If you haven’ t heard yet amazon and blogger have worked out a deal where you can now very easily create links within your blog posts to amazon. There are also gadgets now that will put sidebar widgets on your site with one click. All of these links and widgets will have your amazon associates ID already built in.
If you don’t yet have an amazon associates account you can easily get one now right from your blogger dashboard.
Now before you rush right over there and start monetizing your blogger blogs let’s talk for a bit. 
I received an email from a reader yesterday asking about some of the ramifications of these changes ~ here’s part of the email:
I, for one, would really appreciate some help from you as how to best utilise this between blogger, Amazon and Squidoo. For instance, where do you send traffic, Blogger or Squidoo? Do you promote the same product on both and link to each other etc. etc etc.
ok, I’ll see what I can do. OH boy ~ I have a million things running through my head that I want to tell you, but I have to organize it in a way that will make sense. maybe I should have done that before I openeed the text editor ~ eh, it’s Saturday so be patient with me.
Purpose:
As I have mentioned in another post purpose is key. YOU have to figure out what the purpose is for your blog. It’s purpose will determine how you want to implement these new options with amazon.What is the purpose of the blog you currently have on blogger?
Is it …
1. to provide links to your other sites?
2. to make money from it?
3. well I guess there’s only really 2 purposes.
If the purpose is to provide links you are probably not writing awesome content for this blog. (because there’s no reason to really). You may even be using other people’s content on this site. You are probably not building links to this blog if its purpose is to build links to other sites. You probably are not getting any nor WILL you get any traffic to this site ~ IF the purpose is to provide links to other sites.
Sooo… if your blog’s purpose is to provide links for other sites I’d say ignore the new groovy things from amazon and just let your blog serve its purpose.
If its purpose is to make money then you may want to use the new features. Before you start adding links and ads let’s think about a couple things though.
1. How many links have you built to this site?
2. How much traffic are you getting to this site?
3. How much content do you have on this site?
4. What KIND of content do you have on this site?
These are all things you should probably think about before you start adding ads. When adding ads to a blog ~ and we’re going to get to this a little later on ~ because it’s not always a great idea to monetize your blog right at the beginning. Less is almost always more when it comes to adding ads to your blog. Contextual links will almost ALWAYS do better than big banner ads in the sidebar.
So how would I use the new features available?
I generally use blogger blogs for the purpose of providing links to another site. I probably will not use the new features much.
However… if I was short on cash, and didn’t have hosting I would probably start the process of building a niche blog at blogger. If I was doing this I would absolutely use the new features to monetize my posts and my blog. It is super easy to use, and because I would be writing about physical products it would be a very easy way to monetize my site.
So let’s see how you get this all set up and how it works.
1. Go to your blogger account and log in.
2. Click monetize under the blog you want to work on.
3. Choose Amazon
4. Add your account id or create one here. (if you have one, you only need one, just put your associates id in the box). Once you’ve added your ID click set up amazon account button. You can find your amazon associates ID by going to amazon and clicking “earnings” in the grey stripe at the top of the page. This will take you to your amazon associates account. On the left hand side bar will be your ID.
5. Add the product finder. This is will show up in your blog sidebar, and will make it very easy to find products and it will add them automatically to your blog.
6. You’re all set up now to add amazon stuff to your blog. If you want to add a sidebar widget you just go to the “layout” tab ~ click grab a gadget ~ and then choose the “featured” ones from the links on the left hand side. You will see a variety of widgets you can put in your blog. Which one you want will depend on the topic of your blog. I personally like the amazon contextual widget. This one will look at the content of your blog and give you related products in the widget. That’s nice because you know if someone’s reading a specific post they may be interested in similar products and I don’t have to do anything to make it happen.
Once you choose a widget you will be asked what size you want ~ try them out, see what looks good in your blog, with the theme you’ve chosen. Remember… less is more.
To add the widget just click the big + sign next to the widget ~ it will go right to your sidebar. From the layout section you can left click (and hold it down) and then drag what you’ve clicked on to wherever you want it in the sidebar. It may take a few minutes before the widget will pick up the topics of your posts. Just give it a second to figure things out. If you don’t have a lot of content on your blog it’s going to be tough for the widget to figure it out at all.
So let’s take a look at the product finder ~ this is really pretty cool. I’m going to edit a post that’s already on the site, and show you how it works.
Using the product finder:
1. highlight the words you want to use to link to the product. (your anchor text)
2. Once you’ve done that if you look at the product finder you’ll see it has automagically gotten that information and once you click GO will pull up related products to the highlighted words.
From here you can choose to add a text link, an image link or the regular amazon box image/text link. You choose which one you want by clicking the appropriate blue box. Once you choose it will automatically show up in your post.
No related posts.
What a nice information, I never knew that you can create Amazon associate from the blogger’s dashboard before, I thought you still have to login to Amazon and create account and get the code links. Thanks a lot, I’ve learned a lot from reading your post.
Rob from storage shed plans´s last [type] ..The Right Tools Are Important When Using Storage Shed Plans
Thanks again for this great article. As I mentioned in another comment that I have a few blogs which I see some great opportunity to monetize through amazon. thank you again for walking us through the setup as well.
Great content here – I am tring to subscribe to your RSS feed but cannot figure out how – can you help?
click the RSS button right under the search box.
nice post…well,i still find it easier to make my own amazon ads…
Kristy @ Mens Mountain Bike´s last [type] ..How to fix the chain of a mountain bike
Despite the new widgets, I still find it easier to make my own Amazon ads for this reason: the pictures of the products in the Amazon widgets are too small, and customers like to see what they are buying.
