Amazon has just announced a new tool for Amazon Associates that helps you add product links to Blogger. There is a special page at Amazon with more information and a wizard that walks you through the steps of adding it to your blog. I recommend logging in to Blogger (in another browser tab) before you click the Get Started link.
If you don't have an Associate's account, you can add one within blogger from the same Amazon information page. Before you leap on that, do stop and consider how adding Amazon ads will complement or undermine your blog's purpose. Posts about your special areas of expertise, hobbies, or intellectual adventures may be enhanced by reviews of books you have read or products that you can honestly recommend. Blogs that do nothing but repackage Amazon categories or include little but ads from many sources don't have a high success rate. At best, they're thin gruel. Meh!
In less than a minute, your Amazon associate settings and helpful links will be added to your Dashboard's Monetize tab. You can even integrate an Amazon Product Finder search box into the Blogger post editor, like the one above.
To use the product search, highlight a word or phrase in your blog post, or type your search in the box and click "Go". Then select one of the standard link types: LINK (text), IMAGE (product image only), or LINK+IMAGE (an iframe). For this example, I've selected LINK+IMAGE and tweaked the colors in the HTML tab for border(bc1), links(lc1), and background(bg1) to match this page a little better.
Some of the most frequently asked questions on the Associates Discussion Board are about adding links to Blogger, so this is very, very cool!
Other Amazon gadgets
The new Amazon Blogger tool makes simple links to individual products that you might review or recommend. However, I discovered that there are several other Amazon widgets available through Blogger's Add a Gadget, Get More Gadgets option, as shown in the screenshot at left: Amazon Deals, Amazon MP3Clips, Amazon Contextual Product Ads, and Amazon Searchbox.
Interestingly, if you go to the Amazon's Associate Central site and select "Contextual" from available widget types, there are two choices, neither of which is called "Contextual Widget". The listed widgets are "Recommended Products" and "Omakase". The Recommended Products widget seems to be the equivalent of the Contextual widget in blogger. If you add that one to a site, Amazon will scan your pages to determine which products to list. Omakase is more geared towards the visitor's shopping history at Amazon.com than the context of your site. Omakase is unpredictable and a little creepy because of the way it works.
To explore all the easy ways to build links, widgets, and "aStores", go directly to the widget page at Amazon Associates Central. There are "wizards" to generate code you can copy and paste, along with instructions for everything.
