Jessica LaRue has been sharing her entrepreneurial journey on TheSellingFamily.com since 2012, teaching her followers various side hustles over the years. After making millions online and achieving FIRE (Financial Independence and Retire Early), she took a much-needed year off and is now focusing on side hustles that are low pressure, flexible, and have the potential to generate passive income.
If you’re interested in learning how you can make passive income as an Amazon influencer, keep reading.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your background
I’ve been an online entrepreneur since 2008.
Since then, I’ve done a lot of different things to make money online.
Some of the things I’ve done include reselling used items on eBay, reselling retail products using Amazon FBA, blogging, creating and selling online courses and memberships, making low content books, creating print on demand t-shirts, and a few other things I’m forgetting along the way.
Overall, my business has been very successful.
But behind the scenes, I was feeling a lot of anxiety, self-imposed pressure to “do more,” and severe burnout.
So in 2023, I decided to close my online course business, which was making hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, and take a much-needed break. I wanted to take a year off to make money and figure out what, if anything, I really wanted to do next.
If I never went back to “work” again, that would be fine by me, and I knew my family would be okay because we had already achieved “financial independence.”
As an entrepreneur, I knew in my heart that there was probably something else going on, I just needed the mental space and freedom to figure it out without the pressure of simultaneously pursuing another business that I felt needed my attention.
Little did I know, my vacation wasn’t going to be about relaxing: my husband was diagnosed with leukemia and we were thrown into the crazy world of cancer treatment.
But I’m really grateful for the timing.
I had already closed my business so I could focus 100% on helping him, rather than working while I was at it.
He is now cancer free and our lives are beginning to return to normal.
After being home again for a few months and taking a long break, I finally felt the urge to get back to work.
The burnout was gone, my family was healthy again, and I felt the freedom to enjoy my new side hustle.
How did you get started reviewing products on Amazon?
Since I’ve been in the Amazon industry for a long time already, I’ve often heard about making money as an influencer by reviewing products on Amazon.
I thought I’d create an account and give it a try.
That was three days before my husband was first diagnosed with leukemia.
So, needless to say, it was forgotten about for almost a year.
When I got home and got back into my daily routine, I started thinking about what side hustles I wanted to try and I remembered the influencer account I had set up.
I logged back in and realized I had made nearly $200 completely passively from those three videos.
So I decided to go back and see what I could do.
It was perfect for me because I didn’t have any faces in my videos, so I didn’t have to be the face of the brand, and there was no pressure to meet quotas or anything like that. I could just do what I wanted.
I could make videos when I felt like it, upload them, and then go back to my normal life.
As I started adding new videos, my commissions soon started to increase.
Between March and April, I added 25 videos to my account and started making $75 a month.
So, I carried on!
By June, I had about 45 videos completed and was making $100 a day for the first time.
That’s when I really saw that this was a totally viable side hustle.
I was sharing this journey with my email list and they were so intrigued that I started recording the steps I was taking so I could share the process.
For those who aren’t familiar, can you explain what it means to be an Amazon influencer?
Yes, of course!
The Amazon Influencer Program is a program created by Amazon as a way to bring influencer marketing to the Amazon platform.
Typically, an influencer builds a brand and an audience, then drives that audience elsewhere to make a purchase, and when a purchase is made, the influencer receives a commission from the sale.
Well, Amazon has flipped that!
With the Amazon Influencer Program, we create videos about products that we own and Amazon shares those videos directly on the product pages where customers are already looking.
So you no longer need to look for your own customers.
When potential customers are browsing your Amazon page, they can watch influencer videos to get more information about your product, such as a demo of how it works, an unboxing of the included items, or tips and tricks.
If a customer makes a purchase after watching an influencer’s video, Amazon pays the influencer a commission based on the purchase price and a set commission structure (1-5% depending on the product category).
If you’re using Amazon, you’ll see a section called “Videos,” which is separate from the customer reviews section where videos may be featured.
The videos displayed consist of customer reviews, influencer videos, and the brand’s own videos.
Influencer videos will display the title of the video and the influencer’s name below it.
When you click on the video, the words “Earn Commission” will appear under the influencer’s name.
This means that if I watch the video above and then buy the vacuum featured in the video, Mark will earn a commission.
Commission is paid to the creator of the last video viewed before you clicked the buy button (i.e. the person who “completed the sale”).
These videos are typically between 1 and 5 minutes in length.
So when someone says they receive compensation from Amazon for reviewing products they already own, this is what they mean.
Does this business require special tools or equipment?
One of the best parts of becoming an Amazon influencer is that you don’t need to buy a bunch of tools or pay a bunch of subscription fees to be successful.
To run this business you need a few things.
- A smartphone or camera for recording product review videos
- A computer to apply for the program and upload your videos (once you’re approved, you can upload videos directly to the Amazon app from your smartphone, if you prefer)
- The products you review are ones you already have at home, so you don’t need to buy anything new.
