As Amazon Associates, we're allowed to place their Special Links onto sites of our own registered domains only. Once we want to recommend a product through a blog comment, through a forum posting, by e-mail, or by any offline publication, we're not allowed to use Special Links any longer. Any Amazon marketing activity outside our own sites is strictly forbidden, and can lead to termination of the associate agreement. We can, however, link to our own site, and point our customers to Amazon from there.

Now to create a page for each product recommendation would both be a tiresome process, and also lead to a fast growing collection of lots of useless pages with just a single Special Link on each of them. I've had the idea to improve the procedure and to create recommendation landing pages dynamically.

Introducing the Amazon Linker

So I developed an Amazon linker script, which takes the ASIN and the Amazon Associates locale as input parameters, and creates a page with the text and image Special Link to present to your visitors. Have a look at the live version of the Amazon Linker on here first. Enter any ASIN, select a locale, and go for it. The link to the landing page can be found at the bottom of the site.

The Amazon Linker version avaiable publicly for download is a bit less advanced than this live one as it doesn't make use of the Amazon Web Services. The only requirement to get it running on your site is that your webspace supports PHP. Download the archive asin.zip. It contains the single file asin_linker.php. Open this file with your text editor, and look for the comment blocks, which will show you where you can add your own configuration and coding.

Just before the first block, please replace the preconfigured Amazon Associate IDs with your own ones, and delete the lines with the IDs you don't need. In place of the following comment blocks, you can add your own HTML coding with elements that are supposed to be going on the page's top and foot positions, as well as in between the Special Link and the submission form. Replacing the Associate IDs is the only mandatory action required. So you don't have to know about HTML and PHP to get the Amazon Linker to work. If HTML is above your knowledge, you can just replace the Associate IDs and upload the file asin_linker.php to your webspace, and it's gonna be working.

As no one would want Amazon to ban this kind of approach, please use the script responsibly. Don't start spamming dynamic links, and don't steal other associates' commission by pasting dynamic links to their sites. I can only appeal to your common sense here.

Copyright Notice

The Amazon Linker is copyrighted material, but may be used by anyone free of charge. The actual source code may not be published or distributed in any other place than here.

Please don't remove the copyright note from the script. Should the notice bother you, just move it further down towards the bottom of your site.