Insert Amazon Affiliate Images into WordPress with AzonPostImages

I have been growing my Amazon affiliate sales recently by using Azon brand of plugins and with the release of SimpleAzon I have rebranded it to offer it to fellow WordPress bloggers so they can get all of the benefits of SimpleAzon for a fraction of the price.

AzonPostImages is my branded version of SimpleAzon, it is the same exact plugin and is just branded for my site and readers.  Therefore any information you read about SimpleAzon you are reading the same information for AzonPostImages.  This page will show you how the plugin works, how to configure it and how to leverage AzonPostImages to add Amazon Affiliate Links or Images into your articles.

What is AzonPostImages

AzonPostImages is a WordPress plugin that allows you to search for Amazon products in your WordPress post editor and automatically insert affiliate links or images for those Amazon products.  This saves you time as you don’t have to go to the Amazon Affiliates website, you don’t have to get the affiliate ID for each specific product, find/download images to embed it into your blog and do this manually for each and every product.

With AzonPostImages you setup the plugin and configure it in a few minutes and then easily add Amazon Affiliate product links and images anytime you want to in articles.

Installing AzonPostImages

Here is how you install AzonPostImages to your WordPress blog.

After you purchase the AzonPostImages plugin

• Download the zip file
• Go to your WordPress dashboard
• Click on plugins
• Click on add plugin
• Click on Upload a file.

• Click Install now

Configuring AzonPost Images

After you install the AzonPostImages plugin you will have to configure it to work with your Amazon Associate Account.  To do this click on the Settings –> AzonPostImages plugin.

Configure API Credentials

The first thing you need to setup is the API credentials which allows the plugin to talk to Amazon Associate from your website.  Click on the link to the AWS Account Management page and follow the instructions to get your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key.  If you are not an Amazon Affiliate customer then you will need to sign up as an Amazon Affiliate and then go to the AWS Account Management page and get this information.

Configure Default Amazon Store

After you configure your API Credentials choose the default Amazon Store you want the AzonPostImages product to use, you can choose the Amazon store closest to your reader audience.  Choose the country which provides the most traffic to your blog is my opinion and recommendation.

If you run a blog in the U.K. with most of your readership being U.K. readers then you will want to configure and use Amazon Associates U.K. instead of United States Amazon Associates.  Making sure your primary Amazon store is set to the country of your most frequent visitors will ensure you get more sales as they won’t have to deal with international shipping or products not being available to their location.

Configure Search Index (Default Product Area)

If you run a very niche specific website, maybe you don’t want to waste time and have your AzonPostImages plugin search the entire Amazon store. You want to isolate it to only 1 category of products to save you time during the search part.  You can do this by setting the Default Search Index.

Choose the category you want the AzonPostImages to search and it will refine it’s search so it only includes products in this category.  I typically allow All and if I have a hard time finding a product, I will search for ASIN # directly.

Enable Content Types

If your blog has various custom content types you can enable AzonPostImages to work on some or all of your custom content types.  The default is to allow the plugin to insert shortcode into posts and pages, but if you run a Live Blog plugin you can make your AzonPostImages shortcode work there as well.

Configure Locale Associate Tags

This is important, you have your default Amazon store that you setup your Amazon Affiliate for, but you can also have AzonPostImages use the local Amazon store nearest to the visitor.  You do have to go through the effort of signing up and making sure you setup an Amazon Associate ID for every single Global Amazon Affiliate store.

But doing this can greatly increase your number of sales from International users who can’t use the local default store.  I use Associate Tags for all of my blogs where I affiliate sell Amazon products.

Open Links in New Window

Finally the last configuration box for AzonPostImages is to open affiliate link in a new window which I highly recommend so the user isn’t redirected away from your blog.

Your configuration of AzonPostImages is now complete, now you can move on to the next step of using AzonPostImages to insert Amazon affiliate products into your WordPress blog posts.

Using AzonPostImages

Now in  your WordPress post editor you would type up your article, after finishing your article you would click where you want to insert images or select which keywords you want to change to Amazon affiliate links.  You will notice a new editor box in your WordPress post editor called AzonPostImages.

