A while back I signed up with Amazon's Affiliate program. I wasn't expecting to rake in lots of cash, but I figured, as long as I link to Amazon (as I frequently do when I mention a physical item), I might as well get some sort of credit for it.
After signing up, I fiddled around with various link builders, to try to connect my my blog with Amazon. Unfortunately, the HTML that the links produced always looked out of place. And besides, it was a pain to go through the link building process. I rather just copy and paste the link from Amazon and move on with life. So, I more or less forgot about the program.
Then, a couple weeks back, I had a client who asked me about using the Advertising API. One of the take-aways from that project is that integration with Amazon doesn't need to be nearly as painful as I originally had thought.
Here's all you need to do to setup an affiliate link to Amazon:
- Figure out what your tracking ID is. Once you log in over at Amazon, this is prominently displayed.
- Copy and paste the normal link to to the product on Amazon. Something like: http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-DMC-TZ1S-Compact-Digital-Stabilized/dp/B000EIVKPW/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1318447884&sr=8-10
- And now for the magic: append &tag=TRACKING_ID to the URL. The above link becomes: http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-DMC-TZ1S-Compact-Digital-Stabilized/dp/B000EIVKPW/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1318447884&sr=8-10&tag=bensjou-20
That's all there is to it. Who knew that all those fancy link builders I was tripping over was adding a single parameter to the URL?
Should be that easy.
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