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How To Promote Affiliate Products On Your Lens

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Step By Step Guide To Adding Affiliate Products To Your Lens

You've identified a great product or group of products or you've written a lens on a really great topic and to round it out you want to be able to guide your reader to some related resources. Plus it wouldn't hurt to earn a buck or two. Whether that is your main motivation or not, at some point you'll probably find that the Amazon and eBay modules don't fulfill your needs exactly. That's when you'll need to compliment your lens with links to other sources. This is a resource for lensmakers who want to learn how to promote products on their lenses outside of the Squidoo modules. This lens will help identify some of the affiliate programs you can sign up to, how to find products and how to add products to your lens.

There are many resources available on affiliate marketing. Affiliate Programs: How to Make Money Online with Other People's Products is available from Amazon.com

Who Uses Affiliate Links?

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1. Sign Up For Amazon

Amazon AssociatesUsing the Amazon modules on Squidoo is a quick and easy way to add products to your lenses. Signing up as an Amazon affiliate offers a little more flexibility and greater earning potential once your turnover of number of items sold each month begins to grow. In addition, Amazon has associated stores with products which aren't available through the regular Amazon channel that offer different commission structures, some up to 15% commission.

Go to Amazon Associates to join the Amazon.com Associates program.

Adding Amazon Links To Your Lens

Once you have been accepted into the Amazon program as an associate you can start promoting their products. There are several ways to do this. If you are still finding your feet when it comes to working with html you might like to try using Squidutils to start with. Go to Squidutils.com. In the left-hand column you will see a heading "Amazon Associates" Lets go down the list.

Amazon Links


The 2011 Report on Affiliate Marketing Services:
World Market Segmentation by City

The Amazon Links widget produces the link at left. Simply insert the product ASIN and your Amazon Associate ID where indicated and fill out the remainder according to your preferences then click on the "Get HTML" button. You will see a preview of how your link will appear. Copy the code in the box and paste it into a text module. This is what you will see on your lens. I have added some padding so the text doesn't butt right up to the image. To find out more about laying out images using html and css see Greekgeek's excellent lens How to Align Images in CSS & HTML

Amazon Posters

The Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing on the Web: How to Use and Profit from Affiliate Marketing Programs



The Amazon Product Poster Ad combines an image with a heading, price saving if the product is reduced and a buy now button. In fact, the entire image is the link but the large 'Order Now' button acts as a call to action. This link requires that you accept that one in every 10 clicks will use the Squidutils associate code in place of yours. This is a nice way of rewarding the site owner for his efforts in making this resource available to you.

Amazon Banners

The Amazon Banners widget allows you to create a banner which when clicked on will take the reader to the top sellers in the category you have chosen. You will be asked to enter the category url or browse from the list. You can't get too specific with this widget but it remains current. Once again you must agree to one in 10 clicks being associated with the Squidutils tag.

Top Sellers in Web Development

Amazon Feeds

The Amazon Feed widget is an excellent tool. Once again choose the category you wish to receive the product feed from and insert your associate ID. Next choose your preferred Product filter from a choice of Top Sellers, New Releases, Most Gifted, or Most Wished For. Now, decide how you want to see your items laid out. Tip! The grid layout looks tidy and professional and is a more compact layout on your lens. Finally, click on 'Get RSS Feed Url'. This will generate the url which you will need to copy and paste into an "RSS: Add your blog" module. Next you need to change the number of headlines to show to '6' if you want two rows. I always select 'Everything available' and leave the default update frequency at one day. Select 'Yes' to display the html then save.

***At last edit this feed wasn't working for some reason. I will keep an eye on it to see what happens***
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Using The Links Amazon Provides

There are two main ways to get links for Amazon products.

The first is from the Amazon Associates dashboard. When you first sign in you will see a search bar where you can search by keyword or ASIN/ISBN. The search results page will have a 'Get HTML' button next to each product. After clicking the button you will see four tabs. We are only interested in the 'text' and 'image' tabs These are the only links which will work on Squidoo but feel free to experiment with the other options on your own blog or web page.

If you use the image code provided by Amazon this is what it will look like. Hover over the image and you will see that it is a clickable link:



If you then grab the text code and paste it immediately after the image code it will look like this:

The Awakened: Book One

Okay, so there are a few things you can do to improve how this looks. If you place <p align="center"> in front of the Amazon code and hit return immediately after the image code the text will sit nicely beneath the image like this:


The Awakened: Book One

The AwakenedAlternatively, you can grab the image and upload it to a text module then add the hyperlink and description. This will give you a nice big image with the text aligned to the left like this. To do this follow these steps:

Right click on the Amazon image and choose "Save image as"; give it a name and save it to your desktop.
Browse for the image through the text module, label it with keywords then grab the url with your associate ID and paste it into the field titled "Link the photo to this URL" The url you need is taken from the Amazon text link and is shown in red:

<a href="

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051BBHGE/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=freshoday-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=B0051BBHGE

">The Awakened: Book One</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=freshoday-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B0051BBHGE&camp=217145&creative=399373" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />

Don't forget to click 'Upload Photo'! Finally, add your description incorporating the text link from Amazon, for example:

The Awakened: Book One is a really great read. If you enjoyed his other books then you will love this one!

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Popular Affiliate Programs

Tip! If you see a website whose products you think would be great to promote check at the bottom of their page where you will often find a link for Affiliates. You can also do a search engine search for affiliate programs if you are looking for something in particular and the major companies don't seem to have it.
Commission Junction - Join Here!
Commission Junction is one of the biggest affiliate groups with literally thousands of companies as part of their program
Allposter.com - Join Here!
Allposters.com and their sister site Art.com are great for enhancing your lenses with images or pick a topic and dedicate a lens featuring solely Allposters.com products
Linkshare - Join Here!
Linkshare is another large affiliate group. If you can't find it on Commission Junction then it is probably on Linkshare
ShareASale - Join Here!
Shareasale is very popular and offers some features that the other to don't

Using Links From Other Affiliate Sites

Using links from other affiliate sites is exactly the same as it is for Amazon. You firstly need to apply to the program you are interested in. For example, you join Commission Junction and search their list of marketers. You find a company whose products you are interested in promoting so you apply to their program. Some sites will automatically approve applications, others approve manually and can be very difficult to be approved by. Once you have been approved then you can start promoting their links.

Marketers will offer a list of banners and text links and for some purposes these may be fine but most lensmasters prefer to be able to market specific products. If you are lucky you may find a product with the code already created for it but more often than not you will need to create it yourself. These are referred as Deep Links or Custom Links. Usually it involves replacing the destination url with one for the product you wish to feature before generating the code.

Youtube Tutorial On Deep Linking

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Let Me Know If This Was Useful

  • poutine Nov 22, 2011 @ 6:46 am | delete
    good tips.
  • Jack-in-the-Box Nov 21, 2011 @ 11:11 pm | delete
    That is pretty good for the spur of the moment lens. Good Job!
  • davidstillwagon Nov 21, 2011 @ 11:06 pm | delete
    Very helpful lens!
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