There are many ways to monetize a blog. One popular way to achieve that goal is so-called affiliate marketing. The idea behind affiliate marking is that the publisher of a website (or any other site with content and audience for example a YouTube channel or a social media account …) does some marketing for a third party and receives commissions if his marketing leads to successful sales.
Many third parties offer such programs to publishers of content on the Internet (e.g. blog owners). Amazon too offers such a program which is called Amazon associates (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/)
How to join the program
The Amazon affiliate program is free and everyone can join it if Amazon policies are not violated.
As the first step you have to create an account here:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
To add Amazon ads to your page you have to do the following steps:
- Generate affiliate links, which you can place at your chosen position on your page.
- Add a disclosure on each of your pages where you add any Amazon affiliate links.
Amazon offers three different ways to add links to your page:
- Text links
- Banners
- Native shopping ads
The text links are the most efficient and popular of the three variants. So for now we focus only on text links.
Text links
To retrieve text links, make sure that you are logged in on the amazon associates page (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/) and navigate to the menu [Product Linking / Product Links]:
The following page opens, which explains how you can get the Amazon affiliate links that you can place on your website. It’s pretty simple, you just have to log in with your Amazon associate account you just created into the normal Amazon page and then start to search for products that would match the topic on your website page. Because you are logged in with your Amazon associate account you will see the SiteStripe (see screenshot below) which helps you to retrieve the Amazon links you want to add to your page.
Text only links
Let’s assume you want to add a text link for this book on your website (or blog, YouTube channel, or whatever other internet source with content you have …). On the top of the page, you see the [Text] hyperlink inside the SiteStripe
You may want to choose the [Full Link] to have fewer troubles, because using [Short Link] might lead to some trust issues (read more about this here: https://keyword.com/blog/how-to-tell-if-a-link-is-an-amazon-affiliate-link/)
You can then copy paste the generated link and paste in into your website. You have different options, text only, image only or combined link type.
In case your page is a WordPress site with Gutenberg editor, you might add the generated link as follows:
- Add the text behind the URL on your page
- Turn that text into a link
- Place the generated link code into the URL part
- Select the options [Open in new tab], [Add “nofollow” to link] and [Add “sponsored” to link]
The text link will look as follows in the preview mode of WordPress:
Text and image links
As you can see on the SiteStripe, you can not only generate text-only links but also image-only links or text & image links:
We take a look at how to add the Text+Image link type to a WordPress page, the same approach is also applicable to image-only link type.
Select the Text+Image option and copy the generated link:
Go to your page and paste that copied link into your page.
Again, just like in case of text-only links, if you want to add this link to your WordPress page using the Gutenberg editor you can add a new block of the Custom HTML type:
Then you can paste the copied link:
You can click on [Preview] to see how this would look like in preview mode:
You can also add a table block instead of a custom HTML block and paste the link code inside the table block to have more control over the positioning of the ad box.
Adding the mandatory disclosure to your pages
On every page on your website where you plan to add Amazon Ads, you have to add a short discloser text (preferably before the Ad) informing the visitors that you are an affiliate of Amazon or something along those lines. Here is an example of such a disclosure text:
Disclosure: I have included affiliate links on this page which means that I may receive a commission (at zero cost to you) if a purchase is made through any of those links. See my disclaimer for more details.
It’s recommended to put the disclosure text near the top of your post, so that the visitor may read it before he/she sees the Ads. So a good place would be somewhere after the first section of your post.
In addition to the short disclosure text that you should put on every page where you want to add Amazon or other affiliate links you can include a link in the short text to a more detailed info page used for the whole website, such a page could be your website’s disclaimer page, privacy page, terms and conditions page or a similar page.