Apart from these, I would recommend getting a few other things that will eventually help improve the quality of your influencer videos, but you won’t need them when you’re just starting out.
- A tripod to stabilize your phone while recording.
- Some kind of lighting. This could be a ring light, a light box, or even a portable light that you attach to your phone.
- If you’re shooting a video while walking, we recommend using a smaller microphone to keep the audio consistent.
All of these influencer tools are things you can add on as you start making money, and they should cost less than $100 in total.
How much can you earn as an Amazon Influencer?
Like any business, the amount of money you make depends on how much effort you put in.
I’ve found that most people can make $500 a month by creating 100-200 high-quality videos.
I know people who have posted over 1,000 videos and are making over $5,000 a month.
As I mentioned before, the first time I made $100 per day I had fewer than 50 videos published.
What kind of personality is best suited for this business?
That’s a great question!
Many people think that to be successful in the Amazon influencer program, you need to be a very outgoing personality.
However, this is not always the case.
What initially interested me was the opportunity to make a video without ever showing my face.
I had been building a “brand” for myself for over a decade and wanted to venture into a business where I wasn’t the “face” of it – it didn’t matter if people liked me personally or not.
I’m big on faceless videos, so it doesn’t matter if I’m in my pajamas, my hair’s in a messy bun (which it is 95% of the time), or I have a breakout on my face – no one is watching, so I don’t have to worry about any of that.
I know in the grand scheme of things they don’t really matter, but it’s hard to be in front of a camera when you’re feeling bad about yourself.
So for an introvert like me, faceless videos are perfect.
On the other hand, if you’re a very outgoing person who loves to be in the spotlight or doesn’t mind being in front of the camera, you could create a completely different type of video.
You can be the star of the video.
You can sit in front of the camera with your product and let everyone see and hear your enthusiasm.
That’s what’s so great about this.
Some never appear, some appear in every video, and some produce studio quality reviews.
Can you tell me about your online courses?
of course!
The reason I created the Amazon Influencer Mastery course is because I was sharing my experience as an influencer with my friends and email list and I got a lot of questions about how to get started and how to be successful.
When you look online for ways to do something like this, there is always a lot of conflicting information and it can take days or even weeks to go through it all.
I have over 10 years of experience teaching people how to make money on Amazon, so it made sense for me to create a course that walks you through the entire Amazon Influencer process step-by-step in just a few hours.
We know how hard it can be to piece together all the bits and pieces of information, so we wanted to give people a place where everything is up to date and in one place.
The course starts with a thorough overview of the program, including how it works, how I get paid, and my experience.
Then there’s the matter of getting approved for the program, which is a multi-step process that many people try to do themselves and end up giving up completely.
So here’s how you can get approved and start making money.
Once approved, you’ll move into the video creation process, where we’ll explain the different types of videos you can create, how to edit them, how to upload them, how to create good captions, and more.
Finally, we’ll answer some frequently asked questions and explain how to manage your account going forward.
Essentially, everything you need to know to become a successful Amazon influencer starts with the very first step.
The courses are mostly videos, where you share your screen, talk at the screen, or record yourself doing tasks like creating and editing the video.
There is also an optional support group for those who would like more interaction and a place where they can ask questions of myself and other members.
What will people learn from your free e-book?
Our free eBook, “7 Steps to Becoming a Successful Amazon Influencer,” outlines all the steps you need to take to get started as an Amazon Influencer.
We’ll walk you through the two-part application process and what to expect along the way, plus we’ll cover video creation, managing your influencer storefront, and more.
This free eBook will really help you figure out what you’re getting into and if this is the type of side hustle you want to start.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
Getting started and getting approved is the hardest part of this business. The application process is two-step, which is why many people give up before even uploading a review video.
The first part of applying is to have a highly engaged social media account, meaning you must have an Instagram account, Facebook page, or TikTok account that people are following and engaging with.
If you don’t already have one, it may take several weeks or months before you can move on to the next phase of the program.
What matters most is not the number of followers, but the engagement part, meaning even if you have 50 followers, as long as they are actually liking, commenting and interacting with your posts, you could still be approved.
That’s why we provide you with the option to request engagement in our course support groups if you wish.
The good news is that once you’re approved, you don’t have to keep building your social media accounts and can just focus on the Amazon part for uploading videos. You already have an audience on Amazon, so there’s no need to post your review videos anywhere else.
Where can we find out more about you?
Thank you for sharing! It was fun!
I’d love to continue the conversation with anyone who wants to know more 🙂
You can find me on TikTok @JessicaLarrew and on my site, The Selling Family, where I share about the Amazon Influencer program, other side hustles I have, and ways to save money.
To learn more and enroll in Amazon Influencer Mastery, click here.
