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How do I quickly build Amazon affiliate links on my pages?

Dave, I notice that whenever you mention any products on Amazon, your links always go straight to the recommended product (rather than their annoying intermediate landing page where they try to sell you on other products) and neatly tuck your affiliate link in too. So, do tell, what's your secret technique?

Dave's Answer:

If you're already an Amazon affiliate, then you know their affiliate area has a nice "build a link" capability, highlighted on their Build Links to Amazon.com area. If you're not an affiliate, then, for goodness sake, go sign up!

Let's step through an example so you can see how the Amazon Affiliates program works, and then I'll show you how I make links myself. Since it's the holidays, let's do this by considering a game I've always loved, in an edition that my kids would doubtless really enjoy: Disney Monopoly.

To use the Amazon Affiliate "text link" system, I have to navigate to the page in a separate window, then copy and paste the URL of that page into their dialog box, then click "bulid link" to have the code generated. Here's the HTML they give me:

Disney Monopoly

Nice, but that's a long, torturous way to build these links if you just want to pop a few into a Web page or Weblog entry. Instead, here's how I do it...

First off, go to Amazon and find a page that you'd like to link to. Copy the URL by clicking on the address bar in your browser. It'll look something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005JG32/ref=cm_lm_fullview_prod_3/102-2173641-6432913?
%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

Generally, you can just slap your affiliate code on the end of any Amazon URL and their system is smart enough to catch it and give you credit for the purchase. But that's really not the best solution. Instead, chop the URL down to immediately after the first sequence of letters and digits. In this case, it's B00005JG32 .

Stick with me. Once you've done this once, you'll see, it's just as easy as using the Amazon system, but much, much faster.

So the URL at this point is:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005JG32/

Now, all you need to do is add your affiliate link. My affiliate link ID is davetaylor, logically enough, so this is the minimalist URL to point to this Monopoly game:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005JG32/davetaylor

Now it's just time to drop this into a hypertext reference. That's done by using an a href="" sequence:

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005JG32/davetaylor">
Disney Monopoly</a>

Perfect! Try clicking this link to see how it works.

Easy enough, isn't it?

It's also easy to include the image from an Amazon product and even make it clickable. Pop over to the product page and simply right click on the product image itself. You'll see a pop-up menu from your browser that includes "View Image", "Open Image In New Window" or something similar. Do that. Now you'll see just the product image itself (click here to see what I mean). If your browser's decent, it'll not only show the image, but the title will include the size of the image (this one's 160x160).

To include the image on your Web page just wrap the image URL in some rudimentary HTML:

<img src="url of the image" alt="product name" />

For bonus points, include height="height" width="width". Here's how that HTML would look for our Monopoly game:

<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00005JG32.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg" 
 alt="Monopoly Deluxe" height="160" width="160" />

Here's the image as it'll show up on the page:

Monopoly Deluxe

Just about done. All that's left is to put the two pieces of HTML together, so that we have a clickable image. That's surprisingly straightforward. Just replace the text in the earlier hypertext reference with the img HTML instead:

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005JG32/davetaylor">
<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00005JG32.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg" 
 alt="Monopoly Deluxe" height="160" width="160" border="0" /></a>

That's all there is to it. To show you it's legit, click on the monopoly board below and watch how the affiliate link is saved as Amazon rewrites the URL to its internal system and shows you the page with that product:

Finally, you can use the Amazon affiliate link building system, but I promise, once you start experimenting with this approach, you'll find it's considerably faster and much more flexible. Oh, and the affiliate payout for purchases is exactly the same as if you'd used their tool too.

Updated July, 2006 to reflect changes in Amazon's inventory and to further simplify the affiliate URL link by using the "ASIN" shortcut.

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Categorized: Blogs and RSS Feeds , HTML and CSS (Article 3807)
Tagged: affiliate links, affiliate programs, amazon associates
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Comments

It's worth noting that this doesn't work with Amazon FR, though it does work with Amazon UK. The FR site wants an ASIN listing. I haven't tried with any others, since I don't have accounts with them.

