Amazon Change = HUGE business opportunity

In this post I’m going to give you a business idea that’s perfect to start during COVID lockdown. Yesterday (April 15th) Amazon announced a major change that has opened up a big business opportunity. That’s where you come in.

Here is what we’ll cover in this post:

• The change Amazon made
• Product opportunities this opens up for you
• How to grow it to a $10,000 per month business

Step #1: The Opportunity

Amazon just announced a huge change to their affiliate program. They cut commission rates by 50%+.



Many affiliate site owners are losing their minds. Don’t blame them. Massive hit.

Problem = revenue for 1000s of website owners will plummet in a few days. This will put many out of business.

Step #2: What’s the business idea?

The problem is clear. But what product or service can you offer to take advantage and help these site owners?

Let's brainstorm with these 5 questions:

1. What online course could I create?
2. What service could I provide?
3. What resources could I create?
4. What app could I make?
5. What coaching service could I provide?

Here is what I came up with:

1. Create a premium $997 online course that shows these site owners how to identify the Amazon products that produce 80% of their revenue and then shows them how to find other affiliate program to replace that money with. 5 videos of core curriculum. 3 examples where you show yourself spending an hour for 3 different businesses to find and replace their links. You show how you find even better deals than they had before. Not only do they replace their lost revenue but they are making more.

2. Create a high-end service that does this for people. $5,000 up front + % of revenue recovered Big earning potential for you. Capped downside for them. Identify their top 20% products. Go find better affiliate programs for them. You make a % of the difference.

3. Create a 50 page eBook and sell if to $197. Find the top 500 products on Amazon sold by affiliates. Then find replacement affiliate programs for all of them. Super expensive for an ebook. But you’ve done all of the hard work. Sell it for a premium

4. Create a $197 per month web app that I load all of my affiliate links into and it constantly looks for better affiliate programs for those deals. Proactively protects me against this kind of stuff in the future. The second a program changes its parameters it notifies me and tells me who to switch to.

5. Offer a $5,000 consulting package. 3 months. Calm me down. Give me a solid plan. Teach me how to think about this so I’m not losing my mind. Then walk me and the marketing team through coming out the other side of these even better than before the change.

6. Bonus idea: Buy these sites. Replace the Amazon links with better affiliate deals. Optimize the sites for list growth. Then launch your own product. Flip in < 12 months.

Let’s narrow it down with these 3 questions:

1. Which one of these ideas is the most exciting to me?
2. Which of these could I legit help people with?
3. Which of these could I make good money on?

My winner? eBook.

The reason I picked it is that it would force you to do the research needed to fulfill any of the other product ideas on this list. It creates the database of top 500 amazon products sold via affiliates and the new product and company they can use instead. Once the eBook is made, all of the others become much easier to do.

Step #3: Making the product

Don’t know anything about the Amazon affiliate world? Me neither.

But I do understand the problem and the concepts of how it works. And I know that most site owners are in total panic mode.

So, how do we build it?

How to make the eBook:

1. Hire a researcher from Upwork
2. Have them compile a list of top 100 Amazon affiliate sites from Nerdy Data cross referenced by Ahrefs traffic estimates for those sites
3. Check the list before finalizing. Make sure it feels right.
4. Have them make a list of the 500 most common Amazon affiliate links across these sites
5. Check the list before finalizing. Make sure it feels right.
6. Then have them research companies with pre-existing affiliate programs that have similar or competing products to the ones on the list.

The deliverable is a spreadsheet with 3 columns:

• Name of product
• Amazon Link
• Amazon Commission rate
• New Company Link
• New Company Commission rate

To ensure quality, hire 2 people to do this job independently. And then a third to throw out any that both didn’t find. Go with the ones that both researchers found. This project would cost $2,000’ish to 100% outsource.

If you hustle this, you can have this made in 7 days.

Step #4: Getting your first 500 customers

You know this is a massive problem. You know affiliate site owners are freaking out over this change. And we know that many of them will lose their business if a solution doesn’t present itself soon.

So, now what?

How do you get customers?

Here is your ‘first 500 customer’ marketing plan:

Phase #1: Guerilla - First 50 customers

• Twitter search “amazon affiliate”
• DM everyone that’s complained with a sample of 20 alternate links
• Tell them you have the top 500
• Tell them you can find alternates to their top 20% links.
• Do this for first 50 buyers to make the database better
• Find affiliate forums, slack and Facebook groups. Repeat steps above.
• Contact Appsumo. Run a deal.

If you hustle this hard, you can get your first 50 customers in 7 days.

Phase #2: Repeatable - 200 customers per month

• Make a list of 100 influencers and companies in the affiliate space
• DM and email them all.
• Give them your eBook
• Those that respond, ask them to partner with you

Reach out to 100, 10-20 will do it. Repeat every month. Work your face off. Within 90 days you’ll be at 200+ units sold per month