Blogger Now Supports Amazon Associates Integration

I've had an Amazon Associates account to post product links into my blog for a while now. Blogger has recently added Amazon Associates integration for blog posts to make it easier to post product links into entries. I haven't had much luck with the program so far, and I doubt the integration will make readers more willing to click on links and buy things, but since it's easier now, I might as well post Amazon links more frequently.

Before the integration, you had to go onto the Amazon website and locate the items that you wanted to feature in your blog by hand, click the "link to this page" link on the Amazon Associates toolbar and edit the information to copy and paste into blog entries (which had to be done from the "Edit HTML" view).

Now that Blogger has integrated Amazon Associates into the posting interface, you don't even have to leave Blogger to get Amazon links.

To get started, first go to the "Monetize" tab of your blog and click on "Amazon Associates." You will be given the option to use an existing Associates ID or to create a new one if you don't already have one.

If you already have an Amazon Associates account, simply check that option to set up Amazon Associates with your blog. Once it is all set up, you can then post links directly into your entries as you write them. You don't even have to copy and paste anything. With this new system, simply highlight some text in your post, for example, "Harry Potter" and click "Go" on the Amazon box that now appears next to the post that you are writing. A list of products matching the highlighted text will appear. For the "Harry Potter" search, I chose a box set of books 1-7. To get the link, I simply clicked the blue "Link" box under the product.

What happens when you click one of the other blue boxes? For my second search using the new Amazon Associates feature, I will use the text South Park

When I click the "Image" box under the first search result, South Park: The Complete Twelfth Season, I get an image of the product that links to the product's page on Amazon.

And finally, if I search for The Wizard of Oz and click the "Link+Image" box under the result I chose, I get this little box next to the paragraph featuring a picture of the item, a text link, pricing info, and an "Amazon" button linking back to Amazon.com.

All three options are the same as if you were to go to the Amazon site directly and get the links, with some minor differences.

First of all, for the text links, I noticed that there's not a weird space after the link anymore (Never mind. It's still there, it just doesn't show up in Preview now). When you copy the link from Amazon and paste it into a webpage, there is always a space after the link that you can't get rid of.

I've never tried to post an image-only link before, but I imagine that it's the same.

The thing I noticed about the Link+Image is that it is automatically left-justified with the paragraph wrapping around it. When you copy and paste, the product gets it's own little paragraph. There also doesn't seem to be a way to customize the background and text color of the product info when you get the link through the Blogger interface.

Aside from Amazon Associates integration, it appears that Blogger has made some other minor changes to the way its users post blog entries. The biggest thing I noticed is the preview. It now displays a preview over the blog entry, with a button at the bottom to close out of preview.