Use the Amazon Associates Site Stripe toolbar for easy affiliate product links

You bet, and I'm glad to be able to help you out. I too have been surprised how difficult it's been historically to produce simple text links to specific products in the Amazon catalog without all the fancy "stores" and such. I mean, if I want to mention that one of my favorite books, for example, is Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, I don't want to spend ten minutes digging around to find an affiliate link, it's a waste of time.

By making it a toolbar, however, Amazon's made it surprisingly simple and elegant, which is a huge benefit and will doubtless encourage you to add affiliate links more frequently and - hopefully - make you more money with the affiliate program too.

If you're in the Affiliate (uh, Associates) program, it's dead simple to get working too, thankfully. You just need to be logged in to your Amazon account when you're surfing the site.

If you're not, a product page looks like this:

It's a bit small, but be aware of the space between the Amazon logo and the actual toolbar from the Web browser. In this case, there ain't nuthin' there.

When you log in, it's possible that you still won't see the Site Stripe toolbar because it's minimized. That's what you can see here:

Click on it and *poof* the bar appears:

Nice, simple, and elegantly integrated into the overall experience on Amazon.

Since I really do want to recommend that you buy and read Foucault's Pendulum, I'm on that page and will click on the "Link to this page" button on the top left.

It takes me here:

As you can hopefully see, the default is a combination of text and graphics as a sort of mini-widget (it's on the right side, half way down, in a box).

That's not what I want, however, so I click on "Text Only":

At this point I can grab the code it's generated:

which looks like this:

An easier alternative is to simply notice that on the right, the preview section now shows a text link:

Right click on it, choose "Copy Link", and you've got your affiliate link for the product (if you don't end up wrestling with the preview pop-up, that is!) ready to copy and paste. Now, I wish that clicking on "Link to this page" actually just loaded the affiliate text URL into the copy/paste buffer so I wouldn't have to do these other steps, but at least it's easier than it was...

Btw, want to enjoy the kind of literature that inspires us at Ask Dave Taylor? Then grab a copy and enjoy the brilliant Foucault's Pendulum by Italian author Umberto Eco (who also wrote The Name of the Rose).