Note: Unfortunately, due to sales tax disputes with several states, the Amazon Associates program for Amazon.com is currently unavailable to residents of Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Check the complete, up-to-date list in the operating agreement, which you may want to read in its entirety.7
Amazon Associates was one of the earliest and most popular affiliate programs on the Web.8 Every time you refer a customer to a given Amazon site (e.g., Amazon.com) with your tracking ID, you’ll receive a small percentage of the total cost of whatever that person purchases during the next twenty-four hours.
Some affiliate marketers and bloggers greatly underestimate the earning potential of Amazon Associates on the basis of the tiny cookie duration (only twenty-four hours, instead of, say, sixty days) and the small commissions (usually between 4 and 8.50 percent, depending on your monthly sales volume, instead of the 30 to 75 percent commissions that are common for digital goods elsewhere).
While both counts are true, there are many benefits to Amazon that make it a very worthwhile program for reputable bloggers.
• Virtually everyone knows and trusts Amazon as a store. You don’t have to convince your visitors that their credit card number won’t be stolen when they shop there.
• Amazon’s inventory of physical products is fantastic. They carry so many items that you can always find something of quality to promote, almost regardless of your particular blogging niche.
• Amazon spends millions of dollars studying ways to increase the percent- age of visitors who end up buying products (i.e., optimizing the conversion
7. affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement
rate of their pages). Your main goal is really to send traffic to Amazon by way of your affiliate links, after which Amazon will take care of converting many of these visitors into customers, thus earning you a commission on all of those sales.
• Unlike other referral programs, you get a cut for every sale that’s made within a twenty-four-hour period, not just for sales of the product you promoted. My technical blogs have received commissions for goods that I never promoted, including watches, swimming pools, and adult toys. That is because you may send visitors to check out a book, but once on Amazon they may purchase other books or other products (either instead of or in combination with the original item) within the twenty-four-hour period for which your tracking ID is valid. Those unexpected, additional sales add up quickly.
• Unlike some other affiliate programs, it is considered normal for bloggers to routinely link to Amazon in their posts. This means that your archives will contain many posts including Amazon affiliate links, generating you commissions long after you initially posted them.
Earn Money with the Amazon Associates Program
Head over to affiliate-program.amazon.comand apply for the program. You can sign up even if you’re not a US resident. You’ll be asked about a series of things, including payment information and details about your blog. The overwhelming majority of people who apply are accepted.
Note that once you are approved, you’ll be able to use Amazon affiliate links on a variety of sites you may own and not just the one you applied for. Remember to use disclaimers everywhere you use affiliate offers, as previously discussed in Chapter 4, Customizing and Fine-Tuning Your Blog, on page 55. Amazon has several associates programs, depending on the locale of the store you are targeting. Currently, there is a program for the American store (Amazon.com) and one for each of the Canadian, British, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese stores. Again, you don’t have to reside in one of these countries to sign up for any of their respective affiliate programs.
Register for each of the programs according to the demographics of your traffic and your blog’s language. For example, if most of your traffic arrives from the States, the UK, and Canada, then apply for each of those three Associates programs. (You’ll be applying three times.) You can select the locale
using the drop-down menu in the top right corner of the Amazon Associates login page.
Build Links with Your Associates ID
Your Amazon Associate account will be provided with an initial tracking ID (known as your Associates ID) that is specific to a given Amazon site (e.g., Amazon.com). Such an ID must be embedded in the links you build and place within your blog. For example, the main Associates ID for my US account is antoniocangia-20. So if I want to link to a product on Amazon.com, I need to enclose my tracking ID in the right portion of the URL. Here are some link examples:
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1934356344/antoniocangia-20/ref=nosim/
Or:
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1934356344?ie=UTF8&tag=antoniocangia-20.
Note that 1934356344 is the ASIN number of this particular book, an identi- fier that can always be found in the URL of a product you visit on Amazon. The ASIN and Associates ID alone will uniquely identify a product on a given Amazon site and track your commissions (via a cookie that is set when the end user visits the URL).
You can build such links manually, or you can use one of Amazon’s link- building tools, which are available from the Links & Banners tab in the Amazon Associates administrative interface (provided you are logged in to the site). When opting to create a Product link, you have an opportunity to select Text and Image, Text Only, Image Only, or Add to Widget, if you are creating a widget to display more products. Text Only and Image Only are the ones you should use to create textual links and linked images, respectively. (Others won’t perform as well.) The resulting URLs will be more verbose than the ones I outlined above but equally valid.
Alternatively you can create a bookmarklet and add it to your browser book- mark bar. A bookmarklet is like a regular bookmark, but instead of a regular web address, the URL field contains JavaScript code that is executed when you click the bookmark.
To obtain a link with your Associates ID from a given product on Amazon.com, you could use the following JavaScript code and place it in the URL field of a bookmark. For the name of the bookmark, you can use something like Amazify (USA) or use whatever you like.
javascript: (function () {
var usid = 'antoniocangia-20';
var asin = '';
if (document.getElementById('ASIN')) {
asin = document.getElementById('ASIN').value;
document.location = 'http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/' + asin + '?ie=UTF8&tag=' + usid
} else {
alert('ASIN not found. Are you on a product page on Amazon?') }
}());
Find a desired product page on Amazon and then click the bookmark. The address bar of your browser will now show you the URL with your Associates ID in the right place. Copy the URL and you are settled. Just remember to replace the Associates ID with your own in the JavaScript code above if you intend to use this method.
You can always use the Link Checker, which is available in the left sidebar on the Links & Banners tab, to verify if a link you’ve built is correctly attributed to your Associates ID.
I sometime provide links to multiple Amazon locales next to the name of the product by linking the words USA, UK, and Canada with the correct URLs for each, as follows: “The Passionate Programmer (USA, UK, Canada).” This way I can maximize earnings from users who don’t shop at Amazon.com while at the same time providing them with the ability to quickly shop in the Amazon store that is most convenient for them based on where they reside or prefer to shop from. (I used to have a script that chose the store and associate ID based on the geographic location of the visitor, but geo-redirects are rarely a great idea from a UX standpoint.)
If you like this approach and you opted for the bookmarklet route, you can create three bookmarks, one for each locale, and use them to generate the three links each time. You’ll need to replace both the Associates ID and the TLD of the Amazon site (i.e., .com) to create the, say, Canadian and British bookmarks. (When you sign up with a given local Amazon Associates program, you are assigned a unique Associates ID that’s different from those of other locales.)
If you’re unfamiliar with bookmarklets and using them sounds complicated to you, feel free to ignore my trick and instead build your links through the Amazon Associates product link building tools. It’s not as convenient, but it won’t affect the end result.