I now focus on creating content for my blogs and storefronts, and although I still share a bit on YouTube every now and again, it is a much more highly selective and curated version of what I want to share. Working on Meta as a platform has become a bigger part of my sphere again, and I’ve started enjoying content creation again. It is a bit more effortless and less intrusive.
I’m now having fun creating content, being able to travel on content trips for my travel blogs, and also creating course materials to help others scale their own business. So if you’re looking for a way to create more consistent passive revenue, you have a blog and a Facebook business page, then the Evergreen Income System may be the right course to help you with your strategy of how to build and scale your business.
These days, I’m all about automation and creating content that will have a lasting evergreen impact. And I would love to share that strategy with you! Check out my Evergreen Learning Ideas for more info! Let’s get automated!
