Amazon Hacks

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.

Product Recommendation Banners ...