In my experience, it’s much better to have a big picture of the product on your blog, hyperlink the picture with your Amazon affiliates link, so that if a reader clicks it they get sent to Amazon, plus add a text link too with the Amazon link. Works like a charm.
Teatree´s last [type] ..Backlinking with Ezine Articles
Hi Jackie,
Once again thank you for a mind-blowing post on blogger and amazon. I love the way you share it and as a newbie i learning things that previously was not within my means. I was not sure whether i can do it online or learn in online but now after finding you … i know that i can do it if a mom like you Jackie can do it.
Thank you for taking so much time to put up this post…Bravo!
Yes, when we get to monetization. Like I said, right now we are concentrating on building great content. There’s no point (and it can be detrimental to your site) to put a bunch of monetization on it before you’ve got good content, traffic and search engine rankings.
and again ~ you want to be using text links to point to your products from within YOUR content ~ not on the sidebar. The sidebar banners really don’t convert very well.
Hi Jackie,
Are you still going to go into more detail regarding the sidebars? Blogroll, banner ads, etc.??
I have my categories and recent post set up.
Thanks,
C
Good point ~ don’t think I covered this lol. I’ll probably do a whole post so it’s easier for everyone to find, but here’s what I usually add.
recent posts
categories
blogroll ~ which I will be talking about in Tuesdays post.
You can add a banner ad/amazon widget at the top (or in your second sidebar) if you have something that is specific and relevant. You don’t need a bunch of stuff in the sidebar for these sites. You want the focus on your content/links to products not the sidebar.
Jackie,
Not sure if I missed it somewhere along the way, I selected my 3 column theme for my WP blog, installed the plugins and Zemanta, am not sure what to do in the sidebars. I know you can select from the widgets, but which widgets are best to use, etc.
Thanks,
Carole
you certainly could ~ it’s not ideal, but if it’s all you can do then it’s a heck of a lot better than nothing.
Jackie, thanks a million for all the valuable feedback and apologies for the confusion.
My blogs are strictly linking blogs. My question around WordPress was, not that I would want to do it but, are you suggesting that one could use the free Blogger facility as opposed to a hosted WordPress site for your “mountain bike” project?
~ not sure I’m understanding you correctly ~ this is a blog you’re using on blogger as a niche site? like the mountain bike site? or is this just a linking blog like in the christmas cash method?
If this is your niche site you should not be using content from other people on it. If it is just for linking purposes that is fine.
You may be posting a lot, but it takes a little effort to get the search engine spiders to come by regularly. Are you being notified when articles go up on your site? If you are I would ping your site every time a new article goes up ~ in fact, you could get some plr articles and post them even more frequently like once an hour. Each time you post new content ping your blog. Do this for about a week. This will let the search engines know you are posting frequently and they’ll be more likely to continue coming by regularly. I would do the super frequent posting/pinging for about a week.
You’ll know how often they are coming by when you go to google and put site:yoursiteurl in the search box. If you see a date in front of listing of your pages that’s a good thing. The more frequent and current the dates the better. Then make sure after that week you go back and ping your site once a day, to keep them updated that you are still posting to the site.
If you can get the spiders coming to your site regularly you are creating a HUGE asset. You can then use this site to get new lenses indexed (by linking in the sidebar or a post), you can get other links indexed (by putting links in the sidebar) ~ you can take these links down once they are indexed, but it will be a super quick way to get your sites indexed.
Pardon me Jackie, wrong terminology. The blogs are for creating backlinks and not for driving traffic. Posts are done on a daily basis via the UAW link. I thought this would make them appear very active in the eyes of our friend Google?
I was referring to the use of WordPress as per your “mountain bikes” training track (i.e. using Blogger instead).
Henry, I would be very careful using wordpress for linking to your other sites ~ it is specifically against their terms of service and they will delete your sites.
Part of the reason you’re not seeing your backlinks show up as fast with your blogger blog is the you probably do not post content as often and as regularly as people are posting new content to EZA. Because EZA has tons and tons of new content every minute of the day the spiders hang out there a lot ~ so they end up picking up new links much quicker. Now your blogger blog is probably not very active, and while it’s indexed the spiders are probably not coming back to your site very often so it takes longer for your new links to get picked up. They will get picked up ~ and I think blogger is a great platform to build links from.
It might help if each time you make a post at your blogger blog you make sure you ping the site to let the search engines know you posted something new. You can use sites like pingoat or pingomatic to do that.
Are they really meant to drive traffic to another site ~ or are they meant to provide a backlink to help the other site rank better in the search engines?
Jackie, thanks for another very interesting post.
Question: Would you really recommend using Blogger as opposed to WordPress, say? This seems like a very neat solution but my problem is that I don’t trust Google. They seem to think they own the Web (they probably do) and they want to control it.
Also, I have two blogs at Blogger (they both took about a week to get indexed by Google) and they are meant to drive traffic to other pages. One was created 2 months ago and contains links to my Hubpages, Squidoo lenses and a sales page. The other one was created 6 weeks ago and contains a single link to my product specific Squidoo lens. In both cases I did the initial 5 posts and then set them up with UAW free articles. I have yet to detect a single backlink from these blogs! (with EZA I have a backlink within 5 days)
Am I wasting my time with Blogger?
I don’t think I’ll use the new feature either. I’m so glad I read this post! I use my blogger blogs for links to other sites so I probably would have been wasting my time monetizing it with adsense.