Amazon Associates offers more ways to generate income from web content
Howard Lake | 6 June 2007 | News
Amazon Associates, the online bookseller’s affiliate programme for web publishers, has added two new tools to help associates generate more income from their websites. Context Links and Product Previews offer simple ways of adding relevant items for sale on associates’ websites and a pop-up preview of the item available.
Charities that use the Amazon Associates service to earn income by selling books, CDs, and other items on their website now have two more tools to generate more income using the free system.
Context Links will automatically identify and link relevant phrases within your web pages to Amazon products. You no longer need to spend time creating links manually, and this of course expands the inventory of items you can earn income from. It takes just minutes to add the links into your pages, and Amazon offers a range of options to customise how they are displayed.
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As Amazon explains, “Context Links are for people looking for an easy way to generate money from the content they write”. The company suggests that “bloggers, review sites, and people that have archived pages that are currently not monetised are excellent candidates for Context Links”.
To create Context Links you simply embed one piece of code on your pages. You can choose to enable the preview functionality to let your site visitors see a preview of an Amazon.co.uk product relevant to the phrase selected. Clicking on the link will send your site visitors to the product detail page on Amazon.co.uk, and you will earn referral fees for any sales generated.
Amazon describe the second new tool, Product Previews, as “a portal into Amazon.co.uk – directly on your Web site”.
When a user hovers over a preview-enhanced text or image link, a small window appears containing information about the product you’re advertising, including an image, new and used price, average customer review and availability.
These links give site visitors more information about the Amazon product but without taking up space on your site. One particularly useful element of Product Previews is that it gives your visitors the ability to add the item directly to their shopping cart, keeping visitors on your site until they are ready to buy.
UK Fundraising is testing these two tools across the site so you should start to spot them as you explore the site.
The pop-ups only work if you have Javascript enabled and have disabled any pop-up blockers you might use. Here is an example using a text link but you could use a graphic link too:
If you haven’t started earning income from your website as an Amazon Associate, you can sign up at no charge. Amazon.co.uk now pays commission monthly in arrears directly into the nominated bank account.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.