Type in the product or ASIN # of the product and click search Amazon, you can also restrict the search Index by default here which is why I don’t bother restricting it at the plugin settings level.

After clicking Search Amazon a list of matching products will show.

Here are your options.

Text Link

When you click on Text Link you get a popup that allows you to choose which keywords you want to link to the Amazon affiliate product and then you simply select “insert shortcode” and the code will insert wherever you were at or replace whatever you had selected in your post editor.

Shortcode will look like this:

Guild Wars 2

But will look just like a hyperlink when you publish your article, the above looks like this.

Image Link

When you choose to Insert Image link you are presented with a popup with all your image options.

This includes various image sizes that you can insert into your post, and the alignment (left, center, right) of the image so you can make it look properly presented in your article for maximum effect.

After you select your options and insert into post, the short code will be placed at the point where you had selected in your post editor and will look like this.

Optional Tip: Now if you need to change the image size, you can manually replace the width pixels with the image width you want.  I recommend this if you need to size down images a little bit when you couldn’t find the right size.  If you do size the images down via width, remove the height=”xxx” parameter entirely and it will auto scale to your manual width change.

Now when you publish your post you will see the banner image for your product which will link to your Amazon Associate sale link.

As you can see you can easily find and insert product images into your posts but you don’t have to just use the AzonPostImages for posts where you sell affiliate products.  Consider using Amazon Affiliate related images for all POST images, find posters, banners and product images that just touch on the topic idea of your post and you can replace all those creative commons images with images of products from Amazon Associate that match creatively. This turns every single image in every post into a potential Amazon affiliate sale.

Don’t forget the real power of being an Amazon affiliate is the cookie that Amazon sets that makes you get the referral commission of any purchase that user makes on Amazon within 24 hours, so even if they don’t buy the product in the image they clicked on, if they buy ANY Amazon product you will make the referral commission if they purchase an Amazon product within 24 hours after clicking on your link.

Why Buy AzonPostImages?

AzonPostImages is the same exact plugin as SimpleAzon just rebranded for my Dragonblogger.com fans.  This plugin costs $3.95 if you purchase it from me and it costs $9.95 or more if you purchase it from the source.

UNLIMITED LICENSE USE OF AzonPostImages

I am giving you FULL permission to distribute AzonPostImages for free to anyone you want, use it on client sites, give it to friends…etc.  Once you purchase AzonPostImages you may use it on unlimited # of sites and for unlimited # of client blogs all for the low price of $3.95.

What about EasyAzon?

EasyAzon is the more advanced version of AzonPostImages, here is what features you get for EasyAzon over AzonPostImages but EasyAzon costs $47.00

EasyAzon allows the following in addition to all the features of AzonPostImages

Info Boxes

This is to add info boxes, not just images or links into posts.  Info boxes add a small image, product description and price into a box directly into the post.  The results look like this but you can fully customize what displays and the CSS appearance of the info box.

Whole info box generated with EasyAzon.

Fancy Links

They call it cloaked links but really it is fancy links and means your Amazon Affiliate link will be changed to something cosmetically appealing like yoursite.com/go/AZONPRODUCT this way your links don’t like like direct links to Amazon associates.  They used the term “cloaked links” but these aren’t actually cloaked links.

NoFollow

The ability to make your Amazon links NoFollow which will help prevent PR juice from leaking out of your site.

Add to Cart

When a user clicks on the product you can automatically add it to the users Amazon cart instead of only just arriving on the product page, this can help spur sales but may also be considered a poor ethical move because unless you have a button that says “buy now” they may not have wanted it added to their cart.  I don’t use the “Add to cart” functionality myself.

So there, EasyAzon has those additional features and costs you $47 while AzonPostImages I offer to my fellow bloggers for $3.95.  You always have the option to upgrade your AzonPostImages to EasyAzon later if you install it, like it and want to get the additional functionality as well.

Any questions, ask away and I will answer about either of the product as I have used them for a long time.