The Amazon affiliate marketing program, called Amazon Associates, is free to join and pays bloggers and website owners a percentage of every sale they refer to Amazon. Getting started is simple, and the earnings can be big. Part-timers can make hundreds of dollars each month easily while some power bloggers make millions annually.
Before you can start exploring Amazon affiliate marketing opportunities, you need to have a blog or website where you can publish content that markets Amazon products. WordPress is the top choice among affiliate marketers many reasons. It costs just $2.95 per month with our recommended provider, Bluehost, has a quick learning curve, and has unlimited design and content creation capabilities. Enter your domain name below to launch your Amazon affiliate website on WordPress today.
Amazon affiliate marketing works like other affiliate marketing programs by paying website owners — generally bloggers — commissions on sales that result from marketing Amazon products to their audience. Site owners insert trackable Amazon affiliate links into site content like blog posts and can also insert affiliate ads into site sidebars, headers and footers.
When a site visitor clicks on one of these links or ads, he or she is sent to Amazon. If they complete a purchase there, the site owner — called the “affiliate” — is paid a percentage of the sale. Amazon affiliate commissions range from 1 percent to 10 percent of the item’s selling price. These percentages are based on the category the item is listed under on Amazon.
Amazon’s pays affiliate commissions based on the purchased item’s category. We’ll explore how Amazon commission works in detail in step three.
Career blogger Amanda Formaro of AmandasCookin’ says “the Amazon affiliate program is a terrific fit for new bloggers, but it’s important to understand that Amazon only pays you when your readers make purchases.” Formaro emphasizes that Amazon doesn’t pay affiliates for simply listing products or ads on their site. “Amazon affiliates don’t earn money for sending visitors to Amazon or the number of Amazon ad impressions that appear on an affiliate’s website,” says Formaro. “It’s all about the sale.”
Formaro tells budding bloggers that “it can take a while to build up enough traffic to get people clicking your links, and then they still have to buy once they land on Amazon. But don’t get discouraged,” advises Formaro. “Keep creating and sharing content, and insert Amazon affiliate links for relevant and helpful products into your posts, and the sales will follow.”
Bloggers are the primary users of the Amazon affiliate program. However, Amazon affiliate links aren’t limited to use on blog websites. Book authors, ecommerce sellers and service businesses can bolster income with Amazon affiliate earnings.
Bloggers: Bloggers can cover every broad and niche topic imaginable and, as long as you can connect products sold on Amazon to the content that you create, you can make money as an Amazon affiliate
Amazon Kindle book authors: Every Amazon Kindle author should have an author website on WordPress to market their books and brand; you can list your own titles via Amazon affiliate links and earn an added 4 percent on top of your ebook royalty when titles sell; plus, you can earn even more by marketing Kindle devices and other items that might interest your reading audience
eCommerce sellers: Ecommerce sellers can earn affiliate income when items are on backorder or discontinued by inserting an affiliate link to a similar item on Amazon; this services your customer and captures income otherwise lost and, if you produce content for your brand, insert affiliate links to complimentary items from Amazon
Online & offline service providers: If your service customers can benefit from products that Amazon sells, you can launch a WordPress business website and publish content that benefits your clients and markets these items
Essentially, any individual, group or business that creates some type of online content and attracts an audience can bolster income with Amazon affiliate earnings.
Becoming an Amazon affiliate isn’t difficult. In fact, all you really need is a website — WordPress is ideal for this — and the ability to create content around something that interests you. These are the two simple building blocks that many Amazon affiliate marketing empires are founded upon.
Getting to that point takes some work but, clearly, the payoff can be very worthwhile. Here’s how to become an Amazon affiliate in six easy steps.
If you don’t yet have your own blog or website, you’ll need to launch one to house the content you create to market Amazon affiliate products. You must have your website in place before you can apply for the Amazon Associates affiliate program, which we detail in step two.
WordPress is, by far, the most popular web platform for affiliate marketers. You can learn how to get your site up and running quickly in our WordPress website launch guide.
A simple content-focused WordPress blog or website is all you need to get started with Amazon Associates affiliate program.
Once your website is up and running, your long-term goal is to build it out with content that interests you and attracts an audience. Most successful Amazon affiliate marketers target a niche that interests them like cooking, hiking, aquarium care, antique Corvettes and so on.
Niche topic possibilities are endless, but you want to be sure it’s something that you’re passionate about because you’ll be living and breathing it in order to make your Amazon affiliate marketing effort a success. You can learn more about identifying a niche and building an audience in our blog marketing guide.
One of the perks of the Amazon affiliate program is that you can apply for it as soon as you’ve launched your site. You don’t have to have a large following to get started. So, you just need to set up a website on WordPress or another web platform, have a content plan of some sort in place and apply to become an Amazon affiliate.
The Amazon Associates affiliate program is completely free to join, and it has very low-level entry requirements, so entry-level beginner bloggers and content marketers are welcome. Start the process by visiting the Amazon Associates Account page:
You need to have a standard Amazon shopping account to join Amazon Associates. If you have a business entity like a sole proprietorship, LLC or corporation, you can set up a new Amazon account under that entity to keep your affiliate account separate from your personal Amazon shopping account.
As mentioned in step one, you need to have your website or blog set up and running before you sign up for Amazon Associates. You must provide the URL to your website during registration, so get your WordPress website or other site set up before applying. You can include up to 50 different affiliate sites under one account. Plus, if you develop mobile apps like a mobile deal finder or how-to app, you can include those in your affiliate marketing plan too.
Step two of the Amazon Associates sign-up asks for your website URL. Here, you can enter one or more websites or mobile apps to your Amazon affiliate account.
Your Associates’ profile is the place where you tell Amazon what your blog or website is all about, including the type of content you cover and the types of goods you plan to market via affiliate links. Here’s an idea of what Amazon wants to know:
The Profile stage is where you tell Amazon what type of content you intend to publish and how you’ll market Amazon products through affiliate links.
After completing your Profile step, Amazon verifies your websites and will send you an approval confirmation within about 12 to 24 hours. Once you receive that, you can start adding affiliate links to your site content.
“Your initial approval is the beginning of Amazon’s 180-day probationary period,” says Amazon affiliate and owner of Books That Sow Strength, Cherrye Vazquez.
“In order to remain in the program, a new Amazon Associate must earn three qualified sales within 6 months of sign-up, and those three sales cannot include purchases by family and close friends,” warns Vazquez. “Amazon’s sophisticated algorithm can identify purchases from close acquaintances — so don’t rely on that trick.”
Vazquez advises new bloggers to “be diligent and work on getting at least 20 posts up fast since that time goes by very quickly. However, once you get those three purchases,” says Vazquez, “you’ll get an email that you’re fully approved.”
