Using Amazon Associate links on your Wordpress website

By enrolling in the Amazon Associate programme, you can place links to Amazon products on your website, like the link to Seth Godin’s book on the right.

When visitors click on your associate links and use the Amazon store to buy the products, you earn a commission. This is mainly 4%, but can be higher for some categories of product that Amazon wants to promote, or if you start to sell a lot of product for them.

Here is how to enrol in the Amazon Associates programme and add Product Links to your site. Using Wordpress there is a ‘gotcha’ you need to take care of.

1. Go to the Amazon Associates page (you can find a link to it from the bottom of the Amazon.com home page as well).

2. Click the Apply Now button, enter your email address and register. There are only a few questions.

3. After registering, you will be given the chance to search for a product. Alernatively, if you log out and log in again, go to the Build Links/Widgets option in the sidebar and choose the Product Links option.

4. Create a Product Link

  • Choose the product you are looking for (e.g. Books)
  • Enter a keyword to search for e.g. title name or author name
  • When you have found the correct product, click the Get HTML
  • 1. Select Link Type – select Image Only. Note: Text and Image will not work with an OM4 Community Website as it uses an iframe
  • 2. Customise Link – choose your preferred options
  • 3. Get HTML Code – click Highlight HTML and copy to your clipboard

Open a text file and copy the HTML code there temporarily so you don’t lose it.

4. Save the Product Image to your hard disk
While on the Amazon Associates page, right click the image and save it to your hard disk.

5. Upload the Product Image
Go to your OM4 site Dashboard. If you are writing a product review on its own page, use that page to upload the product image, otherwise just upload it from any page or post.

6. Fix the image reference.
This step fixes the *gotcha* problem you will encounter if you just follow Amazon’s instructions. There are two issues you need to fix:

  • Amazon’s HTML code just uses the file name all on its own. Using Wordpress, your file is usually placed into a subdirectory
  • When Wordpress uploads the file for you, it makes some helpful changes to the filename without telling you. This means it won’t be found by the HTML code you paste

It is easy to fix this.

Go to Dashboard, Manage, Media Library and find the file you uploaded. Look for the File URL and copy the address to your clipboard, including the path. For the image you see on this page, the image address is this:
http://om4.com.au/wp-content/uploads/41hkszuruhl_sl160_.jpg

Now go and look at the HTML code you got from Amazon. You need to find the image file name. You will see something like this:
src="41HksZuruhl._SL160_.jpg"

See how the upper/lower case file name from Amazon has had a period removed and been converted to lower case by Wordpress?

Now replace the Amazon file name with the full path and file name for the uploaded file. This is the before and after view of your HTML snippet:
src="41HksZuruhl._SL160_.jpg"
changes to
src="http://om4.com.au/wp-content/uploads/41hkszuruhl_sl160_.jpg"

7. Insert the HTML Code

You have a number of options to place the HTML code for your affilate link.

  • copy the HTML into any post or page and save it.
  • add it to a Text Widget in your sidebar and update it.

If the Product Image does not display, it is probably the file name. See step 6.

Feature Articles

Using the OM4 theme you have access to the Featured Articles plugin.

With the plugin, you can create a set of feature articles that show the Amazon associate image and link. Add a Feature Articles widget to the sidebar and a new product will be displayed every time the page is reloaded.

Similarly, if you are up to writing a review of the products you are linking to, just create a new page for each review and paste your associate link into the page. You can then create a collection of Feature Articles for your Book Reviews set.