Amazon RSS - make your own feed with only your Amazon Associate ID
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Most people explaining how to make yourself an amazon feed, will give you a method that includes their associate id. That way: when you make a sale, so do they. It's not quite fair. Here's the method to get rid of their ID, and have only your own.
Making your own Amazon affiliate RSS feed is not hard. It's a matter of knowing what you want, and then doing it.
And of course, to implement it on squidoo, you simply use the RSS module.
This lens is my translation into non-geek-speak of this page by amazon itself.
There is NO problem using this
There were some online rumors that these feeds might not work. Well, they do. I've sold something through one of them.
If you want to be sure Amazon will count all the sales, do put in all the domains (like squidoo.com) in your amazon account. I'm not convinced it's necessary though.
1) Finding your Amazon Associates ID
Once you've signed up for their program, you'll find your Amazon Associates ID at the top left corner of the screen - when you're logged in. As you can see, my associates ID is katihessnet-20.
If you want to track stats by domain you use these on, or by topic or some other metric, you can make tracking-ids for each variation you want to track. For instance, I made one for RSS feeds on squidoo.
Once you've created them, you can use them the same way you would your amazon-id. In other words: your associates ID will be one of your tracking IDs. Similarly: you don't need to use both. Amazon will know it's you when you replace the associate ID with your tracking ID.
[It's a good idea to have a tracking ID for hubpages for instance, so that you know when you sell something through that platform.]
2) What do you want? New or popular?
In most of my niches popular is better than new. However, this can give you outdated products that were popular last year. Amazon is not smart enough to replace last year's most popular calendar with this year's version.
So, in case of things like calendars and computers, and other niches where what's hot changes around a lot, you're probably better off with NEW.
NEW - new used instead of popular
This RSS feed, gives the following results. It looks like they're favoring popular products, even on the 'new' setting. That's good, obviously. You don't want to show stuff that people don't want.
RECENT
This is recently tagged 'spirituality'.
To show you can get rid of the tags at the bottom of each product description, I've use the squidoo RSS module option to only show the first 100 characters on this feed.
Unfortunately, that also gets rid of the ratings.
3) The format
This is what you've been waiting for:
The RSS feed for the most popular products labelled 'spirituality', with my associate ID, is:
http://www.amazon.com/rss/tag/spirituality/popular?tag=katihessnet-20
Just replace the word spirituality with your favorite tag, and replace 'katihessnet-20' with your associate ID.
If you want to put up the newest products labelled spirituality instead, you go with new instead of popular:
http://www.amazon.com/rss/tag/spirituality/new?tag=katihessnet-20
If you want, I don't know why you should, but it will change around nicely, products recently tagged with your favorite tag, you go with 'recent':
http://www.amazon.com/rss/tag/spirituality/recent?tag=katihessnet-20
I think this might filter out those pesty popular calendars from last year.
The most popular products labelled spirituality
I set this RSS module to show everything available, update daily and display HTML. In order to keep this lens of decent length, I'm only showing the top 3.
Tags with more than one word? Yes, you can use those too
http://www.amazon.com/rss/tag/spiritual%20fiction/popular?tag=squidoo-rss-20
In other words - you put %20 between the two words you want to see in the tags. However, the more narrow you get, the more likely it is that amazon will simply have no results to show.
The easiest way to find tags that will work is by looking at a broader tag and then check what other words people use to tag that item with. That's how I found 'spiritual fiction' as well.
Alternatives
Another alternative is to have TheFluffanutta create your feed for you. He's done some coding magic, to add all kinds of options to how the feed looks on your Squidoo lens. You can left align the images, or right align them. You can put products side by side - etc.
However, you do have to share some of the revenue with him. Less than with Squidoo itself (which takes 50%), but still 10%.
The advantage of the Amazon module provided by Squidoo is that you can search by word - that is: words in the copy of the products.
The advantage of the Amazon feeds provided by TheFluffanutta is that you can give products by category. For my lenses that's not granular enough, but it may be for yours.
In both cases you can also just pick your products, however, I personally prefer to use the Squidoo Amazon Spotlight module for that: it looks good and my lensrank goes up if I sell something. That just might move a lens into first tier. I also feel better knowing that Squidoo gets paid to keep the platform going.
More questions?
I am available for consulting though, but that doesn't come cheap. For $99 you get a month of asking whatever questions you want and advice on your SEO strategy, link building, optimizing your blog etc. SEO consult online publishing.
If you aren't willing to pay up, you'll have to be content to stay updated on my Marketing Spiritual Blog where I am also willing to answer any questions related to the posts. It also contains a free ebook.
I'm active on twitter and facebook.
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