Vazquez adds, “Amazon Associates Is one of the few affiliate programs that allow new bloggers to enter their program without an existing social following. Many others only approve new applicants that have a social following in the thousands.”
If you do have a large social following, you can pair your Amazon Associates account with the newer Amazon Influencer program and make the most of social media-focused promotions.
Once your Amazon affiliate account is approved, you can start adding Amazon affiliate links to your content. But before you jump in head-first, you need to learn the different ways you can earn Amazon affiliate commissions and understand Amazon’s category-based affiliate commission structure.
Amazon affiliate commissions are category-based, so you can make higher payouts per-sale by marketing goods within higher-paying categories.
Furniture, home decor and lawn & garden: This category pays 8 percent of an item’s sale price; if a shopper purchases throw pillows for $40 via a link on your site, you make 8 percent, or $3.20, on that sale
Beauty, musical instruments and headphones: This category pays 6 percent of the items’ sale price; if a shopper you sent to Amazon purchases a garden rake for $30, you make 6 percent, which is $2.40 in your pocket
Luxury beauty: Affiliates are paid a whopping 10 percent commission on items in this category; if you market an $60 item from this category, you’ll make $6 when a visitor clicks through from your site and makes the purchase
Now, Amazon’s categories can be confusing. As you use the program, you’ll find that something that you’d consider a “Home” or “Luxury Beauty” item might be categorized at a lower rate. To be sure of the item’s commission category, check the categories listed at the top of the item page or search by category as we did here to find this Luxury Beauty item:
This $121 item within the Luxury Beauty category would net an affiliate $12.11 if the shopper came to Amazon via the affiliate site.
Here’s the most exciting part of Amazon’s affiliate program. You make commissions on any other items your shopper buys too. They don’t even have to purchase the original item that sent them from your site to Amazon. This is a great perk.
If your visitor clicks on one of your affiliate links, say for the beauty cream above, but purchases another brand of cream or even a blender or pair of shoes during their visit, you get paid a commission on those items too. In fact, Amazon’s affiliate links track the shopper from your site to that of the shopper. If he or she completes a purchase within a 24-hour window, you get the commission — whatever it is he or she buys.
Plus, if the shopper leaves Amazon’s site without purchasing, but returns and completes a purchase within 24 hours, you earn commissions on anything the shopper purchases. In fact, if the shopper adds items to his or her Amazon cart within that 24-hour timeframe, but leaves without purchasing, all is not lost. If he or she returns and completes the purchase within 90 days — without clearing the cart and starting over, that is — you can still earn that commission.
Clearly, these are not factors you can control, but they are nice perks of the Amazon Associates program.
Amazon Bounties are flat-fee payouts that affiliates earn when a visitor signs up for an Amazon service like a Prime membership, Amazon Music or Kindle Unlimited. Most bounties pay around $3 to $5. It’s easy to market Bounty programs by adding an Amazon Bounty ad into your store’s sidebar or banner:
Amazon Kindle and Prime subscriptions are two of the many bounty programs that you can add to your site via text links or display ads.
Amazon affiliates can insert different types of trackable links into content to market Amazon goods and services. Some of the affiliates that we interviewed have one or two favorites as you’ll see below, but most use different types of links throughout their site.
Before you start working with any links, you’ll want to install the Amazon Associates Site Stripe browser extension. This makes quick work of inserting affiliate links into your content as you’ll see below.
Amazon’s free Site Stripe extension and popup link button are quick and easy ways to insert Amazon affiliate links into your website content.
Here are the five primary types of links that Amazon affiliate marketers use to monetize site content.
Text links are just that: links that you add within the text of your site content like a blog post or product review, such as this Baby Safety Gate Checklist on the SimplySmartLiving blog:
The blue text underneath the bullets above are affiliate text links. When clicked, these send the viewer to Amazon’s baby gate listings page, where a purchase leads to affiliate earnings.
Text links are simple to use, and many successful bloggers recommend them for both startup and established affiliate programs.
Slavik Boyechko, founder of the filmmaking equipment review site GearDads, says, “The easiest way to begin as an Amazon affiliate is simply to write good content and insert in-text links using Site Stripe when it makes natural sense to link to an item. Banners and native ads and advanced comparison tables are something you can do down the road.”
James Goodwillie of the blog One To Multi agrees. “I’ve been an Amazon Associate from day one, and it’s the number-one way I monetize my content. I’ve found that things like big sections of product image links are too much and scare away users,” says Goodwillie. “Adding affiliate links for product pictures or any text where I mention the product is the method that works the best for my site.”
With the Amazon Site Stripe extension turned on, you can search for and insert Amazon affiliate text links within your website editor using its handy popup “Create Link” button.
When you click on “Create Link,” can select an item from the pop-up list, search for a specific item or link to a search results page on Amazon. You can complete the entire affiliate linking process in just seconds within your site dashboard — as we did in this WordPress post edit screen:
You can also create text links for any Amazon item or page within your Amazon Associates dashboard. Once you select the item or page, Amazon gives you code that you copy and paste into your web content.
The same linking process used to create in-text links can also create affiliate links for the images you publish in your web content like product reviews or how-tos. These can be images you take that illustrate your content, shown below or product images copied from Amazon product listings.
The image in this how-to post was taken by the publisher, but you can also insert images copied from Amazon product listings if you’re covering a specific item.
You want to be careful with this because the item featured in the image needs to match the item that you’re linking to in order to best-serve your reader and to meet Amazon’s affiliate image guidelines.
Like text links, the simplest way to insert Amazon affiliate links into images is using the Site Stripe extension. With that, you can select the image in your site editor, and the Amazon “Create Link” button pops up, like this:
Then, click on “Edit,” and the pop-up search window opens. In it, you can search for the exact item you want to link to, and click “Tag Image,” to insert the affiliate link, like this:
John Holloway uses Amazon affiliate links exclusively on his Guitar Lessons website. He advises beginning bloggers to “try different things and see what works best. Some best practices to start with are image links, in-text links and even product comparison tables with links,” says Holloway. “Just make sure that the linking is natural and not overdone or you run the risk of driving visitors away.”
Amazon provides many types of ad-style affiliate links with custom coding that automatically updates item pricing, names, review starts and images for you. One of the easiest and most effective options is the Amazon’s Featured Product links.
Jeff Rizzo, founder and CEO of the RizKnows affiliate site says, “adding Amazon’s product linking graphics in a post is a great way to make the post more visual and ensure that pricing for featured items is up to date.”
Amazon’s Featured Products affiliate links are easy to insert anywhere in blog posts and content pages using the code that Amazon provides.
