Amazon Affiliates for Noobs?
The amazon affiliates program is a great way to
start making some extra money on your site whether
you are a blogger, a developer or an entreprenuer.
The process is simple, you have to register and sign
up for the affiliates program which is free. They
will give you several different scripts and codes on
your site which you can then embedd.
In this article, I will be covering product linking
which is the fastest and easiest way to get started
and will work for any simple html site. In fact it
is tailored toward these sites as opposed to React
Apps or other SPAs. For those sites the API may be
more appropriate and I will be covering that in a
later article
How it Works
Let's imagine you are running a successful blog for
"vegan nutritional products". A niche market for
which you have started to build up a following and
traffic towards your site. Because you put a lot of
time, effort and dedication towards your site and
writing articles you probably want to monetize that
at some point, while still keeping the content for
your readers free.
There is a few different options for that such as
Google Adsense which displays ads on your site, but
for this particular case Product Linking
via Amazon is potentially far more lucrative, more
user friendly and relevant to your reader base
Product Linking Overview
The Amazon Affiliates platform will give you many
different product links, widgets and tools which you
can use to help you build your Affiliate Ecommerce
Site or Blog. You put these links and widgets on
your site and when users go to Amazon from the links
and widgets on your site and purchase a product, you
will end up a commission!
That's right! Amazon will pay you to show their
products on your site. No fees or other commissions.
The only thing you need to know is how to make a
website and injects these tags or scripts onto your
site.
Turn Off Ad Blocker!
Before we get started with Product Links, make sure
that AdBlocker is turned off. That is something that
you must keep in mind if you decide to use Amazon
Affiliates. The products will only render if
AdBlocker is turned off!
Currently, there is a few technical ways around this
such as forcing your users to turn adblocker off on
their browser. For now we will not worry about this.
If you are interested, the number of users using
AdBlock can be found here
Our Very First Product Link
Under the product links tab in Amazon Associates you can search for products by keyword or ISBN number. I am going to search for Vega. Here I see that I can get a link for a all the Vega Products that are currently on Amazon. Once I get this link I will need to copy and paste it into my site to where I want to render it. I am going to choose the link below. It should look something like this!
For styling, you are limited to what is given in the customized link section on the associates website. I like to use a larger image and make sure that the "Open Link in a new Window" option is checked off and that I am showing all the prices. You can also choose to show image only without text.
Promotional Links
There are several types of promo links you can use. They work similar to Product Links but are not "on branding" in a sense that the products might not be related to your branding
The links are Easy Links, Gift Certificates and Rotating Banner Campaigns. The advantages of using these links, is that they give you more flexibility in terms of sizes to choose from. See some examples below
Amazon Gift Card
I think the Amazon gift card is a pretty good one to try on your site if you have a wide range of products or are writing about last minute gift ideas for those people who are difficult to buy for. If you like this blog and are planning on purchasing a Amazon gift card, please consider doing so through this link!
Rotating Banner
This one, has the feel of a Google AdSense ad. They will change with each site reload or from time to time using Amazon's Algorithm for "high performing" banner ads
Link to Any Amazon Page
With these tools of linking to any Amazon page, we give the user more landing page options to the Amazon site. These is useful if you want to filter down the products a user sees when they first go to Amazon. There are three options:
- Link to Favourite Destinations
- Link to Search Results
- Link to Any Page at Amazon
Links to Favourite Destinations
As shown above, "Link to Favourite Desinations" allow you to select a product line and a subcategory from a predefined dropdown based on your Product Line selection. In my case it was books with the sub categories shown above. The user will then be directed to popular pages on Amazon based on the Product Line / Sub Category combo chosen.
Links to Search Results
If you want to get more granular, "Link to Search Results" shown above lets you
choose your product line and then enter keywords
related to the items within the product line of
choice. In the first example above my query was
"Smart"
and the product line was "Watches". This gives a link for all Smart
Watches
Links to Any Page on Amazon
This one is very simple. Enter the URL from Amazon that you want on your website and name your link accordingly. I want mine to go the the "Daily Deal" and "Buy Your Product Again" page since I think both of these pages will be high convertors.
The Amazon Search Widget
The Amazon Search Widget lets a user search for Amazon products on your site. There is a few different styling options you can do
Search Bar Widget
Dark Theme Search
Search with Custom Placeholeder
There is a few other options and styling you can play around with, such as color and size settings. If it is auto, it will assume the width of the parent container it is in.
Your Picks Widget
There is some more options for other kinds of widgets such as Carousel and Slideshow Widgets. Under the slideshow and carousel widgets you simply add products to show an your Widget from Amazon. From here you can choose widgets sizes, gallery or scrolling and different transition effects. Below is the default plain vanilla slideshow widget.The downside of using these type of widgets is that on Chrome and other browsers, users will need to enable Adobe Flash on their site. That is pretty old technology, and not user friendly. For that reason, I don't recommend to user these Widgets or otherwise use them sparingly.
Tracking My Earning and How I get paid
Tracking your earnings is easy. It is found under the Reports Section in your Amazon Associates account. Here you will have some graphs showing which or your links performed the best and your total earning over any given period of time. It will also show click, conversions and returned items. This dashboard is awesome as you can look over your earning overtime and see which links you should be using based on your site and how your store is trending overtime.
To get paid, you need to fill out your banking details. If you are not sure about certain field such as routing number, you will need to contact your bank to find that out
There is some other handy information links such as operating agreement, program policies and advertising fee schedule. The payout for Amazon Affiliates if 60 days, meaning that you will get paid for September earnings at the end of December.
Summary
This was a quick overview on how to get started with Amazon Affiliates using Product Linking and Widgets. These types of tools are best for HTML and PHP sites where it is easy to insert custom javascript into the html. If you are using SPA like React, Angular or Vue and want to insert them into a component you will need to do some custom configuration depending on the Widget or Product Link used. For SPA or larger sites, the Product Advertising API might be a better option. For these you will need to have a least three products ordered from your site in 180 days and get a manual review/audit of your site by Amazon. I plan to cover APIs in my next article.
If you find this article useful, please consider supporting me by buying from Amazon from one of the links below. If you require assistance in setting up Amazon Affliates on your site or need a business, please contact me at admin@dash-intel.com. We have affordable and friendly rates and want to help grow your online presence.
Amazon Gift Card
Give two gifts for the price of one. By purchasing a gift card, you are helping a freelance developer out and giving someone (or yourself) a wonderful Amazon giftcard!
My other affilliate sites