Ah, the magnificently grand, vast and ever flowing abundance that is Amazon!
Nope, we’re not talking about the river in South America. We’re talking about the robust online store that supports small and medium-sized business, that reaches out to its customer to deliver its products at the click of a mouse! But since you’re here, you probably know all about that, and you’re trying to earn a little bit on the side for your WordPress site with affiliate marketing.
So why make a big deal about the Amazon Associates program?
Amazon Associates has developed simple solutions to website owners, developers, and sellers using Amazon to make money through advertising products from amazon.com. As most bloggers or website owners know, you can earn using affiliate program links, and when customers click you can collect referral fees. The Amazon Affiliate program is entirely free to join and very simple to use. Sign up here.
You can earn up to 10% referral fees if your visitors turn into Amazon customers and purchase a product via a referral link from that neat WordPress site of yours. Once they make a purchase, you get your commission.
Psst.. here’s another tip for you reviewers, you can earn a whopping 15% referral fee if you are writing and promoting featured Amazon products such as phones and tech stuff. What you need to do is to review the product and encourage potential buyers to purchase with an Amazon affiliate marketing link. Again, once they make a purchase, you get your commission.
By now, you’ve probably set up a WordPress site with the goal of making money from Amazon affiliate marketing.
Now before we get started, let me know if this sounds familiar:
- You’ve already spent money buying a domain for your WordPress site.
If you haven’t gotten a site already, start here first. We’ve got an excellent guide on it here, and for starters, we can recommend MyDomain.
- You’ve already paid for an excellent hosting service.
If you’re hoping to add some moolah to your wallet, you’re going to need fast and reliable hosting! You’ll need a managed hosting service, like WP Engine, if you’re dreaming of making money with the Amazon Affiliate program.
- You’ve employed the services of a web designer to design your site.
If you’re looking to earn, you’re going to have to make sure you appear trustworthy and presentable, and your site doesn’t have bugs. WordPress is pretty well known open source software, and there are tons of resources out there to get the right people for your site such as Codeable.
You might be talking to your screen after that checklist saying “Hey, I’ve got all of that!” and then only to find out the money made from your WordPress site isn’t enough to cover your costs.
Maybe you haven’t tried the right Amazon affiliate program plugin?
Let’s take a look at some of Amazon Affiliate plugins out there in the wild now:
- Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin (AAWP)
- Amazon Simple Affiliate (ASA 2)
- Amazon Link Engine / Geniuslink (Genius Link)
Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin
AAWP is an Amazon Affiliates plugin made by a German developer with WordPress and the WordPress user in mind. The team behind the plugin has been working on it and continuously updating the plugin since 2015.
Highlights
- Products lists to showcase ranked bestseller products and even latest releases
- Filtering and ordering of product lists to give rankings and to categorize your products
- Product boxes to display product info on posts and pages
- Geo-targeting to localize products and target specific audiences per location
- Google AMP Support
- Earn additional commissions for referred Amazon Prime customers
Features
- Automatic Updates for products – Affiliate links will be all be generated. The prices, and products refresh automatically.
- Highly Customizable Templates – choose from many different designs, add custom style or even create new design templates.
- Easily adjustable configurations – can be changed via the plugin settings themselves or adjusted via shortcode.
Support
To start off, they’ve got a very well organized library of documentation.
You can browse through each topic based on what you need. The documents are easy to understand, including tables, and links to graphically show how everything works and what it does. Their documentation is just short of being a simple infographic.
You can also submit a support a ticket or use their online chat if you have any questions.
Limitations
The plugin only works on self-hosted WordPress blogs. It’s incompatible with WordPress.com.
Pricing
**The pricing on site is in Euros**
The Personal plan starts at €39 for one single domain. For multisite usage, there are the following plans: Plus plan at €99 for up to 3 domains, Pro plan at €199 for up to 25 domains and the Ultimate plan at €299 for an unlimited amount of domains.
All plans include all the core features and the standard of 1 year of updates and one year of support.
Amazon Simple Affiliate
The team behind ASA2 isn’t entirely new for the affiliate scene. This plugin is the team’s second attempt at an Amazon affiliate plugin. First starting with ASA 1, they’ve built the sequel from the ground up packed with more features and dedicated support for this premium version.
Highlights
- Standard 1 year updates and 1-year premium support with paid license
- WPML ready for localization and translation
- Fully EU-GDPR / EU-DSGVO compliance
- Setup Notifications for specific products to send out alerts such as Out of Stock products
- Developer friendly with AJAX options, SEO ready product posts, Caching settings and ability to modify Cron Jobs
- Multisite Ready
Features
- Product Repo – Robust product repository to organize and categorize your chosen Amazon products. Data The plugin includes a Product Picker that helps you select products and generates the correct shortcode for you.
- Templates – Unlimited templates for customization and unlimited template translations. These also include managed templates and dynamic templates you can populate with placeholders that will fill in data for your templates.
Support
They offer a support hub on their site, where you can get help via their massive collection of documentation, youtube video tutorials, active forums, and finally submitting a ticket. This type of support is what you would expect for a purely premium plugin, and you get 1-year updates and premium support with your paid license.
Limitations
You may have to reset caches which include the ASA 2 caches as well as those of third-party plugins. Because of this, you may have to refresh your Repo items as the product data is retained in the cache data as well.
Pricing
Now this being a premium plugin, it comes in 3 paid tiers: Personal for a single domain, Professional for up to 5 domains, and Business for 25 domains. The price point for those being $59, $119 and $249 respectively.
