I finally signed up with the Amazon Affiliate program. They let me sign up and gave me an “Associates ID.” Amazon lets me have access to the “Associates Central” web pages (Amazon Associate information and link pages) now before accepting me as an associate. They will review (and may reject) my application after I log my first sale through the affiliate links. And if I have no sales in 180 days, they will revoke my affiliation with them.
So I better get to selling, and you better get to buying.
I have to put the following notice on my site. So I have put it in my “Advertising Notice” page.
“[Insert your name] is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.”
Amazon offers a variety of ways to add Amazon advertising to your site, but I am just going to start out with links. I already have made a ton of links to Amazon with every book I have mentioned in my posts, but now I have to go back and replace those links with links that Amazon supplies to me.
On the Associates Central site pages, I can enter a book name and Amazon gives me some HTML code. I switch from the “Visual” tab to the “Text” tab in WordPress and paste the HTML code where I once had my own text and link about the book.
The link now has my Associates ID in it, and Amazon will know if a buyer has come directly from my site. I may experiment with links with images or previews and banner ads later.
I also decided to put a notice in every post that has affiliate links that the post contains affiliate links. Everyone, and by “everyone” I mean the government, Amazon, readers, and bloggers such as myself, wants bloggers to be transparent about their affiliate advertising, so readers are aware of potential conflicts of interest. As I have said in my Advertising Notice, I don’t intend to change my opinions about items based upon an affiliate link and I will be honest in my opinions.
So now, I am going to go change a bunch of links and hope that after I do all this work, Amazon will keep me as an associate.
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