Create Banner Ads for Your Site
Amazon banner ads and product recommendation ads are a quick way to link into the associates program.
Banner ads are a common way to advertise on the Web, and if you want to add them to your site to make some money for your site-building efforts, the associates program is an easy way to make that happen. Amazon has dozens of premade buttons and banners you can add to your site (http://www.amazon.com/assoc-art). You can save any of the images locally, and then build an appropriate associate link [Hack #59] to Amazon for the banner.
For example, you could take a “camera & photo” graphic (Figure 5-5) and save it to your hard drive as camera_banner.jpg.
Figure 5-5. Amazon “camera & photo” banner
You would then create an associate link with a redirect URL to the Camera & Photo section (browse node 502394). Putting it all together would look something like this:
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=insert associate[RETURN]tag&path=tg/browse/-/502394/"> <img src="camera_banner.jpg" width="467" height="58" border="0"> </a>
While perhaps not as effective as linking to individual products, adding a banner like this to your site takes only a few seconds. There are many banners and graphics to choose from on Amazon’s site, all arranged by category. Finding one appropriate to your site’s content shouldn’t be hard.