In my prevous posts about the Amazon Associates link types, I have provided a general overview
of the types of links Amazon offers affiliates and about the Amazon Associates Product Links.
In this post I will address the Amazon Associates Text Links. You may reach the Text Link section by
logging into Amazon Associates Central, clicking on the
"Build Links" menu item and then clicking on the
icon next inside the "Text Links" section:
Text Links are Page Content Links (see Link Type Overview) that give you an opportunity to link to a specific page on the Amazon site. As you can see from the options provided to you, you can:
1. Link to Favorite Destinations.
2. Link to Search Results.
3. Link to Any Page at Amazon.com.
Link to Favorite Destinations
In this section you can build a link that will lead your visitors to any of the major product lines that Amazon distributes and a subcategory within those categories. The following is an exhaustive list of categories / subcategory pages that you can link to:
The above categories put the size of the Amazon catalog in perspective -- it's enormous. This makes Amazon Associates one of the premier affiliate programs on the Internet. No matter what your site is about, chances are you will find something in the Amazon catalog to link to.
If you do not wish to link to a particular subcategory, each category has a special "General Bestsellers" section that you can link to.
Unfortunately, Amazon does not provide as part of its associates central web site an ability to use image links into each particular category. However, you may find excellent images on each of the subcategory pages of Amazon.com, so you may consider putting one of those images on your site. Of course, you should download the image to your server to ensure that delays on the Amazon site do not impact your performance and that the image will continue to be served if Amazon chooses to remove it at some point in the future.
Link to Search Results
The next option that Amazon provides is an ability for you to link to the the search result page of the Amazon site. When you visit Amazon.com you typically see a search box at the top of the page giving you a way to search for a particular product within a product line. Linking to search results gives you a way to link to a result page for the key words of your choice. Take a look at the following few examples:
Link to Any Page at Amazon.com
Lastly, the Text Links section gives you an ability to link to ANY page on Amazon.com. You can use this option as the text link to any product detail page, any product-line page, any sub-category page, or a search results page. In effect, this text link can do what any other Product or Text link can do, but without the images.
The most common use of this option is to link to Amazon.com home page. The interesting peculiarity of this link is that you cannot link to http://Amazon.com (with the capital A). You have to have the lower-case 'a' as in http://amazon.com.
In my next post I will take a look at the Amazon aStore.
icon next inside the "Text Links" section:
Text Links are Page Content Links (see Link Type Overview) that give you an opportunity to link to a specific page on the Amazon site. As you can see from the options provided to you, you can:
1. Link to Favorite Destinations.
2. Link to Search Results.
3. Link to Any Page at Amazon.com.
Link to Favorite Destinations
In this section you can build a link that will lead your visitors to any of the major product lines that Amazon distributes and a subcategory within those categories. The following is an exhaustive list of categories / subcategory pages that you can link to:
The above categories put the size of the Amazon catalog in perspective -- it's enormous. This makes Amazon Associates one of the premier affiliate programs on the Internet. No matter what your site is about, chances are you will find something in the Amazon catalog to link to.
If you do not wish to link to a particular subcategory, each category has a special "General Bestsellers" section that you can link to.
Unfortunately, Amazon does not provide as part of its associates central web site an ability to use image links into each particular category. However, you may find excellent images on each of the subcategory pages of Amazon.com, so you may consider putting one of those images on your site. Of course, you should download the image to your server to ensure that delays on the Amazon site do not impact your performance and that the image will continue to be served if Amazon chooses to remove it at some point in the future.
Link to Search Results
The next option that Amazon provides is an ability for you to link to the the search result page of the Amazon site. When you visit Amazon.com you typically see a search box at the top of the page giving you a way to search for a particular product within a product line. Linking to search results gives you a way to link to a result page for the key words of your choice. Take a look at the following few examples:
- Books on Affiliate Marketing
- Clothing for University of Michigan Fans
- Lots of Wi-Fi products
- Items to Make Your Picnic Perfect
Link to Any Page at Amazon.com
Lastly, the Text Links section gives you an ability to link to ANY page on Amazon.com. You can use this option as the text link to any product detail page, any product-line page, any sub-category page, or a search results page. In effect, this text link can do what any other Product or Text link can do, but without the images.
The most common use of this option is to link to Amazon.com home page. The interesting peculiarity of this link is that you cannot link to http://Amazon.com (with the capital A). You have to have the lower-case 'a' as in http://amazon.com.
In my next post I will take a look at the Amazon aStore.
Hi Gene,
I'm new to Amazon Associates and don't know if its appropriate to ask my question about text links here - but if it isn't, I guess you'll just bin this post anyway!
I'm trying to link to Amazon results pages from blog posts and because the amazon urls upset technorati indexing I'm directing visitors to a web page which loads the Amazon results page in an iframe such as here:
http://members.aol.com/jorolat/cuk.html
What I'm uncertain about is that when I built the text link Amazon gave me the following code:
href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=creationism&tag=
evolutiresear-21&index=books&linkCode=ur2&camp=1634&creative=6738">creationism
I had to ditch the image (because I don't know how to include it in an iframe) but after reading some of your comments in these pages I'm wondering if this works - I've had some sales via Astore referrals but apparently none via search results pages such as the one given above (and I've posted 'quite a few')
Bearing in mind you may ditch this post anyway I may as well go the whole hog:
I posted about this problem on the AA discussion boards but haven't had any replies so now I'm looking at linking to search results using the search box of my Astore.
When I entered 'creationism' into it, i got a url with this on the end:
...&keywords=creationism&x=6&y=9
What are the 'x=6&y=9' for please? If I want to use this url in my blog posts can I ditch the x and y?
Going back to the Amazon build text link code, could I somehow load the Amazon search results page and the 1px image if I used frames instead of iframes?
Would be very grateful for any help or advice you can give,
John Latter / Jorolat
Evolution Research
http://evomech.blogspot.com/
Posted by: John Latter | November 04, 2006 at 11:10 AM