Amazon Hacks

Build Associate Links

The key to earning money through the Associates Program is linking to Amazon the right way.

Once you have an Amazon associate account and associate tag, you can start sending traffic to Amazon. You can’t just place your associate tag anywhere in any Amazon URL to get credit for sending visitors. Amazon’s servers expect specific URL formats with your associate tag in specific parts of the URL. Once you know the URL patterns, you’ll be able to build your own fee-earning links no matter which part of Amazon you’re linking to.

Link to the Amazon Home Page

According to Google, there are about 36,400 web pages that link to Amazon with their base URL (http://www.amazon.com/). That means each one of those pages has a bit of HTML that looks like this:

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/">Amazon</a>

It also means that the owners of these sites aren’t collecting referral fees for traffic they send to Amazon. In contrast, Google estimates only 432 sites link to the Amazon home page with the associates format. That’s a lot of lost revenue!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/insert associate tag

This specially formatted URL links to exactly the same page. The difference is that Amazon ties any sales made from it with your associate account.

Link to Individual Products

As a general rule, targeted sales work much better than general sales. For example, sending someone to the Amazon home page is a bit like saying, “Go see if there are any books you’d like to buy.” Sending ...