The Amazon Associates Program have entered the 21st Century by announcing Amazon Widgets.
They’ve gone fully into it with 16 widgets for your blog covering a range of functions (listed below).
Some of the widgets are open to everyone – others are exclusively for Amazon Associates (those enrolled in the affiliate program).
Update – exploring these a little deeper reveals that some of the 16 are actually just ‘classic link’ options (ie things we could already do. There are a few new options – but those options listed towards the bottom of the list below were already available.
The Widgets
Unbox Videos
Show studio previews for a huge range of recent and classic movies or tv shows available from the Unbox video download service.
Slideshow
Make elegant slideshow widgets out of images chosen from products across the entire Amazon catalog – CD cover art, DVD’s, books, anything!
Product Cloud
Take tag clouds one step further by showing Product Clouds – clusters of product titles relevant to your page
My Favorites
Express yourself by recommending and commenting on products from Amazon.com. Let everyone know how you feel and what you like!
Wish List
Show your Amazon Wish List in a widget and let everyone know what you like. Or show your friend or relatives Wish List to help plan a special occasion.
Quick Linker
Quickly and easily link to relevant Amazon.com products as you write your blog posts or page content by including custom HTML tags as you type.
Search
Let your readers find and explore interesting products from Amazon.com without them leaving your site.
aStore Widget
With aStore widgets, you can display products from your aStore. You can add aStore widgets to various pages of your website and drive traffic to your aStore.
Product Links
Link to specific products in our catalog. Also, power up your Product Links with Product Previews by Amazon!
Product Previews
Have you ever wondered how to give visitors to your site more information about the Amazon products you merchandise – without taking up more space? Or how to keep visitors on your site until they’re ready to buy? If so, Product Previews is the product for your site!
Text Links
Satisfy your inner wordsmith, and link to favorite destinations, search results, or any other page on Amazon.
Context Links
Automatically identify and link contextually relevant phrases within your content to Amazon products.
Omakase
Leave it up to us! Automatically feature ideal products based on Amazon’s unique knowledge about what works for your site, for your users and for the content of your page.
Banner
Use an Easy Link to feature a variety of Amazon.com promotions or select a promotional banner to feature specific product categories.
Search Box
Enable your visitors to search the Amazon.com catalog by placing product search boxes on your webpage.
Recommended Product Links
Automatically feature products based on product categories or keywords.
How funny! I was just now looking at the Amazon widgets and thinking how cool they were, then I went back to your site on another window and found this post.
I can’t wait to play with these new widgets!!
I’m actually part of the affilate program, however, I haven’t utilized it to it’s full potential yet. I haven’t figured out if it’s worth the time.
Omakase
It’s not much to be desired (at least currently(. Although I use it on my site, I feel that it doesn’t often pull up the most relevant products in relation to the page content. It needs some work, but it has potential.
That’s cool! I am currently starting a case study using ebay affiliate links, but maybe now I will consider using these new Amazon wiki’s as well. I am documenting the full process on my blog at http://www.spencersgoal.com.
i saw this earlier today when i logged into my account and was surprised to see that there was a significant amount of new widgets to use. we’ll see how they work out.
Cool, but, probably, the simplest text links will the most efficient (at least for me).
Its about time they spiced those up a bit.
I use Amazon whenever I talk about a product and have found it to be a pretty good source of income – it’s just one heck of a hassle to build a proper associate link.
The “Quick Linker” looked promising until I realized it required JavaScript. One of the benefits of building traditional Associate links is that they won’t be blocked if your visitor is using Ad blocking or JavaScript blocking software.
With “Quick Linker” it looks like any visitors with blocking software is going to see broken links whenever a writer tried quick linking to an Amazon product – not good.
In all I think these are some great additions to the service, I just wish Amazon would work on fixing up their method for generating basic text links.
Is it true that Amazon still has a 4% starting commission rate and 1 day cookie duration? If so, then why would anyone waste a single minute on them? So many other merchant affiliate programs with decent commission rate and cookie duration. If you are driving enough traffic to make money with Amazon you could kill with dozens of other merchants.
geomark – yes they have lower commissions (although it depends on the item – I earn around 8% on some items with Amazon) and shorter cookies than some – however there are a lot of people who still make a lot of money from them.
Here’s a post I wrote on the topic – 9 Reasons Why I am an Amazon Affiliate – it shares why I use Amazon and why it’s one of my biggest earners now.
I need to look into this more deeply, but one thing Amazon needs to do to enter the 21st century is to automatically show products in the visitor’s region, rather than the one you use. It’s annoying when you put Amazon.com ads, then UK users don’t see UK prices / products.. so you lose out on sales, etc, and the same vice versa :(
I think these new widgets from Amazon are spectacular. There are enough different styles of them that they really should fit a lot of different sites needs.
Peter Cooper,
I’ve thought about the same thing. One solution which works for text links is link cloaking. It means you create a wrapper for your affiliate link, e.g. yoursite.com/your_amazon_aff.php. When the user clicks the link, the PHP page finds out where the user is from and sends him to the right site. This kind of scripts can be found by googleing “php visitor country”.
But I’m also waiting Amazon to solve this issue :)
I have played with affilities and have some scattered on my website and like what I see so far.
I am thinking of a new redesign so when that happens I will incorporate some of these widgets, as some look tasty indeed :)
I’ll take a look at these at the weekend. I need to utilize amazon better on my site, although in my travel niche, I’m a bit limited. The slideshow might be useful.
Thanks Darren for the heads up…
I haven’t had much luck with Amazon but these new widgets are at least something to play around with, hopefully I’ll have better luck with them.
I also haven’t had much luck with Amazon, but I’ll definitely give the new widgets a try.
I was messing with these new widgets for amazon last night, and really like the improvement. Hope they continue to spice these up for us bloggers!!
My blog has only been running for a little over a month now but I find the astore to be my best earner so far. It’s only one or two sales a week at the moment but it’s steady and I could see it growing.
Thank you so much for this information. I wanted to monetize my site and was looking into Affiliates. Your information was timely and I have always used Amazon products, so naturally it made sense to offer it to others. Thanks
awesome, i have been an associate for a while but havent used them in a few months. time to start again.
It seems google is getitng on board with widgets too. I have to say, your advice on ads and what it does to newer blogs was well headed. I ended up scaring off more than a few subscribers with my adsense implementation. I am excited about the widgets though and think it might have a different effect because they are useful.
Cool widgets … but all of the Amazon widgets incorporate javascript. This means it will not work on sites like MySpace that block javascript.
If you want to display your Amazon wishlist on any social website (including MySpace) — use the first flash based Amazon wishlist on the web — http://www.JunkIWant.com
Hi Darren,
Do you think the javascript issue is a big one? On my newest blog Im considering using the Quicklinker whenever I mention any product. What percentage of people use adblockers? I want my blog to be as futureproof as possible.
By the way if your on a mac a little tip is check out a program called Textexpander… it lets you have a little text and trigger it with a key combo. It will even put the cursor in the middle of the expanded text. So this is perfect for quicklinker… no affilation with that software by the way… just something I use.
I never applied any other except simple text link.
But this time, the recent widget are cool. I wil ltry one in near future
Thanks for this anyway
I make limited use of the widgets; what’s more important to me is the layout of the site, the colors being used, and the construction of proper meta tags.
What people need to understand is that the amazon affiliate site needs to load as fast as possible.. the shopper’s experience must be as easy as possible.. and the search engines should not have “to struggle” in order “to read” what the site’s content is about.