From the beginning I intended to tell you of both my successes and my failures for your blogging edification. I just completed a time-consuming project on my website only to get to the end and realize I should have done it differently.
This, I confess, is painful. But I have no doubt that every other blogger has experienced something similar. You just can’t predict some things, and you just have to experience them in order to make a better decision.
I just spent quite a few hours going back into all my posts and replacing my links on each book I have mentioned with a new link that includes my affiliate ID.
Then I decided to tackle my “Book Review page.”
I originally had a list of links here that were the titles of the books I had mentioned with a link back to the original post that mentioned the book.
After I got my Amazon affiliate, I had access to code that I could put here that would either list the book with an image only or with an image plus text which listed the title and price. I decided to just put the image in next to my already configured links. Thus the reader could click the picture and go to Amazon or click the link and go to the original post.
So I did this for 34 books until I got to the 35th one and realized I had more than one post where I mentioned the same book. And as I continue to post, I realized this will happen more and more. I realized at this point, as well, that what I should have been doing was to import the Amazon code with both image and text and rename my links to the posts with the post name not the book name. Then I could continue to add relevant posts to the list as I mention a book again. So I did this here. The image doesn’t show up in the edit mode as you can see.
When you publish the page, it looks like this:
What really would be best is if I could do this automatically through some custom tags. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to work on this now, but I will put this on my to do list. And I think I will not go back and change all my links right now—especially since I don’t really even have official approval to be an affiliate. That will come after I get my first sale through a link.
But this is how a website evolves. The best ideas don’t come first. For most of us, the best ideas build on good ideas through trial and error. So lesson learned: Get ready to fail.
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