Rizzo says, “Rather than putting in individual links into text and images, bloggers can copy the automatically generated HTML code from Amazon and get a much more engaging link, which converts better.”
You can create a featured product affiliate link using your Site Stripe extension bar which appears above the item listing page on Amazon.com. Use Amazon search to find the item that you want to list, click on that page, then click on “Text+Image” in the Site Stripe bar above it.
Amazon shows you how the affiliate link will appear, and you copy the provided code and paste it into your website content.
Grabbing the code for Featured Product links is as easy as searching for the item you want to feature on Amazon, clicking your Site Stripe bar and copying and pasting the code into your content.
To create a row of multiple featured products links as we show above, you can insert the link code into a table on your website or copying and pasting the code for several featured product in succession into your post.
Amazon Native Shopping Ads are Amazon Associates’ newest affiliate link product and produces a slick-looking ad section that looks great in blog posts and website content as shown below. Rizzo recommends that Amazon affiliates use Native Ads as soon as they’re comfortable creating and inserting the code into posts.
Amazon Native Ads convey pricing, Prime eligibility and reviews to your readers, which entices them to click and shop.
“For example,” says Rizzo, “rather than having a Google AdSense banner, bloggers can make more money early on with an Amazon Native Shopping ad, which pays whenever someone clicks through and makes a purchase.”
Recommendation ads: Amazon populates these ads automatically based on a scan of the surrounding post content; these ads insert the products that Amazon feels are the best match for the content and reader interests and makes updates automatically too
Search ads: Creates an ad strip of best-selling items for a search phrase and includes an Amazon search box so your site visitors can search Amazon right on your site and see new results in the Native Ad strip
Custom ads: You can create a Native Ad strip that includes products that you specifically want to promote; Amazon updates the pricing automatically and reviews information for you, but you select the specific items that appear in the strip
Of the three Native Ad options, Rizzo recommends that new bloggers try the simple and effective Recommendation Ads. “These scan your post automatically to make certain that the products it recommends are relevant to the reader,” says Rizzo.
Native Ads can be set up in the Site Stripe bar. However, many new affiliates find it easier to do this within the Native Ads section in your Amazon Associates dashboard. There, you can tinker and test all types of ads options to find the best fit for your content.
The Native Shopping Ads section in your Amazon Affiliates dashboard gives you lots of ad-building options.
Amazon also gives affiliates a huge selection of automatically updated ad banners that can be inserted anywhere easily. We mentioned the Amazon Bounty programs earlier, and these offer banners that market Amazon memberships like Prime, Kindle and Music programs and much more:
You can also insert all types of Amazon affiliate ad banners and buttons for seasonal and holiday specials, shopping events like back-to-school and many other niche-targeted promotions like crafting, kitchen, tech and plenty more. If you insert a banner for a seasonal event but forget to change it out when the promotion is over, Amazon has you covered. Amazon will update any expired banners automatically with standard promotions, so you aren’t left with a blank spot on your site.
You can find many Amazon Banner Ad options in the “Banners” section of your Amazon Associates dashboard. Once there, you can search for targeted and niche market ad programs that promote just about anything you wish:
Most bloggers insert Amazon Banner Ads into site headers, sidebars, footers, specific landing pages and occasionally post content. Amazon offers many different sizes and layouts, so you can find the right fit for your space — like this Kitchen promotion for Cuisinart products that provides banners in seven different size formats:
Amazon provides Banner Ads in several sizes, just click on the size you need, and then copy and paste the code into your website.
If you use WordPress to run your affiliate site, you’ll eventually hear about Amazon affiliate plug-ins. These are third-party programs that streamline adding Amazon affiliate links to your website, provide advanced display tools and help with overall performance management. This sounds enticing, but many blogging pros warn new bloggers that relying on plug-ins can be risky.
Jon Hayes, the author of the Authority Hacker Amazon affiliate site, says, “When it comes to plug-ins, it’s important to remember that Amazon is extremely harsh with their penalties.” Since its very easy to lose your Amazon Associates affiliate account for incorrect linking, Hayes recommends that “affiliates should thoroughly check to see whether the plug-in is compliant and approved by Amazon or not.”
Hayes says a few plug-ins are closely vetted and offer reliable options for bloggers that need advanced design and linking features. “AAWP is by far the most useful and trusted plug-in we have worked with,” says Hayes. “It adds a lot of versatility to our articles and gives us a range of dynamic design options improving the visual design and bolstering the trustworthiness of our reviews.”
Part-time travel blogger Shawna Newman, who runs Active Weekender, agrees. “Simple in-text links are still the best for any blogger, but for advanced display needs, the AAWP plug-in integrates with the Amazon Associates API [application programming interface] and makes it easy to display product images and prices in a way that keeps you compliant with Amazon.”
Since API connectivity is quite advanced for the beginning blogger, plug-ins should only be explored after your Amazon affiliate site is established and you’re familiar with the program. However, most experienced bloggers agree that the options covered above handle most affiliates’ linking needs just fine — without a plug-in.
Next, we’ll look at the different types of content you can create to house your affiliate links and effectively market Amazon products to your readers.
To become a successful, money-making affiliate site owner, you must create interesting and compelling content — and lots of it. Content is what attracts an audience and what that content largely depends on the purpose of your blog. Some bloggers focus on product reviews while others are do-it-yourself crafters who publish how-tos, cooks who create recipes or workout pros who publish fitness-centered articles and posts.
Whatever your niche, here are four different types of content that our expert bloggers recommend to attract readers and convert them to Amazon buyers.
Jeff Rizzo says “the easiest posts to incorporate affiliate links are best-of and roundup lists, like the ‘5 Best Water Bottles for Hiking.’ These lists allow bloggers to incorporate numerous product links into a single post and thereby have more opportunities for click-throughs.
Shawna Newman agrees, “the best types of posts are product roundup posts where you can recommend great products, like The Best Hiking Sandals, shown below.
Rizzo adds, “roundup lists can also rank higher in Google search results because they tend to be more specific. In other words, don’t do a post entitled ‘Best Laptop Computer’ because you will be competing with some of the largest websites out there such as CNET, PC Magazine and so on and will have a difficult time getting traffic,” says Rizzo. “Instead, think about deeper pieces of content like ‘Best Security Camera System for Small Businesses,’ which has fewer searches but far less competition.”
Connecting tightly post titles and content to your niche topics helps your site rank higher in search results and attracts readers looking for your specific information. That’s how you build up a following of readers and shoppers who share your interest.
Product review posts take a deeper dive into specific product features that a Best-of list or product roundup. You can even incorporate your own star rating system, shown below, which tends to boosts your search results too.
The SimplySmartLiving blog uses a star rating system to tell readers how reviewed lines meet specific criteria and help boost search rankings.
