So for those of you who don’t know Prourls is a link creation service for Amazon affiliates that allows them to build a shortlink for Amazon products that are localized so you can take advantage and earn money from more than just your local Amazon store. Like GeniusLink it allows readers or viewers who click on an Amazon link to be taken to the local store that is closest to their geographic location so this increases odds of a sale. Why would someone in Canada buy from Amazon.com instead of Amazon.ca and same if you direct someone from UK to an Amazon.com product link they won’t buy it, but if you redirect to an Amazon.co.uk link they may purchase it since it is their local Amazon store. If you want to know more about Prourls and how to use it see these 2 posts.
GeniusLink has had a WordPress plugin for a while which auto converts your Amazon links to globalization links, but no ProURLS also has released a WordPress plugin that does essentially the same thing. I like both programs, but for people who barely make any affiliate revenue prourls has a free program that is far more generous than GeniusLink and is why I tend to use this service more frequently than GeniusLink. I am not saying Prourls is necessarily better than GeniusLink which has more features and also lets you link iTunes affiliate not just Amazon, just that Prourls does a lot of feature overlap and is a much more budget friendly option for those who don’t have a lot of income coming in and need the extra features.
To get it all setup just go into your Prourls account settings and get your API key and secret.
Now, I won’t walk you through how to setup all your Amazon affiliates and Prourls account affiliate information for since that is done in the review/showcase post listed in bullet above and this article assumes you are already using Prourls. But when you get to the settings, you just copy in your API key and API Secret.
The interesting option here is keep existing affiliate ID’s, this will basically not change the ?tag=affiliate ID of existing links that it finds locally, so this will basically allow you to use the local Amazon.com tag in the URL but use your prourls affiliate tags for the International redirects. Example, here on DragonBlogger.com our writing staff each have a unique Amazon affiliate tag tied to them, I will use Raymond for example. On his posts when he links to an Amazon product it always includes ?tag=raymonddb-20 which is his tag, well with the prourls WordPress plugin you can see in the below image, it still uses his tag when converting the Amazon link and it does not override his tag with my own even though I have the only prourls account and have my dragonblogger-20 tag set in my prourls account.
Now if someone in the US were to click on Raymond’s link, they would end up on the product page in Amazon with Raymond’s affiliate tag, but if they clicked on the link from Canada, U.K, or another country with a local Amazon store, then they would instead be redirected to the product with my affiliate tag for that international store since Raymond doesn’t have prourls and doesn’t have international affiliate tags setup for his Amazon affiliate.
One thing I have noticed during my testing is that the new Opera browser with a built in VPN will strip all query string data out of URL’s, so Opera VPN browser strips all affiliate tags out of all URL’s no matter what when using it’s VPN functionality. This originally confused my testing as I was using the Opera VPN to test the various locations, and when it ended up having issues I had to instead reach out to individuals in various countries to test for me. The only other thing I noticed about the plugin is the plugin appears to load it’s code very late in the pageload process, so much so that sometimes the page looks rendered and the links haven’t been replaced with the prourls link yet, so in this case it is better to have any links you want to convert later in the article and not in the first paragraph to avoid someone maybe clicking on the link before the page finishes rendering and the links convert. It is still an excellent way to instantly optimize legacy Amazon links you have in your WordPress posts that point to one store only and aren’t configured to leverage globalization of affiliate links. Since I started leveraging my global Amazon affiliate links I have received a $50 check from Amazon.co.uk and a $50 check from Amazon.de that come in the mail since they don’t support direct deposit or any other method of payment if you live in the US and are an International Amazon affiliate.
Get the Amazon Link Localizer Plugin from Prourls now and expand your Amazon affiliate earnings to International stores for free!