Thursday, September 22, 2011

Customizing the look and feel of your Amazon associate advertisements

If you are an Amazon Associates publisher, then you have a great deal of control over the color schemes used in your ads, and some control over the other elements.  This article describes the options that are open to you:  it's writen for Blogger users, but the info applies to all Amazon affiliates.



Easy links between Blogger and Amazon?

Between 2009-2011, Blogger and Amazon were integrated, and there were tools that made it very easy to put Amazon ads into blog posts.  However the integration is gone from the most recent version of Blogger - and besides, many publishers would prefer to customize the colour and style of ads on their site.

Amazon gives some control over these features - you simply need to log into their site, and set up the options that you want.




Making Amazon product ads that match your colour scheme.

Log in to whichever Amazon you're using.

From the row of tabs at the top of the screen, choose Links and Banners / Product links



Click the "Add Product Links Now" option

Search for the product you want to link to

From the list of products shown, click  "Get link" - it's the button on the right side of the screen

In the window that opens, you can edit the link properties.

Choose the type of link that you want:
  • Image and text (show a small picture of the product, a description and perhaps the price)
  • Text only (shows whatever text you choose, only)
  • Image only (shows a picture of the product - clicking the picture takes your reader to Amazon)
  • Add to widget  (these will be covered in another article)

The specific options that you can choose are different for each type of link - changing color is very popular for image-and-text links.  You may just want to choose a values from Amazon's colour-picker:  use the "ok" button at the bottom to apply your colour choice.



Or you may want to get the exacty value from your blog, by going into Blogger's colour selection tools,  choosing the item whose colour you want to use and coping the hex code (without the #) .and pasting it into the Amazon colour picker wind.

For image and text links, you can also choose whether to open links in a new window, picture size (limited to larger or smaller), and whether to show the item price or not.

Once you have finished copy the HTML from the "Get HTML Code For This Product Link" box at the bottom of the screen.

Put the HTML into your blog the same way you would add any other 3rd party HTML.   


Some examples of customized links

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2 comments:

  1. I followed all instructions. Having pasted the html into the html gadget in Blogger, I find that on the page the title of the gadget appears, neither the title nor anything else turns into a clickable link. My blog is keithofrpi/blogger.com

    ReplyDelete