The SimplySmartLiving blog uses a star-rating system to tell readers how reviewed lines meet specific criteria and help boost search rankings.
Hayes advises, “when you’re getting started, I would highly recommend sticking to review articles, particularly roundup reviews. These are a great way ease yourself into the content creation process. During the research process, you will get a deep understanding of your audience and the types of problems they’re trying to resolve by visiting your site.”
Thomas O’Rourke, who runs the affiliate marketing website Decking Hero, finds that product comparison posts that include tables help convert readers into Amazon buyers.
“Placing a product comparison table toward the head of your post or webpage increases your click-through rates to Amazon tenfold,” says O’Rourke. “Plus, tables offer a convenient method for your readers to compare product specifications.” O’Rourke also recommends adding affiliate links to any images in your tables or on post pages.
“Always make sure to hyperlink your page and table images to Amazon,” says O’Rourke. “The testing I’ve done suggests that images are among the most clicked elements of a page. Once you get users to Amazon, you’ve done half the job since they’ll often make a purchase once there.”
Bloggers who focus on creative topics like crafting, DIY, home decorating and cooking have an endless supply of “How-to” instructional content. “This,” says crafting and cooking blogger Amanda Formaro, “is great for converting readers to buyers.”
“One of the most effective ways to use Amazon Associates is to include affiliate links in a list of supplies or tools that are needed for the recipe, craft, garden project — whatever you may be writing about,” says Formaro.
Here’s a look at how Formaro incorporates Amazon affiliate links as product recommendations within a recipe post:
Amanda Formaro adds affiliate links to useful kitchen tools within every recipe she posts on her AmandasCookin recipe blog.
Formaro also publishes other types of content that appeal to the shopping side of her how-to audience. “You can also do product reviews or write gift guides on creative content websites, and these can be very effective — even more so than just linking to supplies within a how-to post,” says Formaro. “Keep in mind that people are most likely not in the shopping mindset when they arrive at your blog to get a recipe or how-to instructions. But, if they come to a gift guide or product review, the mindset is definitely shopping-oriented.”
Next, we’ll look at how to measure and gauge the success of your Amazon affiliate marketing efforts.
After you have some content published and Amazon Associates affiliate links in place, you’ll want to review how well those posts are converting and your links are performing. This is a pretty in-depth science. However, as a beginner, you can start to explore and tweak performance using two analytics tools:
Your Amazon Affiliate dashboard provides an overview and in-depth reporting where you can review and track the performance of link clicks rates, conversion rates and the income generated from your affiliate links.
Here’s a look at a typical Amazon Associates account overview, which you can access in the “Reports” section of your dashboard. From here, you can drill into date, link and site-specific details.
Amazon Associates income and link performance reports are very intuitive and help you pinpoint the types of products that convert best on your site.
As your usage of Amazon Associates grows, Amazon’s new Content Insights reports use this data to recommend content ideas and related products that fit your readers’ interests. This program is in beta testing now but is in the process of rolling out to all Amazon Associates accounts.
For overall site performance tracking, including the number of visits, the most popular pages and how visitors interact with your website, you need to use Google Analytics. There is a learning curve to Google Analytics, but it’s well worth the time investment. Even with a basic understanding of Google Analytics, you can learn a lot about how your visitors interact with your site and which pages attract more readers than others.
For example, here’s a look at the Google Analytics report of the most popular pages on an affiliate site over a seven-day period:
Clearly, knowing which pages are the most popular on your site is important to your affiliate monetization strategy. This data helps you target your affiliate efforts to the pages that already attract the most readers. Once those pages are well-monetized, you can look into improving the search results, reader interaction and monetization of less popular pages.
Understanding reports and analytics, especially Google Analytics data, can take some time, but there is help available. Fiverr is home to budget-friendly freelancers that can help you set up, track and understand Google Analytics reports so you can start using this data from day one. In fact, Fiverr’s pros can help you build your affiliate WordPress site, populate it with the content your readers want and even help you effectively monetize it with Amazon affiliate links.
If you want to get your Amazon affiliate site up fast and income rolling in quickly, Fiverr’s Amazon affiliate marketing pros can do the job.
There are many ways to monetize an affiliate marketing blog or website. However, the pros agree that the Amazon Associates affiliate marketing program is hands-down the best way for most beginning bloggers to start earning affiliate income.
The one thing all potential Amazon affiliate marketers need is a website and — again — the pros agree that WordPress is the best option. Hosting a WordPress site costs just $2.95 per month with our preferred provider, Bluehost. You even get a free website address with your account. Enter your website name below to get started today.
As soon as you’ve launched your website, you can apply for the Amazon affiliate program. Provisional acceptance is almost guaranteed and that gives you 6 months to build content, attract an audience and convert just three readers into buyers.
Long-term success depends on doing two things well: building content that delivers value to readers and using that content to market affiliate products to convert those readers into buyers. There are many different types of content and affiliate link combinations you can try, and Amazon Associates reports and Google Analytics both help you measure success and fine-tune your efforts.
Do you monetize your website with Amazon affiliate links? Are you exclusive on Amazon or do you also use other affiliate marketing programs? We’d love to hear what works for you in the comments below.
While free accounting software that meets all of the needs of a small business is difficult to find, we’ve compared over a dozen solid options and have narrowed it down to the five best. We evaluated price, features and other criteria. Wave stands above the rest because it includes the most features, free of charge.
While the free accounting software options review below are good, they’re missing features that a software like QuickBooks has. For example, none of the options we have chosen can produce a statement of cash flows, and only two out of the five allow you to manage accounts payable. With QuickBooks, you can produce a statement of cash flows in minutes, track your A/P, and much more. Click here to save up to 50% off QuickBooks.
xTuple PostBooks Manufacturing & Distribution businesses that want a system that integrates accounting, operations, sales & inventory all in one software for free.
GnuCash Best open source software platform for businesses that want to build a custom accounting software system.
Many small businesses cannot afford to invest in an accounting software but need something more sophisticated than an Excel spreadsheet. During our research, our number one criteria was that the software had to be 100 percent free or include a free plan that did not expire. Based on this, we were left with five great options for which we also compared features, ease of setup/use, and a few other criteria.
The criteria we used to compare Wave, ZipBooks, SlickPie, xTuple PostBooks and GnuCash are as follows:
Overall features for price – Each product was evaluated based on whether or not they could perform basic bookkeeping tasks like invoice customers, pay bills and run reports.
Ease of setup and use – Most of these products do not offer live tech support, so it was very important that they use simple language that does not require the user to have a bookkeeping/accounting background.
