How earning from affiliate links works
With Amazon Associates you recommend products through links that identify your account. You can receive a commission when the traffic you send produces qualifying purchases under the program conditions. A click on its own is not income, and the price of the product is not your commission.
The starting point is an audience with a concrete need. A buying guide, a reasoned comparison or an explanation of what fits with what helps a person decide. A list of links with no context gives nobody a reason to follow you.
Official source: Amazon: about the program
How much you earn: the numbers worth watching
There is no monthly figure that holds for everyone. What counts is interested traffic, attributed purchases, the category and the conditions that apply. Check the current rates in the Amazon portal: do not build your project around a percentage you found in an old article.
To judge the work, keep clicks, items ordered and commissions actually credited separate in the reports. Subtract the cost of your tools and count the time spent writing and updating. What your audience spends is not what you earn.
Official source: Amazon: advertising fees
A practical way to start
Pick a subject you know well enough to explain both the upsides and the limits of a product. The measure is not how much of the catalogue you can copy, but which questions you answer better than anyone else.
- Define an audience and a problem: choosing accessories that fit a particular desk setup, for example.
- Prepare original content on a site or an eligible social presence, before you apply.
- Open an Associates account and use the Amazon tools to generate the links for your recommendations.
- State the affiliate relationship clearly, and update your content when products or conditions change.
- Read the reports and improve the articles that genuinely help people choose.
Passive income: what it actually means
A piece of content can keep being read long after you publish it. Finding deals and distributing them can be automated too. That removes some repetitive work, but it does not create an audience for you and it does not guarantee sales.
Before you automate, check that your recommendations make sense to the people who follow you. A pipeline that publishes barely relevant products faster does not solve a quality problem.
Where Telegram fits in
Telegram is a way to push updates to people who chose to follow you. That it works technically does not prove that every use of Amazon links through it is authorised.
On the Amazon Associates application page, Telegram is not among the social networks Amazon lists as accepted. Before you build a project on direct links in a channel, ask Amazon support to confirm your setup and the channels you are allowed to use. Do not present a channel on its own as certainly eligible.
Official source: Amazon: application review
Write a first recommendation someone can check
Choose a product you can describe precisely. Before you add the link, write down who it is for, what its limits are and which variant you are recommending. If you have not used it, do not present the page as a review based on personal use.
Open the link in a separate window and check the product, the variant and the affiliate ID. A tag in the link does not prove a future order will be attributed: commissions are confirmed in the Amazon report, not in the URL.
Keep the published content, its date and the destination address in your own records. Compare the time you spent against the commissions credited in the same period, without turning a single sale into an income forecast.