How to make a great Amazon aStore

The first thing you will have to do is sign up for an Amazon Associates account. Many people will already have this set up so feel free to skip ahead if that applies to you. For those who are new to this however, just go to Amazon.com and on the left hand side under "Features and Services" you will see the link for "Associates Program". Clicking this will take you to a page where you can join. Even if you are already buying on Amazon you will still have to join the Associates program separately. Click apply and be prepared to enter some basic info and the URL of the main website you will use to send traffic to Amazon. Having a URL set up in advance is something that takes many new aStore prospects by surprise, especially if you are entirely new to the internet marketing scene. Just go to one of the many blogging sites, such as Blogger, and set up a basic account. Please know Amazon will also ask what topic best describes your "main" web site and what your primary method for generating referrals will be. Please know it is not of the up most importance that you get this 100% correct right off the bat. For now just use your best judgment for what kind of site you would like to have because if you are like most bloggers you will have dozens, if not more sites, attempting to send traffic to Amazon. Hopefully this wasn't too oversimplified. Many tutorials just run through the steps without really explaining the "why" so I wanted to be sure and get you a solid foundation on what is going on. So there you go, agree to the terms and conditions at the bottom, hit finish and you will be ready to go. Now lets make some pages.

Now that you are logged in just look to the left hand side and you will see "aStore" listed under tools. Click the aStore link and you will be on the main aStore page. Click the "Add an aStore" button at the top and you will be asked to enter a Tracking ID for your new aStore. The Tracking ID is simply used to distinguish the hundreds of thousands of aStores from each other. There are several ways of dealing with Tracking ID's to analyze performance as well. But for your very first store just pick something that will help you identify your store to yourself and for the chance that a search engine might somehow run across it. If nothing else you will be able to distinguish it from other aStore's you may make in the future. Once you see if your aStore URL is available click continue and you will be at the main page to add categories to your aStore. Now lets get those product on there.

Now click the "Add Category" button and a new option will appear on the right with a heading of "Edit Category Page". This is where the action happens and what you do here will determine what actually ends up in your new aStore. Click in the "Category Title" box and add a title for the page of products you want to add. Lets say that you want to add a music category to your page. Just type in music and either hit enter or look at the drop down menu below where it says "add individual products". Before we go on let me explain that there are two basic ways to add products to your Amazon aStore. The first is just what it says, individual products. So lets say that you want to add some music for the band Counting Crows. Just click the yellow "Add Products" button and you will go to the next page. Use the drop down menu to scroll from "All Products" down to "Music", type "Counting Crows" in the keyword box and there you go. Go ahead and pick the INDIVIDUAL products that you want to add to your aStore. Simple enough right? So simple I probably didn't need to explain it but I really wanted to contrast it with the other option for adding products to your aStore. That option is called the "Add Products by Amazon.com Category" option and it is more of a BULK option for adding lots of products to your aStore. Simply go back to the main interface for your aStore. This is where you added your very first Category Page. Now use the drop down box to go from "Add Individual Product" to "Add Products by Amazon.com Category". Now under the same title of music click on the button that says "Select an Amazon Category" and you will be taken to an entirely different option. Now scroll down to music and in the keyword box below type in the keywords you want to include in your search. Type Counting Crows in again. Now if you were to compare the two pages you would see that they contained the same exact results. Now wait a minute, why would Amazon give you two entirely different ways to do the same thing? Well, to be honest the two options are for entirely different ways of adding products to your Amazon aStore. For the purpose of going through the motions it is much less confusing to show the mechanics of the two rather than the reason. Now that you know how to maneuver the two options I will tell you how to add massive amounts of products to your store with the "Add Products by Category" option and why you may want to use it.

Now for the last of part one for bringing your aGame to your aStore. Now lets add some more products but instead of searching by keyword for "Counting Crows", lets leave the keyword blank and instead and put a check mark in the box "Include all subcategories for this category" Make sure you are still on the category of "Music" and you will see that all the subcategories of music have now been selected. Everything from "Alternative" to "Soundtracks" will be added to your page. If you instead wanted to scan Amazon for all Counting Crows books instead of music, switch from the "Music Category" by scrolling up to "Books", type Counting Crows in the keyword field and hit save. Now you will have filtered the results for books to include just books about the Counting Crows. So there it is. Hopefully I didn't make this lesson more complicated than it needs to be. The one complaint I have about the Amazon aStore is that it can be very hard to get the exact results you want without individually adding hundreds of products. Now just look at your "Books" page now and you will see there are books listed that are not about the Counting Crows and in fact only have the word "counting" and/or "crows" in the title. Speaking of and/or operations, the aStore doesn't support those operations for search at this time, hence the tough time getting the results you want which is why I gave the long and drawn out explanation on using the category pages. The best thing to do is to play around with the aStore as much as you can and see what works best for you. Hopefully this lens gave you a little insight into the concept of adding products to aStore despite how tough it can be to get what you want. All in all I think it is still worth your time to do. So what's up next? - see below.

Well if I haven't ran anyone off yet with my long winded rant on aStore Category pages, check back with me and we can go over customizing your aStore, promotion, inline frames, framesets, widgets and much more. Thanks and hope to get back with you soon.