Ability to give other users access – Having the ability to give a bookkeeper or CPA access to your data is going to save you time, allowing you to work on other areas of your business without having to be interrupted to fulfill requests for information.
Mobile accessibility – With the many hats that business owners wear, it is also imperative that you can run your business on the go using any device with an internet connection.
Positive cash flow and time are two of the most precious commodities that a small business owner could never have too much of. Each of the criteria that we used to evaluate our top five free accounting software picks will either save you time or money, if not both.
Out of the five products that made our list, Wave is our best overall free accounting software for small business. Wave goes well beyond the basic bookkeeping requirements to give you an unlimited number of users, a mobile app so you can work on the go, tools like automatic reminders, and the ability to accept online payments from customers.
Wave is the best overall free accounting software for small businesses because it includes the most features for the price of free. Their features go beyond basic bookkeeping by offering an unlimited number of users and the ability to track more than one business—at zero cost. Wave is ideal for any business that pays most of their bills online, needs to track income/expenses for multiple businesses, and has multiple users they need to give access to their data—all for free.
When it comes to pricing, Wave keeps it simple by offering one plan that is 100 percent free. Unlike most of its competitors, you won’t have to “upgrade” to a paid plan if you need to add a user or start tracking income/expenses for a new business. Similar to Wave, GnuCash is the only other accounting software that is also 100 percent free and does not offer a paid plan.
If you decide to accept online payments or process payroll, both of these services must be turned on and will require that you pay fees in order to use them.
Wave is packed with not only the basic bookkeeping features, like the ability to manage your income and expenses, but you can also invite an unlimited number of users to access your data and you can connect an unlimited number of bank/credit card accounts—at no cost to you. Unlike its competitors that put limitations on their “free” software to force you to upgrade to a paid plan, Wave gives you the same features for free.
Wave includes full cycle accounts receivable, which means that you can create invoices, accept online payments from customers, and generate an accounts receivable report to stay on top of unpaid invoices. Wave also includes the following features to help you get paid faster:
Unfortunately, Wave is the only software that we looked at that does not allow you to keep track of unpaid bills. However, you can record payments that have been made via check, credit card or online by downloading the transactions directly from your financial institution or manually entering them into Wave.
Similar to SlickPie and ZipBooks, you can connect an unlimited number of bank and credit card accounts to Wave. This will significantly reduce the amount of manual data entry that you would normally have to do. By having the ability to sync your bank/credit card accounts with Wave, you can ensure that your financial statements remain accurate and always up to date.
Similar to GnuCash and xTuple PostBooks, you can create all three financial statements in Wave: the balance sheet, profit and loss statement, and the statement of cash flows. This will help you to stay on top of the overall health of your business.
Similar to most cloud accounting software products, you can download a mobile app to manage certain aspects of your business. Wave has two apps: one for invoicing customers and one for scanning receipts. Both apps sync automatically with your Wave account. The following apps are available for iOS and Android devices.
When it comes to customer service, Wave has a four out of five-star rating. Customers love being able to use an accounting software for free. However, customers are extremely unsatisfied with the lack of customer service. The only support Wave offers is email, and some customers say the response time can be days while others say they have never received a response. You can see all of our customer reviews by visiting our Wave customer reviews page.
As we have discussed, there is one primary area where Wave falls short: the inability to track unpaid bills (accounts payable). If you pay all of your bills online, then not having the A/P functionality would not be a deal breaker.
Getting your free Wave account will only take a few minutes. Head over to the Wave website and you will need to enter some basic information about your business, create a user id and password, and then you’ll have access to all of the features we have discussed. Best of all, you won’t have to enter any credit card information.
ZipBooks is best for freelancers who don’t need all of the bells and whistles that its competitors offer. If you are currently using an Excel spreadsheet or the old “shoebox” method to keep track of income and expenses, then it will be easy to make the transition to ZipBooks because it is simpler to use than calculating formulas in a spreadsheet—not to mention a huge upgrade.
Unlike Wave and GnuCash, which only offer one plan—free, ZipBooks has four pricing plans that range between $0 and $125/month. The ZipBooks starter plan is free and it is the pricing plan we will focus on for this guide. If you decide to accept online payments or process payroll, both of these services must be turned on and will require that you pay fees in order to use them.
If you would like more information on the paid pricing plans for ZipBooks, check out our article on ZipBooks vs. Wave. In this article, we compare price, features and who’s best.
Like its competitors, ZipBooks Starter is capable of handling basic bookkeeping such as invoicing customers and paying bills. Similar to Wave and SlickPie, you can keep track of multiple businesses. However, you are limited to one user, whereas both Wave and SlickPie include an unlimited number of users. If you need to give additional users access to your data, you can upgrade to a paid plan starting at $15/month.
Similar to its competitors, you can invoice your customers and accept online payments in ZipBooks. You can also run an accounts receivable aging report to keep track of unpaid invoices. ZipBooks also has a time tracking tool that will allow you to easily transfer hours worked to an invoice.
Unlike Wave, you can manually keep track of unpaid vendor bills in ZipBooks. The way this works is you would enter all of your bills as they come in and run an accounts payable aging report to keep track of their due dates. When it’s time to pay a bill, you manually mark the bill paid by entering the payment method (i.e., check, credit card or online). Unlike GnuCash and xTuple, this is an entirely manual process in ZipBooks.
ZipBooks Starter limits you to connecting one bank or credit card account versus unlimited accounts with Wave and SlickPie. If you have more than one account that you need to connect to ZipBooks, you will have to upgrade to one of their paid plans that start at $15/month. All ZipBooks paid plans allow you to connect an unlimited number of bank/credit card accounts.
Similar to SlickPie, you cannot generate a statement of cash flows in ZipBooks. However, you can create a Profit and Loss and a Balance Sheet report. However, ZipBooks does have a paid plan that includes a dedicated bookkeeper. This person might be able to manually create a statement of cash flows for you by using another tool, like Excel.
While ZipBooks does have a mobile app, it’s only compatible with iOS devices. Therefore, if you use an Android device (like me), you would only be able to manage your books from a desktop computer. Download the free ZipBooks mobile app to your iOS device.
ZipBooks has an average rating of five out of five stars on our customer reviews page. What customers like the most about ZipBooks is the amount of features that are included at such an affordable cost. Unlike most of its competitors, ZipBooks does offer live customer support via chat. However, customers feel that there is significant improvement needed in this area. You can see all of our customer reviews by visiting our ZipBooks customer reviews page.
Compared to its competitors, ZipBooks falls short in three main areas: the number of users is limited to one, you can only connect one bank/credit card account, and you cannot run a statement of cash flows. While two of these limitations can be resolved by upgrading to a paid subscription, Wave and SlickPie include an unlimited number of users and an unlimited number of bank/credit card accounts for free.
