You may have noticed the Monetize tab Blogger added back in April. Up until yesterday, only Google ads (AdSense) for your site and feed appeared here. Now you can also find your Amazon Associates information there, too.

To start, go to Monetize > Amazon Associates. Here you can either enter your Associates ID if you already have one, or start the sign up process (and again, we have a step-by-step walk-through on signing up for Amazon)

Once you’re finished with that step, you have the option to add the Amazon Product Finder to your Edit/Compose New Post page. I say go for it, and I’ll show you why.

The Product Finder is a widget that lives on the Compose New/Edit Post page. When you’re working on a post and you want to include a product link to Amazon, just type in part of the name or highlight the title in your post (you can also search by category with the pull-down menu where it says “Amazon.com”).

Once you find the product you want, you can choose the link type to insert into your post—text, image or both. In my example, I went for both:

There are lots of other ways to use Amazon on your blog—so get started!

Amazon is one of the biggest affiliate marketing sites in use today. To put it simply, when someone clicks on a link with your tracking ID in it, Amazon pays you a (very, very) small commission. You’re basically acting as the sales man, so Amazon is happy to pay you a commission.

And yes, these commissions are very small, but if you have enough of these links and clicks over time, you can see real dividends. All you have to do is sign up and make the links with your tracking ID. This may be very basic to many of you, but this weekend I was reminded that there are a lot of people who don’t know about this program.

Sign up for Amazon Associates

1. Amazon calls their affiliate program “Associates.” If you’re in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France or Japan, to join, go to the bottom of any Amazon page and click Join Associates:

2. On the right side of the next page, click the “Join now for FREE!” button:

3. If you already have an Amazon account (ie you’ve bought something there before), you can sign in with your email and password. If you haven’t, you’ll sign up for a new account:

If it’s a new account, enter your info to register.

Once you’ve signed in to your account, you go to the welcome screen.

Making Links

4. To make the links, click on Links & Banners:

5. The first option in the main part of the page takes you to the product link builder. Click on Add Product Links Now:

6. This takes you to the product link builder, which does most of the work for you (Woohoo!). Use the search to find the product. Here I’m looking for a book called Ghost of a Chance:

7. Apparently there are a lot of books called that, so I added the author’s name to find the right one. Once I found it, I clicked on the “Get link” button:

8. This takes you to the link builder. Here, you get to select all kinds of cool options to customize your link. You can choose from a text and image link, and image only link and a text only link.

The other options there allow you to set a custom color for the text and links (to match your blog, for example), decide whether the price is displayed and how, etc.

You can customize these options to your liking. Personally, if I’m inserting the link in regular text, I tend to use text only links; if it’s a full-fledged product review, I like text and image links.

That’s it! Here’s a text-only link: Ghost of a Chance. Here’s the text and image link: If you click either of these links, they’ll take you to Amazon. If you purchase this book or anything else from Amazon, I get a small percentage of that purchase. (So thank you!)

Note: I recommend that you disclose somewhere on your blog that you are an affiliate or “Associate” of Amazon. My affiliate relationships are on my disclosure page.