Every single week I talk to brand new Amazon influencers, and I keep hearing the exact same sentence in slightly different words: this is too hard. Not “I tried it and it didn’t work.” Not “I made fifty videos and my commissions are flat.” Just — this is too hard, there’s too much to learn, I don’t know where to start. If that’s where you are right now, I want to save you a few months of spinning your wheels, because the problem almost certainly isn’t the program. It’s that you’ve been handed a curriculum built for someone three years ahead of you.
Table of Contents
- Why the Amazon Influencer Program Feels Impossible
- The List That’s Drowning You
- Paralysis by Analysis Is the Real Killer
- How I Hit My First $10,000 Month
- What Amazon Actually Asks You to Do
- What High Earners Actually Do Every Day
- Your Only Job Right Now
- Where Oink Fits In
Why the Amazon Influencer Program Feels Impossible
Here’s what happens to almost everybody. You get accepted into the program, you’re excited, and then you go looking for information. You join a few Facebook groups. You watch a dozen YouTube videos. You follow some people on Instagram. And within about a week you’ve been buried under an avalanche of terminology that did not exist in your life ten days ago.
None of that content is wrong. That’s the frustrating part. It’s all real, it’s all useful eventually, and almost none of it applies to you yet. You’re being taught advanced tactics before you’ve done the beginner reps, which is a bit like being handed a book on marathon pacing strategy before you’ve gone for a single run.
The List That’s Drowning You
Let me name the things you’ve probably been told are critical:
- Advanced product research and competition analysis
- Parent ASINs versus child ASINs
- Deep linking
- Creator Connections and brand outreach
- Storefront health checks and audits
- Brand messaging and positioning
- Spreadsheets tracking every video you’ve ever posted
- Upper carousel percentage
- Off-Amazon traffic strategies
Every one of those is a legitimate topic. I’ve made content about most of them. But look at that list as a brand new creator with zero videos on your storefront. Where would you even start? You wouldn’t. You’d stare at it, feel your stomach drop, and go do something else. Which is exactly what happens to most people who quit — they don’t quit because it failed, they quit because they never began.
Paralysis by Analysis Is the Real Killer
The thing that stalls new Amazon influencers isn’t laziness and it isn’t lack of talent. It’s the very reasonable instinct to want to understand something before doing it. You want to get it right. So you keep researching, keep watching, keep taking notes — and every hour spent researching is an hour not spent making the thing that actually earns you money.
I’ll be blunt about this, because being polite about it hasn’t helped anyone: your first videos are going to be bad. Mine were bad. Everybody’s first videos are bad. That’s not a warning, it’s permission. Go make some crappy videos. You cannot get to good videos without going through the bad ones first, and you cannot think your way past that step. Nobody has ever researched their way into being on camera comfortably.
How I Hit My First $10,000 Month
Back in 2024 I had my first $10,000 month in the Amazon Influencer Program. Here’s what I want you to take from that: I didn’t do it with deep linking. I didn’t do it with parent ASIN strategy. I wasn’t running Creator Connections campaigns. I wasn’t auditing my upper carousel percentage. I didn’t have a spreadsheet.
I made videos. A lot of them. Consistently. That’s the whole story, and I know it’s a disappointing story because it doesn’t contain a secret. But the reason I’m telling it is that the advanced stuff is what you layer on top of volume once volume exists. It multiplies something. If the something is zero, multiplying it doesn’t help.
What Amazon Actually Asks You to Do
Strip away everything the internet has told you and look at the actual deal Amazon is offering. They want you to make short videos about products so that shoppers who are already on a product page — already interested, already halfway to buying — get to see a real person use the thing. That’s it. That’s the job description.
Amazon is not asking you to be a marketer. They’re not asking you to build a brand, run a funnel, or master an API. They’re asking you to hold a product up and talk about it honestly. Every complicated thing you’ve heard about is something creators invented on top of that simple arrangement to squeeze out more performance. Useful later. Noise right now.
What High Earners Actually Do Every Day
I know a lot of people earning at a high level in this program, and if you followed them around for a week you’d be bored. Their day looks like this:
- Pick products worth making a video about
- Film the videos
- Edit the videos
- Upload the videos
- Repeat tomorrow
The advanced tactics show up around the edges of that loop — maybe an hour a week, usually less. The loop itself is the business. When someone tells you they earn five figures a month in this program, what they’re really telling you is that they’ve run that loop several hundred times.
Your Only Job Right Now
So here’s my honest advice if the program feels too hard. Close the Facebook groups for a month. Unsubscribe from the gurus if you need to, including me. Take everything on that intimidating list and put it in a drawer labeled “later, and I mean it.”
Then go make videos. Set a number you can actually hit — three a week, five a week, whatever fits your life — and hit it without negotiating with yourself. Do that for ninety days. At the end of ninety days you will have something almost nobody in those Facebook groups has: real data about your own storefront, from your own videos, on your own products. Then the advanced stuff becomes useful, because you’ll have something to apply it to and you’ll actually understand what problem each tactic solves.
Where Oink Fits In
The one part of that loop that legitimately slows beginners down is step one — figuring out which products are worth filming. That’s where people burn hours scrolling Amazon with no idea whether anything they’re looking at will actually convert, and it’s the reason I built Oink in the first place.
Oink sits right in your browser while you’re on Amazon and tells you what’s worth your time — so instead of second-guessing every product, you grab a good one and go film. That’s not an advanced tactic. That’s just removing the friction from the only step that matters right now.
The Amazon Influencer Program isn’t too hard. It’s just been explained to you in the wrong order. Ignore ninety percent of it, make your videos, and come back for the rest when you’ve earned the right to need it.
Ready to stop guessing which products to film? Get Oink for Influencers here and spend your time making content instead of hunting for it.
