Selecting Products at Amazon

Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (& .de & .fr & ...)

Amazon claim to have created the original affiliate program and they certainly have the biggest and most widely known scheme on the internet.

You will see from the affiliates (or "associates" as Amazon call them) areas that there are a wide range of linking options available to you.

I suggest you use two main link types:

Product Links

Here you display an individual book (or other product) with a link to purchase at Amazon.

A basic link to an individual book looks like:

www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/9999/assocID

9999 in the above example is where you put the unique number that every Amazon product has.
assocID is where your unique Amazon associate ID goes - so they know it was you who referred the customer.

The UK Amazon site uses exactly the same format:

www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/9999/assocID

... but you need to register separately for the 2 systems and so may end up with a different associate ID for each.

Note:

• Personal endorsement/testimonial is the most powerful way to sell a product. If you don't have knowledge/views yourself - ask your visitors for theirs.
• Including a graphic of the product makes it more "real" and overcomes one of the obstacles to purchasing on the internet.
• An individual, or small group of related books on a single page can create a very "Search Engine" friendly page, as with the Vstore products.

Search Links

Giving customers the option to search Amazon for anything they want is a good "catch all" but you can reinforce the subject-specific nature of your site by providing pre-selected searches.

Do your target search from one of the search forms or boxes - and look at what appears in the "address" line of your browser. That will show you how the link should be constructed to "force" a search. For example, one of the menu links on the demo site simply produces an Amazon listing for a keyword - "canoe" (this should of course all be on one line).

www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search
/?mode=books&keyword=canoe&tag=assocID

I'm sure you can imagine how you could set up a whole set of menus for categories and sub-categories of your site subject like this?

Multiply Your Amazon Commissions

Reading the associate areas at Amazon, you will see that most of the time you will be paid 5% of purchases made after links from your site. This rate can go as high as 15% for certain products - but to get the higher commissions you must link directly to the individual product - general searches and category links only ever pay 5%.

At the demo site, the "Camping Books" link demonstrates software in action that makes sure you get the highest possible commission on all Amazon links.

What is happening here is that that the link on the page actually fires off a program on my server that talks to Amazon, gets the search results, and formats each title into a direct link, so if it is purchased, I earn the highest commission rate.

To use this facility, you need to have your site with a web host that gives you a cgi-bin and access to the Perl programming language (like Virtualis). Unlike some Perl scripts, this one is pretty easy to set up, and it will soon pay for itself if you aim to move any number of Amazon products.

More details from Anaconda.