Amazon SiteStripe
Amazon SiteStripe is a type of toolbar that appears on top of your Amazon.com (or other country site) when you are logged in with your Amazon Associates account.
If this bar is not there, then you are perhaps logged in with a buyers account.
Login With The Right Account
To switch accounts or to logout, Hover over Hello, *name* and click in this menu:
At the top it says Hello, *name* with Account & Lists below it. If you happen to have two accounts, one for buying stuff and one for your associates, be sure to Sign Out or Switch Accounts to the right account for affiliate link building.
If it doesn't say your name, you are not logged in. Instead it will Say: Hello, Sign in.
Hover with your mouse-cursor over the Hello, sign in and the below menu will open. Click now on the Sign in button and sign into your Amazon Associates account.
If you do not have an Amazon Associates account yet, you need to sign up for the program first before you continue with this tutorial. Check Page 1 of this tutorial for the link to the right Associates Program for you.
SiteStripe Basics
- text link
- image (+link)
- text & image (+link)
- Native shopping ads
It also shows options to share on Facebook and Twitter. Although I understand the idea of that, I do believe that Social media are not too fond of referral links directly there. I also believe that the effectiveness of that is very small.
As you can see from above image, I haven't searched anything yet. I am on the main page for the Books department (btw Amazon started with selling books). Therefore only Text link is activated.
This means that you can even put up referral links to:
- the main page,
- department pages
- categories
- Best selling pages
- Offers
In other words, your affiliate links are not required to be to only a single product. Very nice to use that when someone for example asks in the comments section of your post about a tool that was not part of the review. You can then link an entire category to answer the question and redirect them to where they could buy such a tool.
For the sheer purpose of simplicity, we are going to search for a product on Amazon before I show you how to put affiliate links to your post/page.
You can of course search for any product that you want to place affiliate links for on your post, but I am going here for a book about WordPress Themes. I found a book that teaches me how to create my own WordPress Themes from scratch.
- I searched for "wordpress theme" in the search bar of Amazon.com
- I had a list of results and chose a book Building a WordPress Theme (clicked upon)
- The Amazon SiteStripe bar changed, now text, image, text+image and native shopping ads (custom) have become active.
Click next to see how to link this product with a Text link
Reply
This is good. I just added some Amazon image links yesterday and today and I think my menus were a little different. I think the UX was maybe a little more graphic.
Anyway, it was pretty intuitive to work with.
Keeping this for a good reference.
Thanks for the work it took to pulling this together.
Good job. Will help a lot of WA people.
Which UX are you referring to? The menu's of SiteStripe or the ones of your WordPress?
I took the screenshots this week of SiteStripe, so I doubt they have already changed.
I gladly clear that up if you don't mind. I gladly look into your version and help you out where possible. Just reply and I will see what I can do.
It should essentially be looking pretty much the same as on what I used in the tutorial, unless you are using a visual editor that replaces big parts of the entire WordPress interface.
Glad you like it - feel free to share it.
Steven