Like Wave and SlickPie, you can set up a ZipBooks account in a few short minutes. Be prepared to enter some basic information about your business like company name, email and business phone number. You can sign up for a ZipBooks Starter account for free, no credit card required.
If you’ve just started your business and don’t have a ton of experience with using bookkeeping software but you want something more sophisticated than Excel, SlickPie is a good solution. While it has many of the features that its competitors do, it is extremely easy to use.
Similar to Wave and GnuCash, SlickPie offers one pricing plan—free. Unlike ZipBooks, they don’t require that you upgrade to a paid plan in order to unlock additional features. There is never a need to upgrade with SlickPie because all available features are included upfront, at no cost to you.
Similar to its competitors, you can manage your bills, customer invoices and so much more with SlickPie. When it comes to features included, it is almost identical to Wave. SlickPie includes an unlimited number of users, the ability to manage more than one business, and the ability to connect an unlimited number of bank/credit card accounts. Like ZipBooks, you cannot generate a statement of cash flows but you can manually track your bills, which you can’t do with Wave.
Similar to its competitors, you can manage your entire accounts receivable process in SlickPie. This includes creating invoices, emailing invoices to customers, and managing customer payments. You can also run an accounts receivable aging report to stay on top of unpaid invoices.
Unlike Wave, you can manage your unpaid supplier bills manually in SlickPie. Similar to what we discussed with ZipBooks, you can manually enter your bills and mark them paid with the payment method used (i.e., cash, check, credit card). You can also run an accounts payable report to keep track of the unpaid bills that are coming due or past due.
Like Wave, you can connect an unlimited number of bank and credit card accounts to SlickPie. This will ensure that you don’t miss out on any tax deductions because you lost a receipt or forgot to enter an expense. You can also easily reconcile your bank/credit card accounts to ensure that your financial statements are always up to date.
SlickPie includes many financial statements like profit and loss and the balance sheet report. Similar to ZipBooks, it does not include a statement of cash flows report. However, it does include an aged receivables report, aged payables report, and a detailed budget report.
SlickPie is compatible with iOS, Android and Windows devices. Unlike its competitors, there is no need to download an app—you can access the mobile-friendly web version from any device with an internet connection.
Customers who gave SlickPie a positive review like that it’s free bookkeeping software that is easy to use. In contrast, a few negative reviews were that there aren’t enough charts and graphs.
Compared to its competitors, SlickPie falls short in two areas: accounts payable is a manual process and you can’t run a statement of cash flows. The good news is that you can at least track accounts payable manually, which is better than not having the functionality at all, like Wave.
Signing up for your free SlickPie account is as easy as pie. Similar to Wave and ZipBooks, you need to provide your business name, address, email and contact information. Since there is no credit card required, you’ve got nothing to lose by taking SlickPie for a test drive.
Like GnuCash, xTuple is an open source accounting software that includes modules to manage every aspect of your business: sales, accounting, operations, customer management, inventory control and supplier management. The best part is that you get access to all of these modules absolutely free, making this the best free accounting software for small business if you’re in manufacturing or distribution. If you need more functionality, you can always upgrade to a paid version.
Similar to ZipBooks, xTuple offers both free and paid plans. The paid plans run between $45 and $150 per month per user. This is definitely on the steep side when it comes to the average cost of accounting software. The free plan is limited to four concurrent users; if you need to give more than four people access to your data, you will need to upgrade to one of the paid pricing plans.
What’s neat about xTuple is that it goes beyond accounting by integrating your entire business process (sales, operations, inventory control, customer relations), and GnuCash is probably the only product that we looked at that is very similar. Like GnuCash, xTuple is an open source software, which means it is a lot more customizable than most accounting software.
Like its competitors, xTuple allows you to easily manage all of your income and expenses. Unlike its competitors, it has an extensive inventory management module that is ideal for both distribution and manufacturing businesses. Another unique feature you will find in xTuple PostBooks is their customer relationship management (CRM) system. Unlike its competitors, you can organize and track all business contacts, including customers, vendors, competitors and partners.
Like its competitors, xTuple PostBooks allows you to create customer invoices, apply payments and stay on top of unpaid invoices with an accounts receivable aging report. You can also accept credit/debit card payments from customers so that you can get paid faster. If you sell products and would like to create and send a sales order to your customer to confirm their order, you can easily do that in xTuple PostBooks.
Like GnuCash, xTuple PostBooks has full accounts payable functionality. This means that you can enter all of your unpaid bills and keep track of their due dates. This will allow you to run an accounts payable report at any time to see how much you owe to your vendor suppliers. Using this information, you can make sure you have enough cash on-hand to meet your obligations.
You can set up and manage all of your bank/credit card accounts in xTuple PostBooks. Similar to GnuCash, you cannot connect your bank accounts to the software. However, you can import a data file from your bank into xTuple PostBooks.
Unlike SlickPie and ZipBooks (which do not include a statement of cash flows), xTuple PostBooks includes all three of the primary financial statements: profit and loss, balance sheet, and statement of cash flow. In addition, xTuple includes a free, open source SQL report writer that can be used to build any type of report that you need (and is not currently available) in xTuple.
Unfortunately, xTuple does not currently offer a way for you to access your data from a mobile device. As we have discussed, the software is downloaded to a desktop computer and accessed by multiple users via a network server.
The online reviews for xTuple are overwhelmingly positive. Customers like the ability to download a free software to see what it can do and if they want more functionality, they can always upgrade to a paid version. When it comes to providing good customer service, xTuple excels in that area as well.
According to a customer review, xTuple goes out of their way to give you the best experience possible. As part of my research, I reached out to the support team to ask a few questions and I received a response the following morning. They provided me with a 45-minute demo of the product and allowed me to ask questions throughout.
One area where xTuple is lacking is the inability to access your data on the go like you can with Wave, SlickPie and ZipBooks. With as many hats as business owners have to wear, it’s not realistic that they must be chained to a desktop computer to get work done.
Another area where xTuple fell short is not being able to connect bank/credit card accounts to the software. Having the ability to look at your software to see up-to-date financials is key to managing cash flow.
Similar to GnuCash, you can download xTuple PostBooks for free to a desktop computer that uses Linux, Windows or Mac. Since it is a pretty extensive software, we recommend that you purchase the QuickStart Wizard for $30. The QuickStart Wizard will walk you through each module step by step to customize it for your business needs. This will save you a lot of time because there is a steeper learning curve to learning how to use xTuple than its competitors like Wave, SlickPie and ZipBooks.
