Audible Affiliate Program (Read This Before You Join!)

When you hear the term affiliate marketing, what comes to your mind?

For many people, Amazon Associates is the first thing they think of, and rightfully so. 

After all, it is one of the biggest companies in the world with the most extensive instant access affiliate program, Amazon Associates. 

Anyone can join anytime and earn product-specific commissions by promoting the millions of products on the massive website.

Amazon also has many other subsidiaries in various other markets. All these companies also fall under the same affiliate program. 

I will now tell you all about one of these subsidiaries and why you should care as an affiliate marketer.

What Is Audible?

Audible is Amazon’s online platform for audiobooks and podcasts. By some estimates, it has over 200,000 titles.

All of them are narrated by famous personalities and talented voice actors, often by the authors themselves.

The company has many professional recording studios, sound engineers, and other resources that it makes excellent use of.

Like Kindle self-publishing, Audible allows individuals to upload and sell their own pieces of content. 

Anyone can sign up and use their facilities to add audio to the library.

They’ve been around for twenty years and have everything from creative fiction and popular science to nonfiction and cultural podcasts in their library.

I’m sure that’s enough for an introduction; let’s see how you can benefit from promoting the services.

How To Join the Audible Affiliate Program

Since Audible is Amazon’s company, it makes sense for them to have a single affiliate program. In fact, it’s rather convenient for affiliates.

Once I give you the details on how to earn money with this, you will see what I mean. Let me give you the step by step on how to get started.

1. Sign Up with Amazon Associates

To start off, you need to sign up with Amazon’s affiliate program. It’s called Amazon Associates, and in case you missed it, you can sign up right here: 

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

Try it out right now, and you’ll see the best thing about Amazon: It’s so easy and convenient; it’s almost unbelievable!

All you need is a website where you will promote them (can be a brand-new blog), your banking details, and an email address.

Takes less than five minutes.

2. Access Associates Central

Then, you can access Associates Central, Amazon’s affiliate dashboard for all its brands. 

You can get everything you need regarding training resources and legal information here. 

It also clearly mentions all the different commissions and earnings for each of the different services and products from their respective sites.

Remember that you need to stay active to remain in the program. You will be disqualified if you don’t make any sales within 180 days.

3. Find The Amazon Bounty Program

In the toolbar, you can see a tab named “Promotions.” Click on it and go to “Amazon Bounty Program.” 

You see, Audible has various different kinds of content: free, plus, and premium. Users can only access certain types of audiobooks based on their membership plan.

Meanwhile, many audiobooks can be purchased outright. Due to a subscription model, it doesn’t make sense for Amazon to offer commissions to Audible affiliates.

That’s why instead of offering percentage-based commissions as they do for products on Amazon, Audible affiliates get rewarded one-time bounties.

The amount of the bounty received depends on the affiliate’s country and the type of action performed by the referral. These bounties are calculated based on a customer’s lifetime value. (it sounds more ominous than it is.)

Here are the commissions in the US. Hence, you can find Audible’s affiliate program within the Amazon Bounty Program.

4. Choose The Offer or Link

Affiliates can find a few different bounty offers in this section for Audible. They can download text links or images for it right here.

Alternatively, since you’ve already signed up for Amazon Associates, you can also get product-specific links for your promotion.

Search for the particular book (I’ve used the new Percy Jackson installment here), click on the Audible audiobook on the product page, and get your affiliate link from the “SiteStripe” at the top.

5. Start Promoting

Once you decide which link to share, you can send it to your target audience. 

Whenever someone comes to the website through your links and makes a purchase, they must buy a subscription to Audible.

In turn, you will receive a bounty. 

It’s clear how easy and accessible the process is; I went from signing up to generating my link for this article in less than fifteen minutes. 

(Although I haven’t added my bank details yet.)

But there are a few things you need to know if you wish to earn a good income using this opportunity successfully.

How to Make Money With Audible Associates

Before you jump in and start promoting Audible for your side hustle or online business, I want you to consider a few things.

It’s better to learn from other people’s experiences and know exactly what you are getting into. In that spirit, Be sure to follow these steps before publishing your first affiliate link.

1. Secure Your Reach

There is no brand without a following or an audience. You can always monetize after you have an audience, but trying to nurture one to get rich can be counterproductive.

The process is different for each medium, but to make sure that a good number of the right people see your promotions, certain steps need to be taken care of.

