Amazon did it again.

With its ever-growing power in online retail, Amazon recently cut affiliate partner commissions on many key products in its Amazon Associates program:

Furniture, Home, Home Improvement, Lawn & Garden, Pets Products and Pantry will go from 8% to 3%.
Headphones, Beauty, Musical Instruments, Business & Industrial supplies will go from 6% to 3%.
Outdoors, Tools will be cut from 5.5% to 3%.
Sports and Baby Products categories will go from 4.5% to 3%.
Health & Personal Care will be slashed from 5% to 1%.
Amazon Fresh will be cut from 3% to just 1% as well.

The changes will devastate many affiliates:

Affiliate marketing is a terrific secondary revenue stream, and a terrible primary one.

Amazon’s cuts illustrate this perfectly: affiliate marketing is too reliant on forces outside your control.

Successful affiliates need to adopt this mantra and and aDjust accordingly. Here are some ideas on how:

Build direct relationships with the providers of your most popular products

It’s possible you could work directly with the companies manufacturing the most popular products you sell -- espeically if you are driving significant volume.

These companies pay big margins to sell through Amazon, and working directly with you might improve their margins on the products you sell.

Reaching out is worth a shot.

Search for affiliate managers, directors, business development people at the companies you want to work with. Explain who you are, share yoru site and sales numbers, and start a dialogue.

Find and promote services--not just products--related to your niche.

If your site is in the consumer tech space, could you refer installation services or repair services related to your most popular products?

Another example: you have a site about home pool care.

Can you work with a directory of pool cleaning services? Or companies that generate pool building leads?

Amazon hasn’t eaten the services space (yet). Opportunity exists for affiliates to recommend services that complement the products their audiences are interested in.

Develop your own products

You know what your audience is intersted in—you have the sales data. And your audience is a built-in asset for supporting a Kickstarter project.

Is there something new you can create—your own product under your own branding—that you can sell yourself to your dedicated audience?

Develop your own services

How you can help support the interests of yoru audience with new services? Can you create a software-as-a-service (SAAS) product, sold as a subscription model, to serve your audience even better than product referrals ever did?

Pivot to a subscription model

Services like Substack make it easy to create a monitized newsletter. Is your content good enough that people will pay to read it? If not, can you create a premier content tier worthy of a subscription?

Offer content creation to similar businesses

If you’re a successful affiliate marketer, you know how to audience-build. You understand how to create content that builds and maintains a target audience.

Those are extremely valuable—and highly transferable—skills.

Can you begin to work as an agency helping other people and companies build their own audiences?

Explore traditional advertising models

Grab your favorite throwback jersey and explore a time when the web was monitized by display and text advertising.

Pivot to a related niche

Is there another area where commmissions are still healthy that’s tangentally related to your audience’s key interest?

In the short run, this may reduce your total audinece. But over time you will build back up as you work through your pivot.

Your downside here, obviously, is that if you move to another area of Amazon Associates, you remain at the company’s mercy, with future potential cuts always hanging over your head.

Create related courses.

Sites like Gumroad and Teachable make it easy to create courses. What is your audience interested in learning? Can you create and monetize a course—or work with others to create a course?

Bonus tip: selling courses created by others is a great way to earn high commissions while bringing value to your audience. Research courses in your niche. What’s worthy of promoting?

In the end: diversify risk

All of these ideas boil down to the same principle: diversify risk. Depending too heavily on any one affiliate program is risky. Relying to heavily on affiliate revenue itself is risky.

Diversify your offerings, but always in the best interest and service of your audience. It’s a winning strategy, no matter what Amazon cuts.

Thanks for reading! If you found this post useful, I hope you’ll sign up for my newsletter.

Amazon cuts affiliate commissions again. What’s next for affiliate marketers?