GnuCash is the best free accounting software for businesses that want an open source accounting software that you can customize to meet your individual needs. For example, if you need a report that is not in the list of report options, you can build it from scratch in GnuCash because the platform is “open” and available for a programmer or developer to change the code behind the scenes. For more information on cost, features and benefits of GnuCash, check out our GnuCash vs.TurboCash guide.
Like Wave and SlickPie, GnuCash has one pricing plan—and it is 100 percent free. GnuCash is supported by volunteer developers so they do accept donations, but you can download the software to your Windows, Linux or Mac computer for free, no credit card required.
When it comes to features included, GnuCash does not disappoint. It includes all of the basic accounting features like the ability to manage accounts receivable and accounts payable. However, it falls short when it comes to users included, which is only one compared to Wave and SlickPie, which include an unlimited number of users. However, GnuCash does beat all of its competitors when it comes to reports. Unlike SlickPie and ZipBooks, you can run a statement of cash flow report in GnuCash to see your cash flow activity for the business.
Similar to its competitors, GnuCash allows you to manage outstanding customer balances. This includes creating invoices, tracking their due dates, applying customer payments and running an A/R aging report to stay on top of invoices coming due.
Unlike Wave, SlickPie and ZipBooks, GnuCash is designed to help you manage unpaid bills. This means that you can enter your bills, assign due dates, and run an A/P aging report to stay on top of bills coming due. In addition, you can pay a bill directly in GnuCash, which will allow your accounts payable balances to update automatically. This will help you to keep tabs on your cash flow.
When it comes to the ability to connect bank and credit card accounts, GnuCash falls short. While you can connect multiple bank/credit card accounts to Wave, SlickPie and ZipBooks, you cannot connect a bank/credit card account to GnuCash. However, you can import bank and credit card transactions from a QIF, OFX or HBCI file type. This will allow you to reconcile your bank and credit card accounts, but it is a manual process and not automatic like its competitors offer.
GnuCash allows you to not only create the three primary financial reports—income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement—but to also customize the existing reports or build a new report from scratch if you need to (one of the benefits of being an open source software). This is something that none of its competitors is capable of doing.
GnuCash allows you to keep track of your business on the go. If you have an Android device, download the GnuCash Android app and you’re all set. Unlike its competitors, you will have to import your data from your mobile device to your desktop to sync your data. Unfortunately, GnuCash does not offer an app for iOS devices like Wave, SlickPie and ZipBooks do.
We found mixed reviews for GnuCash. Customers like all of the features that are included at no cost to them. However, customers feel that the interface is not user friendly and as a result, they have to invest a lot of time to learn how the program works because of the steep learning curve.
As we have discussed, GnuCash falls short in a couple of areas. First, you can only have one person in the file at a time. Second, your bank/credit card information will not automatically download into GnuCash. Instead, you have to obtain the file from your financial institution and then import the data into GnuCash.
Since GnuCash is free, you can download the software directly from their website and start using it right away. You will have access to all of the features available in the software. Be sure to read the step-by-step help guide on their website for instructions on how to properly download the software.
If you’re looking for more robust bookkeeping software and you don’t mind paying for it, we’ve got a few great alternatives to the free accounting software options that we have discussed in this guide.
QuickBooks Online Service-based businesses of any size that include multi-users, multi-currency and 1099 tracking; plans start at $15/month.
FreshBooks Businesses with heavy accounts receivable looking for a way to put customer invoicing and payments on autopilot; plans start at $15 per month.
QuickBooks Self-Employed Uber/Lyft drivers and road warriors who need to track mileage along with income and expenses; plans start at $10 per month.
Odoo Businesses looking for a free bookkeeping software that includes inventory management, POS, CRM and MRP, all in one.
Xero Best alternative to QuickBooks Online; ideal for service based business that has 10 or fewer employees; plans start at $9 per month.
Now that you have five free accounting products to choose from, it’s time to pick one. Deciding which software to choose is really dependent on your business needs. One of the reasons why we recommend Wave is because it works for any size business.
Wave is easy to use, allows you to track income and expenses for multiple businesses, and gives access to as many people as you need to. There is never a need to upgrade with Wave because you get all of the features upfront, at zero cost. It takes just a few minutes to sign up for your free Wave account. Just enter your business contact information and select a user id and password to get started.
Bill Haas follows through on a shot along the 17th fairway during the first round of the Masters on Thursday.	
Bill Haas shot a 68 in the first round of the Masters on Thursday, grabbing a one-stroke lead over a trio of former major championship winners: Adam Scott, Louis Oosthuizen and Bubba Watson. But how likely is an early lead at Augusta to hold up?
For leaders after a single round, not very. I gathered data from Yahoo’s golf scoreboard for every Masters since 2002, when the website started listing round-by-round scores for every player in the field (including those who missed the cut). After feeding the data into a logistic regression predicting the eventual winner, I found that a player’s first-round score isn’t necessarily the deciding factor in whether he can make a run for the green jacket. Instead, it’s all about how many players are in front of him. And even then, there are no guarantees after just one round of play.
Obviously, no players are starting the second round in front of Haas. Based on the regression model, that gives him an 8.6 percent probability of winning the tournament come Sunday afternoon. Scott, Oosthuizen and Watson have only Haas in front of them, so their probabilities are about 7.7 percent apiece. But even someone like pre-tournament co-favorite Rory McIlroy, who finished the first round with 11 players ahead of him, still has a 2.4 percent chance of winning — not too much lower than Haas’.
I ran another regression, this time looking to predict the eventual Masters winner based on the scoreboard after the second round. Once again, a player’s score (relative to the leader, the field average, or the field median) doesn’t have much bearing on his probability of winning the tournament. But the number of players between him and the top slot means a great deal. The leader after two rounds has a 17.5 percent probability of winning, more than double the leader’s expected chance of winning after only one round.
More important, the number of remotely plausible winners is cut drastically after two rounds. Look how much more steeply the probability curve drops off based on how many people are in front a golfer after the second round ends:
After one round, as many as 40 players had a nonzero probability of eventually winning the tournament (although, granted, the majority at this right tail of the distribution was extreme long shots). After the second round, only 20 have a nonzero probability of winning.
Still, it’s important to keep in mind that the leader through two rounds still has less than a one-in-five chance of winning. In other words, while these early rounds certainly matter, when play ends Friday evening we still won’t have much of an inkling about exactly which player will be the eventual winner.
But we will have a pretty good idea of the general group of players from which the victor will emerge. There’s better than a 73 percent chance he’ll be in the top 10 after the second round ends, and roughly a 50 percent probability that he’ll be in the top four. Golfers have mounted charges from deeper in the pack than that, but the odds are good that the green jacket will go to somebody near the top of the scoreboard Friday.
