How to Build Your Own Amazon Affiliate Links

To create your own affiliate link for Amazon, at least in the United States, it’s actually fairly simple…

Locate the ASIN for a Product

See the red highlighted areas to locate the ASIN for the product.  Notice, you can copy it out of the URL – it’s the 10-digit code, or you can copy it directly off the page in the details area.

Locate Your Amazon Affiliate Tracking ID

You’ll log into your Amazon Associates Account, and in the top left, you’ll find your Tracking ID.

So, taking the the pieces identified above and replace ASIN and the your_Associates_ID in the following template URL:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN/?tag=your_Associates_ID

This now becomes:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A2T6X0K/?tag=headpreviehea-20

How to Verify Your Link Will Work

At least Amazon was nice enough to create a link checker so you can breathe freely knowing you’ll get credit for your link building – click the following link…

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/network/tools/link-checker/main.html

Plug your link in, submit it, and you’ll be notified whether your link will work.

What Will You See if it Didn’t Verify?

Notice that I changed the -20 at the end of my Tracking ID to -21. Amazon sees that this is not a valid tracking id and fails.

An EVEN BETTER Way to Create Your Affilate Link…

Yeah, so I showed you the basics of creating your very own affiliate link…but, what if you don’t want to have to remember the format for the url, or, even better, what if you want to send someone to a search results page and you don’t have an ASIN.  Well, it seriously couldn’t be any easier than this:

1. Navigate to the page you want to share as an affiliate link on Amazon.com
2. Just put your “tag” at the end of the URL

SERIOUSLY – it’s that easy!  So check it out…

Here, I just searched for the Epson 5030. This is your standard search results page.

This is the link that was produced in the browser’s url bar for this particular search:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=epson%205030&sprefix=epson+50%2Caps&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aepson%205030

Yeah, that looks nasty, but check this out.  All you have to do is add your tag to the url…see, the highlighted section for what I added:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=epson%205030&sprefix=epson+50%2Caps&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aepson%205030&tag=headpreviehea-20

Am I sure that will work?!  Well, let’s take a look…we have that handy link checker from above:

As you can see, by adding the tag at the end of the URL, we’ve successfully created an Amazon Affiliate Link that we’ll get credit for!

Remember, if it wouldn’t have been a valid Affiliate Link, you would have gotten a failure message as displayed above.  Also, I want to demonstrate that the link checker is actually smart enough to make sure you’re actually using an affiliate link and not just a page from Amazon…

This is the original search results URL from above, but without the added portion of the URL which includes my tracking ID. Notice it fails indicating there was no valid associate tracking id included.

And, while I demonstrated using a search results page, you can easily do the same by copying the URL out of a product page and adding your &tag at the end of the URL.  The & is extremely important so don’t forget it!  

How do I Know You’re Not Feeding Me a Line of…..

Just to put your mind at ease, this information is actually available on a help page on Amazon’s Affiliate program help site – good luck finding it on your own!

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/t64/a1?ie=UTF8&pf_rd_i=assoc_help_t64&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=&pf_rd_r=&pf_rd_s=assoc-center-1&pf_rd_t=501&ref_=amb_link_385181222_2

Wrapping Up

I hope you found this information helpful. I literally went looking for it tonight and couldn’t find much useful (trustworthy) information out there so I decided to do some research and some playing around.  I’ll be using this resource as a reference for myself and I hope you’ll bookmark it and do the same! Considering this is how I earn most of my money online, I figured it was time to figure this thing out!

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