affiliate | Ana Spoke, author

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by Ana Spoke | January 22, 2016 · 3:48 am

Don’t fear HTML…make it work for you, one step at a time!

I was re-reading reviews of Shizzle, Inc (Isa Maxwell escapades Book 1) the other day. I do that quite often, actually – nothing like reading a good review of your book to get you out of the bed and to the keyboard. One of the reviewers mentioned that my book was somewhat similar in style to Confessions of a Shopaholic (Shopaholic, No 1). I personally think that it’s more like The Devil Wears Prada: A Novel or maybe Bridget Jones’s Diary. In any case, it was great to see my book compared to a bestseller.

You know what else is great? How easily I was able to sneak affiliate links into the paragraph above! Each one of these links is attributed to my affiliate account and could make me 4-6% on each sale. I was so excited about it, that I went back to my interview with Matthew FitzSimmons and replaced the links to his book The Short Drop with affiliate ones. It’s been months since that post, but a dozen people a week still find it from a google search for the author. It’s about time that interview started making me some money…and while I’m at it, why not sell Adult Coloring Book: Stress Relieving Animal Designs? It looks like SO much fun…

Okay, okay, I got it out of my system now! Back to my original promise – to teach you how to go nuts using affiliate links in your own posts. If you have not yet, read my how to create an affiliate link post first. Once you got an account with Amazon and can figure out how to get a link, the rest is easy – turns out, all I have to do is switch to HTML in the editor window – usually I just use the default “visual” setting. This is what the above paragraph looks like in visual (notice the highlighted “Visual” button in the top right corner):

Visual draft

…and this is what the same paragraph looks like in HTML:

HTML draft

Scary mess, right? Actually, not scary at all. You can write the entire post in “visual” setting, if you wish, then switch to HTML and plaster affiliate code in the right places. Switch back to visual, check that it looks ok, and voila! You’re in business. Literally.

If you want a bit more info on how to use HTML in WordPress.com, visit this WordPress support post.

Have fun!

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Filed under Self-publishing and marketing

Tagged as affiliate, Amazon, author, Book, marketing, novel, promotion, sale, self-published, self-publishing, writing

by Ana Spoke | January 21, 2016 · 2:24 am

Even more fun with WordPress widgets: how to create an Amazon affiliate link and make a ton of cents!

So I was procrastinating today and watching my sales creep up with eReader News Today, when I noticed that they are an Amazon Affiliate. How genius, huh? Not only they take our money to advertise, they get paid by Amazon, too. Not that I mind – of all the advertising websites I’ve tried, they’ve so far delivered the most value for the money…

They also gave me an idea – I’ve decided to become an Amazon affiliate too! Cause, you know, thousands of people are clicking on the Shizzle, Inc link…well, not thousands, just 100-200 per month, but that’s a start, right? So why not make the link an affiliate one and earn 4% on whatever sales happen as a result? At least it’s an experiment and something new to learn.

First things first – sign up to be an affiliate. Because I’m already registered with Amazon, it was ridiculously easy. Took about 5 minutes and I have no problems to report, or lessons learned – just make sure to have your tax number ready. The only bugger was that I can’t get paid by direct deposit, as I’m not in the US – so I’d opted to be paid with a gift certificate.

Next it came to creating a link – all you have to do is search for a product of interest, which in my case was Shizzle, Inc:

Once I’d found it, I clicked on “Get link” and chose “text only” – to make long story short, I could not get image and text html to work and have found a work-around.

Then, I created a new “text” widget on my WordPress.com website – for more advice on creating links with text widgets see my MailChimp explained post. This is what this new widget looks like:

The tricky bit was how to make the link stand out. Previously, I’d created a link to Amazon using an image widget, which worked well and was easy to use – just click on the image and you are there. I didn’t want to have a “naked” link only and as mentioned before, when I pasted in “image and text” html, I ended up with a lot of code visible to everyone. So I cheated: I put a text widget with HTML in the sidebar first, followed by the image widget, but without title or url link:

And here you go – I now have a working affiliate link in my sidebar, which should be earning me a cool 4 cents each time someone buys a book via my website! Yay!

Have fun 🙂