Making your own clickable html ads

[Jens]

I'm exploring various advertising options for my novel. Has anyone here ever made their own clickable ads? I'm OK making the actual ad. But how do you do the html code that would enable a customer to click the ad and go directly to the Amazon page for my book?

[Tara Woods Turner]

Where would the ad be? If it is on your site you won't need html, just create your ad as an image and link it to your Amazon site.

[C.L.]

I'm doing advertising but I'm leaving that stuff to the website. I made an ad in Canva and emailed it to the website hosting the ad and gave them the link. They'll do the clickable part.

[Ian]

I'm not an HTML expert but I know a few bits. You can turn anything on the page into a link using the "a" tag, assuming you have access to edit the HTML for your web page.

The code looks a bit like this:
[a href="YourAmazonPage"]
Your advertisement content
[/a]

YourAmazonPage is the URL of your book's page.

Your advertisement content is exactly that: the text or image of your ad.

Note - I've used square brackets here to stop the comment box trying to interpret my illustration as HTML. Some things are too darned clever for their own good :) You need to replace the two pairs of square brackets with the HTML angle brackets instead.

Hope this helps.

[Justin]

Figures...my site is html for premium users. I can always make ad's in another way I guess.

[Jens]

Thanks for the responses!

The ads would be on other people's blogs and websites. Do the site owners usually do the clickable part themselves? (I thought I had to do that.)

[Nate]

If I were going to run someone's ad manually (like what you describe) on my site, I would expect to be responsible for making it clickable.

[Tara Woods Turner]

Agree, best to let the site owner work with the image, especially if they use wordpress.

[Prashanth]

In your case, since you mentioned that you want them to show up on other people's blogs and websites, there are multiple ways. A few of those options are:

1. You may have to provide the blogs/sites with a widget, which is a sample piece of html code. They can copy and paste this code wherever they want to show this ad. Of course, this works in the cases where you know the other people personally and they have agreed to take this additional step.

2. The widely read blogs/visited sites could provide links on how to advertise. In this case, you may have to repeat the exercise multiple times.

3. Use Google adwords or something similar, which takes care of both creating the html widgets as well as link to your book page on Amazon. In this case, Google (or whoever the provider is) will decide when and where the ads should show up.

Hope this helps.

PS: I am a senior computer programmer at a Boston tech firm.