For bloggers and webmasters, they need to establish a good domain ranking with quality backlinks in order to rank well on Google. 

YouTubers, TikTokers, and influencers must build a library of good content or a loyal audience before promoting.

There are many exceptions, but I’m just saying that you need to consider the traffic source, volume, and quality before you waste your time and energy promoting Audible to no one in particular.

2. Understand The Sales Process

If you want to make a lot of sales, you must know when to promote a company. A good rule of thumb is to share the Call To Action to warm leads ripe for conversions.

Always aim to connect people to Audible who can actually get a lot of value out of it and try to sweeten the deal for them or help them see the benefits.

Jumping the gun with sales can give off an impression of being exploitative or manipulative at worst and selfish at best. 

Many creators avoid selling anything to their audience nowadays just to maintain the trust they have in them. 

Obviously, each medium and situation is different. The traffic is likely warm if you have an SEO blog with a review on Audible. But if you have a social media audience, you definitely don’t want to seem too pushy.

3. Details of Audible’s Affiliate Program

Another critical thing to consider is the cookie duration. Amazon has a very specific way of attributing sales to its affiliates to make them eligible for commissions.

The website does this through the use of cookies. When a user clicks on any of your links, their activity on the website is tracked for a session of 24 hours.

Any and all purchases made during that session will be attributed to the affiliate whose ID was in the link. 

Additionally, if the customer simply adds the items to their cart without purchase, they can keep it in the cart for 90 days, which will still be tracked.

Items purchased from the cart within the ninety-day period will also be attributed. The same tracking policy applies since Audible products can also be bought through Amazon.com.

Read all the info relating to the program before you start promoting.

4. Be Transparent

Finally, establishing trust with your audience is essential to online sales. It’s always better to be honest and genuine while promoting any company for profit.

Simply ask folks to use your links for purchases to support your work, and you should be more than good to go.

Best Ways To Promote Audible

Here are some top contenders that successful affiliates already use to earn money with Amazon Associates and Audible’s Bounty Program:

1. YouTube: Tons of creators in motivation, self-help, communication, and many other niches make excellent use of this platform for earning affiliate incomes.

Great for small-time creators on a low budget. Great organic traffic. You must make good, helpful, and beneficial content, but it’s a good way to go.

2. Website/Blog: Investing in a niche website or building an SEO blog can be a lot of work and take some time to get started, but it has the potential to skyrocket your growth in the long run.

3. Email Marketing: Building an Email list is pretty underrated compared to how affordable, easy, and profitable it can be when done correctly.

4. Social Media: Hordes of accounts on TikTok and other emerging platforms are dedicated to reviewing Amazon products for commissions.

The content is quick and easy to make and often very engaging. I’m sure there are good ways to promote Audible as well.

Dos And Don’ts

Reading all the policies, terms, and conditions is essential, especially since they are regularly changed as necessary.

But it can be a bit of a chore, so let me tell you some crucial highlights based on my interpretation of the regulations.

Here are the main things you should know before signing on:

Prohibited Behavior:

• Advertising is already a bad option for Audible’s affiliate program since the bounties are small compared to advertising rates. But Amazon prohibits you from using its Trademark while doing so.
• Think of it this way: You cannot impersonate the company and speak on its behalf. 
• Audible doesn’t want to compete with its partners for the user’s attention. It lessens the impact of their own marketing campaigns.
• You are not allowed to make discount claims or offers that are not valid, as it lessens the customer’s trust in the brand.
• Sharing direct links on social media and using bots in the comments for your campaigns is considered spamming and flagged by the algorithms.
• Spamming, in general, is severely frowned upon.

My Suggestions:

• Avoid adding prices and offers into your content since those things are privy to changes.
• Keep things manageable so you can be aware of the status of your various links.
• Be honest about your partnership with Audible in a frank but non-imposing manner.
• Aim to provide value to people through good content and view your partnership with Audible as an extension of that service.

Conclusion

So, we covered the step-by-step of how to get started, the details of the program, and some strategies to succeed.

Audible’s website already does a good job of informing you of what it offers your referrals and you as an affiliate.

That’s why my aim with this article was to make the whole thing more accessible for people considering getting on board.

I hope that it helped. Let me know what you think in the comments, and all the best!

[FAQs] Frequently Asked Questions