A final say on Amazon/B&N Affiliate links?
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I just spent at least 30 minutes reading through all the questions posted about affiliate links to try to solve this myself and can’t seem to get to the bottom of it. Would love some help, please.
I’m a book reviewer, one book a day. In the process of moving from Blogger [dianapagejordan.com] to WordPress.com.
I’d like to become an Amazon/B&N Affiliate.
TOS says that I can do Amazon affiliate links for my original, content-focused book reviews. It specifically mentions book reviewers so it seems it’s ok, but lots of discrepancies in the forums.
One forum post says that WordPress strips out any Affiliate tracking.
TOS says I can have ONE Affiliate link per blog. Since I haven’t signed up at Amazon yet, I don’t know the inner workings – does Amazon issue me personally ONE unique Affiliate link, and I use this link throughout my blog regardless of the individual books I’m linking to? Or does WordPress mean one Affiliate link per blog POST, and Amazon will give me a unique Affiliate link per book I link to?
Once I get these links from Amazon, do I just use a standard text link feature on the book title? Or will WordPress allow me to use the little “but at Amazon” buttons that Amazon supplies?
THANK YOU for any help – I’ve seen pieces of this throughout the forum but can’t quite find the right TOTAL BEGINNER resource to be sure I’m 1) playing by the rules and 2) implementing the best way.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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You will have to contact staff directly in order to get the absolute final resource. Otherwise, as you’ve seen, what you will get is “if you are the author of whatever piece is being sold, you may use an affiliate or direct sales link, otherwise you’re risking the deletion of your blog” which is the best information the volunteers in the forum (including those of us who earn a considerable portion of our income from affiliates) can give you.
Use the Contact Support button to contact staff.
As for the technical details of how the Amazon affiliate codes work, they are irrelevant until you get the answer from staff.
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Some more information.
If you are doing genuine book reviews – by which I mean you have actually read it – then an affiliate link for each book will be okay.
BUT
If the review is along the lines of “This is great” with a link that is not okay at all
If any of the review text is copied from other websites that is also not okay at all.
If your review appears on any other sites (even if you wrote it) that is also not okay.
It has to be a genuine review, have enough content that is is actually a review and the content but be unique to your blog here.People who are passionate about topics will be okay. Those who copy / paste from other sites in a bid to get affiliate traffic are not.
This is the same for game reviews, dvd reviews. All we ask is the above.
We need to keep the spammers out but we do not want to drive away people who just want to share their love for whatever it is.Does that help?
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In that case, I can tell you that the Amazon shortcodes that work on sites that have Amazon widget installs will NOT work here, and the regular HTML links you’ll get from your Amazon affiliate site will leave extra spaces behind each affiliate link that cannot be removed without invalidating the affiliate code, so either put the link at the end of a line or just become okay with the fact it’ll look a little funny.
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There is additional information here:
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/how-can-i-make-money-blogging?replies=6
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Thanks for everyone’s help.
I’m in the book industry and my daily reviews are substantial, so it sounds like using an affiliate link for each book I review will be ok. I’m not using it as a money scheme, but to build community around my topics and give credibility to my blog as part of the platform supporting a book I’ve written and am seeking a publisher for. Pretty sure I qualify as one of the “passionate” people WP supports ;)
I didn’t realize my original reviews could not appear on any other website as well (like Amazon product pages) so I’ll adjust course a little on that – thanks Mark.
Raincoaster – I’m a bit confused by this but perhaps it will be more clear once I put through my Affiliate application and start receiving info from them. Otherwise, I don’t know what a shortcode is although it sounds like they don’t work on WP anyway; and I’m not sure what you mean by the extra spacing. Does that apply only to text links? Will there be “buy at Amazon” buttons I could otherwise use at the bottom of my posts? Or can I link the book cover image from my post through my Affiliate account to Amazon, without being affected by this extra spaces issue? Sorry – total newbie – again, it may be more clear once I’m actually an Affiliate, but I was trying to get enough advance sense of the WP limitations on that (technical/visual) so as to better inform my WP.com vs. WP.org site selection. Will go ahead with .com, sign up for Affiliates, and see where that takes me.
Thanks again!
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If you don’t know what a shortcode is, then it’s not something you have to worry about, since it doesn’t work here anyway. Just use the Affiliate text link Builder and you’ll be fine.
Buy at Amazon buttons will not work.
The way Amazon formats the links puts an extra line at the end of them. You will have to fiddle around with the HTML editor to make sure that you don’t end up with extra lines and so on. Play with it. As long as you don’t delete any actual CODE but just spaces, you should be fine.
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Hi,
thanks to Mark and Raincoaster for the clear answers.
I am in a similar situation to Diana, and would like a confirmation befor I go and set it up.I have two blogs on Raising bilingual children, one in English and one in Italian (blog.bilinguepergioco.com, blog.bilingualforfun.com). On my blogs I have tons of genuine content written by me. I also review and suggest both books on bilingualism and books for children in different languages, say italian, english, french, german at least.
Book reviews are probably less than 10% of my content. Yet I would like to link those reviews to an affiliate programme and see what happens. because the books are in different languages I’d need to set up different affiliate programmes, say 3 with amazon (.co.uk, .fr, .de) and one with an italian equivalent to amazon.
Is this OK?
Do I understand correctly I can add a direct link to the books I review, and may be more than one direct link to few books (i.e. books on bilingualism available for amazon.fr, .co.uk, etc.)?
Can I also set up an aStore and link to the aStore?
let me stress again, my blogs are totally full of rich contnet and defenitely driven by passion, check them if you wish, although the english one is more recent and has less stuff, the italian one is quite developed.
Thanks!
Letizia
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