Posted by: Kirk McElhearn at December 14, 2004 2:22 PM

Other people thinks that kind of link (with "tg/detail/-" instead of "ASIN") does not retain the associate ID:

Amazon Associates beware
http://www.kottke.org/03/02/amazon-associates-beware

But that's from February 2003. Maybe the things are different now, I don't know.

Posted by: Juan G. at May 6, 2005 2:08 AM

Try the Amazon Affiliate Link Creator. It is the quickest and easiest way to create affiliate links for your blog and webpages. The software is freeware.

http://executivedatabases.com/amazon.html

William

Posted by: William Hungerford at December 23, 2005 7:54 PM

There seem to be two problems with the instructions on this page.

1) The suggested abbreviated url's don't seem to work.

2) The Monopoly Deluxe example seems incomplete in the instructions because Amazon does not seem to have that image on their server anymore.

Posted by: Lt. D.N. Foss at July 18, 2006 10:05 AM

I wrote a tool to make it easier for me to generate Amazon Affiliate links in case anyone's interested.

Posted by: dan at November 27, 2006 3:44 PM

Hi,

Isn't this kind of alteration of Amazon's "Special Link" violate the Amazon Affiliate user agreement?

Posted by: Jazmin at January 11, 2007 5:42 PM

Thanks for this page. I found it very useful.

Posted by: R.Pettinger at March 11, 2007 3:47 PM

Ack - I didn't realize the link to the tool I mentioned didn't have a link.

Here it is:

http://dan.hersam.com/tools/amazon.html

Posted by: dan at March 19, 2007 1:00 PM

I'm confused, are you saying the links they give you are some how corrupt or it's hard to put the links on your site?

Posted by: Robert at August 25, 2007 7:33 PM

Why would't you try Amazon Web services Tracking ID? Associates tools such as Build-a-Link and Amazon Recommends are helpful if you want to build Amazon links quickly and easily. But if you'd like to more deeply integrate their features and content into Amazon Web site, you might want to check out Amazon Web Services.

Posted by: Joseph at September 25, 2007 9:24 AM

We are just rolling out a new link building tool for Amazon where all you have to do is highlight the text you want to link to amazon and we search their api and automatically create the link for you. Check it out here triggit.com

Posted by: Zach Coelius at October 2, 2007 1:08 PM

actually, your URL's are still longer than they have to be.

The shortest form is:

http://amazon.com/o/asin/###ISBN###/

Posted by: nordsieck at October 7, 2007 3:51 PM

useful and quick. Thats what i like. The linking process from amazon is really hectic and you showed an easy method.

Posted by: faiz at October 17, 2007 8:35 PM

I'd like to just append my affiliate id to the end of a url like Dave does, but how do you know if it really works?

The code Amazon give you is a pain to generate going through their cumbersome interface. But I'd like to know that Dave's way actually works or that Amazon isn't likely to start rejecting links in that format...

Posted by: BobbyW at January 7, 2008 3:26 PM

Bobby -

If you make a link the way Dave suggests and then open it you can check out the source code. You'll see your associate ID referenced throughout the html which is pretty convincing.

Posted by: Murphy at January 7, 2008 7:19 PM

I am getting the following URL for mobile safari:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d.html/ref=mp_s_a_1/180-5891994-4397819?a=B001F7AHXM

Adding the affiliate code at the end does not work. Any suggestions?

Posted by: Peter at March 14, 2009 5:35 PM

I'm a 6 week newbie, awesome info! I'm definately coming back here again. You guy's sound like you really know your stuff. Now I'm off to become an Amazon and Ebay affiliate, lol.

Posted by: Dane Cramer at May 6, 2009 10:17 PM

I came across this page as I was interested in why the amazon tool (as mentioned in Daves post) inserts a 1px by 1px image in the text link. Surely it serves no purpose?

For example it will generate
Buy This

Thanks for the info tho Dave.

Posted by: Bristol Design at May 26, 2009 4:39 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!