Even more fun with WordPress widgets: how to create an Amazon affiliate link and make a ton of cents!
So I was procrastinating today and watching my sales creep up with eReader News Today, when I noticed that they are an Amazon Affiliate. How genius, huh? Not only they take our money to advertise, they get paid by Amazon, too. Not that I mind – of all the advertising websites I’ve tried, they’ve so far delivered the most value for the money…
They also gave me an idea – I’ve decided to become an Amazon affiliate too! Cause, you know, thousands of people are clicking on the Shizzle, Inc link…well, not thousands, just 100-200 per month, but that’s a start, right? So why not make the link an affiliate one and earn 4% on whatever sales happen as a result? At least it’s an experiment and something new to learn.
First things first – sign up to be an affiliate. Because I’m already registered with Amazon, it was ridiculously easy. Took about 5 minutes and I have no problems to report, or lessons learned – just make sure to have your tax number ready. The only bugger was that I can’t get paid by direct deposit, as I’m not in the US – so I’d opted to be paid with a gift certificate.
Next it came to creating a link – all you have to do is search for a product of interest, which in my case was Shizzle, Inc:
Once I’d found it, I clicked on “Get link” and chose “text only” – to make long story short, I could not get image and text html to work and have found a work-around.
Then, I created a new “text” widget on my WordPress.com website – for more advice on creating links with text widgets see my MailChimp explained post. This is what this new widget looks like:
The tricky bit was how to make the link stand out. Previously, I’d created a link to Amazon using an image widget, which worked well and was easy to use – just click on the image and you are there. I didn’t want to have a “naked” link only and as mentioned before, when I pasted in “image and text” html, I ended up with a lot of code visible to everyone. So I cheated: I put a text widget with HTML in the sidebar first, followed by the image widget, but without title or url link:
And here you go – I now have a working affiliate link in my sidebar, which should be earning me a cool 4 cents each time someone buys a book via my website! Yay!
Have fun :-)
