By contributor Lynn Truong
Amazon offers up to a 10% referral fee for all qualifying sales made through your links. The ease of use and popularity of Amazon makes their Associates Program a good place to get your feet wet with affiliate marketing. Once you’ve been approved, login to your account and you’ll see over a dozen options of building links/ads units for Amazon products.
My Favorites
Search
Allow your users to search Amazon’s products without leaving your site. Any search typed into the search box will show the matching Amazon products inside the widget.
Product Links
If you mention any particular products available on Amazon, you can feature the specific product by creating a link specifically for that product. You can select an image+text link, which shows the image and text information, image only, or text only.
Product Previews
Installing this widget will allow a popup to appear when a user hovers over an Amazon text/image link. It provides the user with additional information before leaving your site, to decide whether to click through to Amazon.
Video
If you host videos on your site, adding this video widget is a great way to capitalize on space. Instead of having to create an ad space for Amazon’s ads, you can insert the ad into the video.
Deals
Display an interactive, real time update of the best deals on Amazon. These are available in a variety of standard ad units. It shows Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals, and Best Deals.
Unbox
Unbox is a video download service available on Amazon that sells and rents DVD-quality TV Shows, movies, and more as digital downloads. This widget shows previews for video available in the Unbox store. You can choose to show the current most popular videos (Latest & Greatest) or specify videos to display.
Slideshow
Make a slideshow out of product images across Amazon’s catalog. You can choose from any image of any product available on Amazon.
Product Cloud
This widget shows clusters of product titles relevant to the content on your page. The more relevant the product, the larger the size of the title will be. When you mouse over the title, the product information will pop up.
Quick Linker
If you're pretty savvy with HTML, you can use this feature to easily add an Amazon referral link to your content as you type. After you install this widget, you can include custom Amazon HTML tags which will automatically add your referral ID to the links. For example, instead of having to log into your Associates account to create a referral link to The Kite Runner, you can enter <a type=”amzn”>The Kite Runner</a> and it will automatically link to Amazon's search results page for "The Kite Runner" (with your referral ID). If you find that you're constantly going into your associates account to create content links for products, this is a nice shortcut.
