How To Add Amazon Product Links

As mentioned above, you don't actually need to sign up with Amazon Associates to promote their products on your lens. However, if you are already an Associate, you have the option to put on your own affiliate links, and potentially earn more.

Here are some facts to help you decide:

• Basic Amazon commission rate is 4%. This increases if you sell lots of items in a month.
• Because of the huge volume of sales it generates, Squidoo (probably) gets the maximum commission rate of 8.5%.
• Squidoo takes half of any commission that you make through your lens. 4.25% is as good as the basic rate.
• Using the Squidoo tag allows for your Lensrank to improve when you make a sale on a lens.

So, if you don't have an Associate account or you monthly sales are really low, then it's best to stick to the modules that Squidoo provides. The same is true, if you want to get your Lensrank up.

On the other hand, if you don't care for Lensrank, and if you can get a higher commission rate, then use your own associate tag. You only need to sell 7 items each month to get onto 6%, and if you sell over 111 items, you will get 7%.

There are some exceptions: Consumer Electricals (TVs, computers, etc) are capped at 4%, whether you use Squidoo's Associate tag or your own. If you do use the Squidoo tag, then you will have to share the commission. It's not all bad though: 2% on $2,000 is still a sizeable commission.

Recently added to this tool are the Border and Shadow effects. This is how they look:

No Effects

Border

Shadow

Border and Shadow

A new tool at SquidUtils lets you generate a large "poster style" banner ad for any product you want to promote, with a bold call-to-action:

Features:
- Automatically generated from Amazon ASIN codes
- Automatically updated daily (to comply with Amazon's rules)
- Display's product image, rating, price, % savings, and free shipping *
- Ready-to-Copy HTML and free hosting of images
- Track all your impressions and clicks (optional)

Here's how it works: You provide an ASIN (or ISBN) and your Associate Tag, and press the button. It will then get the information about that product direct from Amazon, and use that to build a poster ad for you. All the HTML you need will be provided, and all you need to do is copy-and-paste that onto your Squidoo lens.

Click on the Amazon Poster Ad Generator to get started!

Yet another tool will generate Amazon Banner Ads for any category. Loosely based on the Carousel widget, these banners are fully compatible with Squidoo, and are optimised for the width of modules. Here's an example:

Wrap text around it

This is the easiest way to embed Amazon links into your lens. Simply paste the code at the beginning of your Text/Write module, and start your content immediately afterwards. Select between left and right aligned using the options in the tool.

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Multiple links in a row

You can fit 2, 3 or maybe even 4 links in a row. This often looks good at the end of a piece of text. Paste in the code for the products immediately after each other, with no blank lines in between. You might want to tweak the widths of the paragraphs in this case, e.g. use 290px for 2 products, 190px for 3, and 145px for 4.

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There is a modified version of this tool that it can create links that automatically detect where your visitors are coming from. Visitors from the UK will see prices in pounds and will be redirected to Amazon.co.uk, while everyone else will see prices in dollars and links will go to Amazon.com.

Before you begin, here is what you need:

Traffic from the UK. There's no point in doing this unless you're sure you are getting traffic from the UK, as lenses get mostly US visitors. Use a third party analytics package like www.SiteMeter.com or www.StatCounter.com to see exactly how many UK visitors you are getting.

Two Associate Accounts, one for the US and one for the UK. You must setup the same tracking code for both, i.e. myamazontag-20 and myamazontag-21. Amazon let you create additional tags if you need to.

A product that exists on both sides of the Atlantic. Often Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk will have the same ASIN code for an item (especially books), but not always (e.g. DVDs). Do your research, and make sure that you find the identical item on both sites.

Once you have all this, click this link - you'll find it very similar to the regular tool, but it has two boxes for your ASIN codes. The generated HTML will be built from the US product info and your US associate tag. The Price Check will show you the prices for both countries - make sure that these are correct. (Click on them to be doubly sure).

You can then copy the generate HTML code and paste it on to your lens, just like with the regular link tool.

If you have already got these links on your lenses, then you should periodically check the products are still valid. There is now this Amazon Link Error Report, which will tell you if any of your links point to products that have changed or been deleted. All you need to do is login with your Lensmaster name.