Amazon Link Engine / Genius Link
Geniuslink created the WordPress plugin Amazon Link Engine. Geniuslink is a link localization service that ensures all Amazon links are localized.
Highlights
- One time configuration. Install the plugin, then set up your Geniuslink account, and connect the two with an API key.
- No need to apply for an Amazon Developer account or apply for any of Amazon’s APIs or web tools.
- The Amazon Link Engine gets your users to the best possible local version of an in-stock product.
Amazon links are converted automatically to localized links.
Features
- Automatic Product localization – it will not only localize links based on just product ID. Geniuslink makes sure to retrieve a correctly localized product, even when the product IDs don’t necessarily match.
- Automatic affiliation – all you need is to add your Amazon ID, and they’ll take care of the affiliation part so you can start earning on those clicks.
- Powerful analytics – get comprehensive reporting allowing you to check your link’s performance across many different metrics which include, but are not limited to browsers, device, operating system, and geography.
Limitations
You would need a paid Geniuslink account, to earn international affiliate commissions
Support
They’ve got a helpdesk site here – where you can log in with your account and submit a ticket. The support desk seems to be for the GeniusLink premium service overall, so your best bet for free support for the plugin itself would be their WP Support forums.
Pricing
The plugin itself is free. The plugin uses a subscription feature that unlocks other features, and you will need a Geniuslink account to use most of the premium features. You can start with a free trial for 14 days, and then it’s $2 / 1,000 clicks. https://ift.tt/2jh63Bl
Who’s the undeniable “king of the jungle” of Amazon Affiliate Plugins?
Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin (AAWP)
From its excellent and straightforward to use affiliate plugin, to its abundant features to help non-developers as well as developers alike, they’re the clear winner when it comes to Amazon affiliate plugins.
All plans are licensed base, and you can use install to use the license for an unlimited period. There’s no subscription, and you can voluntarily renew after one year if you want to continue receiving support and updates.
Renewing even gives you a 50% special discount, so you can’t go wrong with voluntarily renewing your license to support the team and support yourself!
Now let’s take a peek at AAWP settings and how to get started.
First, before you start your journey into the Amazon Affiliate world, please go to the settings, and sign up here –
Don’t forget to set the country to where you want to select products from as this will change all the Amazon links to the proper store. By default, this is set to the German Amazon store in AAWP.
After setting up your Amazon Affiliate ID, link up your API Key and API Secret, and Tracking ID into the plugin via the AAWP Dashboard. Then save your changes, and you get started.
One of the very first options that you can set is the shortcode to use is the shortcode, which can be [amazon], [aawp], or Disabled. In our opinion, it is easier to use the default setting of [amazon] for the shortcode as its easy to remember, and you’ll know what it is in the editor right away when reviewing Posts/Pages with the shortcode on it.
Another setting to take note of is an experimental setting called Smart Caching for caching. It’s a built-in feature that automatically tests and checks if a product listing needs to be updated or not. If it doesn’t, it’ll load the cached version of the product listing, saving time and resources. Who doesn’t like faster, speedier load times?
This is a very aptly named solution and a feature that you may be used in the background once you set it to check for products. Just set it and forget it. It does the hard work for you of keeping track of products and serving the latest versions as quickly as possible to your visitors.
For Affiliate links, please note that the currently supported tracking methods are through Google Analytics & Piwik.
There are a couple of extra options like AMP support useful for your mobile visitors. There is also a simple attempt at theme compatibility with the opportunity to set the shortcode to work with things like in widget areas, or even setting the shortcode to work in descriptions for things like Categories.
You can also include specific info for product listings, such as when the last update was for a product, and even change the verbiage to something custom. They even have comparison tables so potential customers can compare products before purchasing right on your site.
They’ve also included the option to present the Amazon Product disclaimer, though this is optional, we recommend displaying this. It gives visitors the value of knowing the products are from Amazon, that you can be trusted, and you are not held liable for any discrepancies regarding the product listing.
You can also customize this in any way you want, however, the placeholder information should be enough to keep you looking legit and running correctly.
If you have a problem with remembering that shortcodes shouldn’t have any space, or maybe something goes wrong switching between the Visual and Text editors, (like some invisible page breaks or spaces), there’s an option to fix and clean up the shortcode! We love how the plugin is looking out for you and making sure it works to present the best version of your site at all times to look trustworthy for those potential Amazon customers!
For the front end, you’ve got options for title length, thumbnail usage, description, and even includes Amazon’s built-in product rating system if you want to show product reviews! You can also display different pricing options, like showing in a specific currency, if prices have dropped for a particular product or even it if it qualifies for Amazon Prime shipping.
The plugin also allows you to preview buttons such as Buy Now or Add to Cart buttons. You might be asking yourself, what happens if a customer adds something to their cart on my site, but leaves before purchasing? Well, the cart button has a 90-day cookie, so don’t worry that you won’t get the affiliate commision. If you’ve got more questions about product linking head to the official Amazon documentation and they’ll get you settled.
You can also set Custom CSS, set a Best Seller list, or show New Releases. The plugin makes sure you’re displaying relevant and fresh content so you can get those potential Amazon customers to purchase!
So with all these neat features, it’s clear AAWP is the best Amazon Affiliate Plugin for WordPress. Don’t wait, get AAWP, ASAP!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to sign up for my own Amazon Affiliate ID to start this affiliate adventure!
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