Thursday, March 02, 2006

Blogging 102 Become an Amazon Associate

To put a link to your book on Amazon (or any book or anything else they sell, because you get a commission on all of it), you must first go to www.amazon.com and sign up for the Amazon Associates program (it's free). To find the link, scroll down on their main web page and look for box in the left hand column that says Make Money in green letters. The link to the Associates program is in that box.

When you get your account, log in and click on Build Links in the left hand column. Under that, choose Product Links. Then either search for the ISBN number of your book (you can look it up ahead of time or use the keyword search here), and Amazon will pull it up. Click on the button that says Get HTML. This will create HTML code to display an image of your book cover as well as a link to your book that includes your account identification (so they can pay you if someone clicks through and buys something). Click on the button that says Highlight HTML, then go to the Edit option of your browser and choose Copy.

Now you have to paste this code into your blog. From here, it is the same as pasting any other link. You can paste it into a post or your can paste it into the sidebar. To paste it in the sidebar, log in to Blogger and go to the Template tab. This will show you the HTML for your blog. Scroll past all the formatting junk on the top (more than half way down) and look for something like this:

< !-- Begin #sidebar -- >
< div id="sidebar" >< div id="sidebar2" >


< !-- Begin #profile-container -- >

< $BlogMemberProfile$ >

< !-- End #profile -- >

This tells you that you are in the sidebar and below your profile. If that's where you would like the link to be, click to put your cursor here, then go to the Edit option of your browser and choose Paste. Click on the button that says Preview. If it doesn't look good, close that window and click on the button that says Clear Edits. If it looks good, click on the button that says Save Template Changes.

3 Comments:

Blogger Peg Spencer said...

Marianne - I don't have a book of my own to sell, and for others like me, the process is easy. Once you have an account, go to the associates page and they'll walk you through it.

link to Peg's page?

10:46 AM  
Blogger Peg Spencer said...

YES! My first HTML attempt.

Hey, if I can do this stuff, anyone can!

10:47 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good work!

7:39 PM  

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