UsiIn this post, we’ll show you how to add Amazon Affiliate Links to WordPress. The Amazon Associates Program is a great place to get started in affiliate marketing. Not only does Amazon offer a massive variety of products and two-day shipping, but their affiliate program is easy to learn and can teach you some essential lessons on how to manage your affiliate business before you start with other affiliate programs.
An Amazon Associate, their term for the affiliate, is oftentimes someone (creator, blogger, publisher) who recommends products on Amazon by sharing a special link to that product. If someone uses the link to purchase a product (or service!), then the creator, blogger, publisher gets a cut of the sale as a commission.
You may be wondering by now “Okay, but how do I find this money making link?”
In this blog, I’ll show you how to create an Amazon Affiliate link, how to add them to WordPress using a plugin, and how to add them to your WordPress manually.
How to create an Amazon Affiliate link
The first step is to make sure that you are signed in to your Amazon Associate account, you’ll need to have or create an Amazon Account for this. Amazon will then prompt you to fill out a fairly short application, it shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes to complete.
There are two important things to note:
First, Amazon currently has 17 independent affiliate programs, each referred to as Amazon Associates. Each of these programs correspond to one of Amazon’s international storefronts. You should pick the affiliate program that corresponds with the store that matches the country where you see the bulk of your audience. For example Amazon.com is perfect if you see most of your website visitors coming from the US, however Amazon.co.uk is best if you see most of your traffic coming from the UK. You can monetize all of your international traffic with Geniuslink, more on that later.
Second, it is super important to list all of the places you will be listing your links, including social media. This will ensure your account doesn’t get banned, for more on that – check out our Ultimate Guide to Getting Your Account Banned.
Once you have created your account, you will be sent to a dashboard on your personal Associate Homepage, now we can start creating Amazon Associate Links.
The next step is to click on the “Product Linking” button on the bar on the top of the page.
When the menu drops down, click on “Product Linking.” Amazon uses something called an ASIN to keep track of all of their products, this stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number. Search the ASIN or the product you want to link to, then you can look through their catalog.
The ASIN for an item can be found in their product details, as you see here. You can copy this number and paste it into the search bar to find the exact product you are looking for. Or you can just broadly search a product and choose one of the results.
Both methods work well, but using the ASIN is better for finding specific products.
Next is to click the arrow next to the “Get Link” button. A screen will pop up where you can shorten your Amazon Associate link.
Shorten the link to amzn.to and you’re good to go!
Pro tip: if you have an international audience, or want help managing your links, you can easily turn that amzn.to link into a Geniuslink!
Amazon affiliate links unfortunately have a hard time localizing and sending shoppers to the same product in their local Amazon store. If you share the geni.us link version of an Amazon affiliate link then when someone in France clicks it they’ll end up at amazon.fr — we’ve localized that shopper’s experience (and the odds they buy are now significantly higher).
With a single geni.us link, you can send every visitor to the right product in their country’s Amazon store, all while earning commissions from each of the regional Associates program.
Additionally, we watch your links health so you don’t have to. If the item you linked to is out of stock, we will make sure you are notified ASAP.
How to Add Amazon Affiliate Links to WordPress Using a Plugin
What if you already have a WordPress blog chock full of Amazon links, and you want to make those links into globally aware affiliate links? Have no fear, there’s a plugin for that! It’s called the Amazon Link Engine. Converting your links to geni.us links with our WordPress plugin is not only easy, but we can help you squeeze more money out of your affiliate links!
First, I’ll take you through installing the plugin.
There are three easy steps to get the most value from the Amazon Link Engine.
1. Install the Amazon Link Engine plugin using the WordPress Plugin Installer.
2. Activate the plugin through the “Plugins” menu in your WordPress Dashboard.
3. That’s it! Once activated, your Amazon links will automatically be localized for your international audience (but won’t start earning you money internationally, keep reading for that!).
To connect the plugin with your Geniuslink Account,
1. If you don’t have an account already, create a Geniuslink account.
2. After signing in, navigate to the Tools tab and create a new API token.
3. Access the Amazon Link Engine Settings through the “Settings” tab within your WordPress dashboard.
4. Copy the API Key and API Secret into your Amazon Link Engine plugin.
**Note: You are not required to have a Geniuslink account, to use this plugin. However, if you would like to earn international commissions, you must sign up for a Geniuslink Account. Try it out for free and check out our pricing.
Once you have the plugin installed, it will automatically change your links to globally aware links without changing their appearance. Here is an example of this on a sample blog.
Our Amazon Link Engine is consistently one of the top recommended WordPress plugins for the Amazon affiliate program, including by Hubspot and many other e-commerce blogs as one of the best, so we hope you try it out!
Good luck in optimizing Affiliate links on your WordPress sites.