I forget whether I posted something on Twitter to this effect or simply kept the thought to myself, but there was a point in time at which I would have given Newt Gingrich not more than a 1-in-1,000 chance of winning the Republican nomination.
That may have been foolish. This year’s Republican nomination process, if nothing else, has reminded us how often things don’t go to plan and how unpredictable the primaries can be. Lately, Mr. Gingrich has been showing some signs of life.
He has averaged 13 percent of the vote in polls conducted of Republican voters so far in November, his third straight month of improvement after he bottomed out at 5 percent in July and August. There’s also some evidence that Mr. Gingrich tends to be competing for the same types of voters as Herman Cain, so if Mr. Cain’s campaign begins to erode support, Mr. Gingrich could be the beneficiary of that.
Perhaps more surprising is the rebound in Mr. Gingrich’s favorability ratings among Republican voters. According to Gallup’s tracking poll, Mr. Gingrich is now viewed favorably by 55 percent of Republican voters and unfavorably by 23 percent, a big improvement from June when those numbers were 42 and 31 percent, respectively.
But there is much to consider in a primary campaign beyond the national polls. I would group these “fundamental” factors into five broad categories, each of which we will consider in the context of Mr. Gingrich:
Early State Polls and Positioning Somewhat contrary to the perception that Mr. Gingrich is running a national book tour rather than a serious campaign for the White House, he has spent most of his time in the key early-voting states. Based on Politico’s candidate tracker, I show Mr. Gingrich as having held 11 events in Iowa between Sept. 1 and Oct. 31, along with seven in Florida and five in South Carolina. He has spent very little time in New Hampshire, but overall he made 25 appearances between the four states during this period, about the same number as Mitt Romney (26).
Polls suggest that Mr. Gingrich is right to concentrate on the other three states at the expense of New Hampshire: his numbers lag his national support by several points in the there, while running roughly in line with it in the others. It’s conceivable that Florida and South Carolina could turn into strengths for Mr. Gingrich. He is from Georgia, which neighbors both of them, and polls find that Mr. Gingrich runs relatively strongly among older voters, which will be helpful to him in Florida. But he will probably have to perform strongly in Iowa to get to those states in decent shape, and although recent polls show his numbers improving there, he lacks infrastructure in Iowa and fared very poorly in the Ames Straw Poll.
Endorsements and Party Support. Mr. Gingrich has a half-dozen endorsements from Republicans in the U.S. House, but almost all of them came toward the start of his campaign in May and all but two of them are from his home state of Georgia. (He also has the endorsement of Georgia’s governor, Nathan Deal.) Mr. Gingrich has very few endorsements in key early-voting states.
Some endorsements are better than none, and Mr. Gingrich has more from members of the Congress than candidates like Herman Cain (who has just one), Representative Michele Bachmann (zero) and Jon M. Huntsman Jr. (also zero). It’s important to remember that relatively few Republican party leaders have made endorsements of any kind so far, and it’s certainly not impossible to imagine the former speaker of the House finding support within the Republican establishment. For the time being, however, the low endorsement total qualifies as a weakness for Mr. Gingrich.
Fundraising and Campaign Infrastructure. Mr. Gingrich’s fundraising has been simply abysmal — just $2.9 million brought in through Sept. 30. Not only that, but as of Sept. 30, Mr. Gingrich had only $353,000 in cash on hand but $1.2 million in debt. There’s some question about whether fundraising is more of a lagging or a leading indicator; the money sometimes follows the polls. But it is hard to see how numbers like these are anything other than a huge problem for Mr. Gingrich.
What they may really point toward is his lack of a robust campaign infrastructure, caused in part by numerous staff defections early in this campaign. He may even be in something of a Catch-22: it’s hard to hire staff if you don’t have money, but it’s hard to raise money if you don’t have any staff. Whether Mr. Gingrich makes a credible effort to address these issues over the next several weeks will be a good sign of how seriously his surge should be taken.
Ideological Positioning. Mr. Gingrich got himself into trouble early on with his apostasies over Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan. But most every Republican candidate has one or two positions that they now find inconvenient, and Mr. Gingrich’s overall ideological positioning isn’t bad given the mood of the Republican electorate. We did not include Mr. Gingrich in our recent magazine feature on Republican candidates that rated their ideology from center to right on a 100-point scale, but his score would be fairly close to that of Gov. Rick Perry, which in my view represents something of a sweet spot for the Republican primary electorate: solidly conservative but not in Michele Bachmann territory. Mr. Gingrich is also fairly well positioned on what I call the establishment-insurgent axis; he can claim to know how Washington works while also seeming like an outsider since he has been out of it for some time.
This, overall, is one of Mr. Gingrich’s greater strengths: one can imagine him being acceptable in theory to a fairly broad array of conservative voters.
Electability and Personal Liabilities The downside to being acceptable to most conservative Republicans is that you may not be ideally positioned for the general election. I don’t place a lot of emphasis on horse-race polls this early out, but Mr. Gingrich trails President Obama by 11 points in recent surveys, about the same as Mr. Perry. Our forecasting model, which is based on ideology ratings rather than these polls, suggests that he might ultimately run a net of about 4 points worse than someone like Mitt Romney nationally.
Of course, in the context of a nomination race, the perception of electability may be more important than the reality of it. But those numbers are quite poor for Mr. Gingrich as well. In the recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, just 5 percent of G.O.P. voters identified him as the candidate with “the best chance to defeat Barack Obama in the general election,” well below the 11 percent support he had overall in the survey.
Meanwhile, although Mr. Gingrich’s personal favorability rating has rebounded a great deal among Republican voters, he has some image problems that could come back to harm him should he rise in the polls and receive more scrutiny from voters and the media. The most obvious problem is Mr. Gingrich’s two divorces, a subject that may receive more attention given the recent focus on the sexual harassment allegations against Mr. Cain. Mr. Gingrich may also not be as thoroughly vetted as candidates like Mr. Romney and Mr. Perry, who have run for office more recently.
Finally, there’s the fact that Mr. Gingrich is anything but a new face to voters and is associated with an exceptionally unpopular institution, the United States Congress.
Overall, I would read three of these factors, establishment support, personal liabilities, and (especially) fund-raising, as being clearly negative for Mr. Gingrich. This contrasts against one, ideological positioning, which is potentially favorable for him. He has both strengths and weakness in the key early-voting states, meanwhile.
That balance is unfavorable enough to suggest that his chances of winning the nomination are weaker than his polls alone would imply. That certainly does not mean that his chances are zero, or 1,000-to-1 against. If Republican voters decide that they really don’t want to nominate Mitt Romney, Mr. Gingrich could be the last man standing. But even if Mr. Gingrich continues to gain in the polls, he will have some major weaknesses to overcome.