The core pieces of an Amazon affiliate site haven't changed in years: WordPress, hosting, an Associates account, a theme that displays products well, and content that ranks. What's actually changed is how much of the content and publishing work can now run without you doing it by hand. Here's the setup in order.
1. Pick a niche before anything else
This is the step most guides rush past and the one that determines whether the rest of the work pays off. A workable niche has enough distinct products to write dozens of posts about, isn't dominated by a handful of unbeatable authority sites, and ideally sits in a commission category Amazon hasn't cut to near zero. See our niche selection guide for specifics.
2. Get hosting and install WordPress
Any mainstream WordPress host works. The one setup detail worth getting right up front: pick a host that gives you WP-Cron reliability (or supports a real server-side cron trigger), since any content-automation pipeline — including Pinery Flow — depends on scheduled background tasks actually running on time.
3. Apply to Amazon Associates
Sign-up is free and immediate, but the account is provisional: Amazon requires 3 qualifying sales within your first 180 days or the account gets closed and you have to reapply. This is the single most common reason first-time affiliate sites fail before they get started — see our guide to getting those first 3 sales.
4. Choose a theme built for product content
A general-purpose blog theme works, but you'll spend real time building product cards, buy-button styling, and (if you want it) a WooCommerce storefront from scratch. See our theme comparison for the tradeoffs between general-purpose themes, magazine themes, and a theme built specifically for this, like Pinery.
5. Decide how you're publishing: manual, automated, or both
You can write every post by hand, use a link/widget tool like AAWP or AmaLinks Pro to speed up manual writing, or automate the whole pipeline — scraping, writing, image generation, and publishing — with something like Pinery Flow. Most sites that scale past a few dozen posts end up doing some combination: hand-written cornerstone content for the highest-value pages, automation for the long tail of best-seller coverage.
6. Handle disclosure and compliance from day one
The FTC requires a clear, conspicuous affiliate disclosure — not just a link buried in a footer page. Amazon's own program policies also require accurate, current pricing (never a stale cached price presented as current) and prohibit certain link placements. Get this right before you publish your first post, not after your first policy warning.
7. Publish, then keep prices and content current
Static, unmaintained affiliate posts decay — prices drift, products go out of stock, and Amazon expects the pricing you display to stay accurate. Whatever publishing method you choose, plan for ongoing price refreshes, not just a one-time publish.
Where the stack fits together
If you're evaluating tools rather than assembling everything from scratch: Pinery Theme (free) handles the frontend, Pinery Flow automates the scraping-to-publishing pipeline, and Pinery Static can move the finished site to a faster, cheaper-to-host static frontend once it's live. None of the three requires the others — pick what solves your actual bottleneck.