WordPress Plugin Review: EasyAzon 4 for Amazon Affiliates

I love being an Amazon affiliate, and I will tell you I don’t make nearly what I could but I make enough that I continue to dabble and use it as a passive means of earning revenue.  As my blog properties don’t make or sell any product themselves, and this site is primarily a news, review and entertainment source we have to rely on a method of generating revenue to keep operation costs running as well as provide incentive for writing staff to product content and articles being the fact that there is very little margin of income to pay for said articles and I don’t like outsourcing to unknown writers as the content quality is generally poor and lacks the “editorial and personal” touch that I like my content creators to have when producing articles for our readers.

What is EasyAzon?

EasyAzon is a WordPress plugin (set of plugins a Core plugin and the Pro plugin) which allows you to insert Amazon product links, images, call to action buttons and info boxes into your WordPress posts so that you can benefit from Amazon affiliate sales for products you review, showcase or merely related products to what your articles is about.  It is a very simple way to grab a readers attention and try to capture some Amazon affiliate commission which grows with the more products you sell on Amazon.

It’s integration is among the best and is one of my top 5 favorite WordPress plugins that I have been using since it first released.  This is truly a plugin that I endorse and use on DragonBlogger and every other site that I have passive Amazon affiliate sales enabled on the site.  There localization options are a fantastic choice if you run an International blog or have a high volume of traffic from readers who are not in the origin country of your blog, this way you can set local cookies for the Amazon store for the nearest reader and they have a greater chance to buy from their closest Amazon store.

What this means is that someone visiting your post from Canada will see that product listed in the Amazon.ca store for them, rather than the Amazon.com store which may be your default.  The caveat is you have to register yourself as an Amazon affiliate for each and every Amazon store and there are A LOT of them now.  Each one tracks earnings separately and has minimum threshhold of $100 payout so you may end up having a lot of trickle income streams from the smaller Amazon sites for your market.

This is only a casual glance at EasyAzon 4 and I will go into more details with more detailed videos, review and walkthroughs later, this post is merely to show you how the various functions look and isn’t walking you through configuration but what it looks like to the reader when you put Amazon affiliate links and images into your blog post.

After you have EasyAzon (Core) and EasyAzon 4 Pro installed, after you configure it with your AWS keys (which you get from Amazon) you simply have a new “EasyAzon” button in your WordPress post editor.

Click on the EasyAzon Button and you get a search box to find the product you are looking for, you can search by product name or by ASIN number directly.

After you find the product you want in the search results, you can choose between doing a simple Text Link, an Image Link (image that links to product), a CTA Link which is a Call to Action button, or an Info Block.  If you want to see an example of what each looks like, just look below.

EasyAzon 4 Text Link Example

Bejeweled Royal Dragon Goblet Cup Stainless Steel Lining

EasyAzon 4 Image Link Example

EasyAzon 4 CTA Link Example

EasyAzon4 Info Link Example (Default)

EasyAzon4 Info Link Example (Attributes Template)

EasyAzon4 Info Link Example (Image and Prices Template)

 

AzonTables Plugin

If you purchase the full pack of EasyAzon it comes with AzonBestSellers and AzonTables which are sub-plugins that only work with EasyAzon Pro and offer additional functionality.

with EasyAzon Tables aka TableZon you add an extra element when you click on your EasyAzon button which is the “add to table” and once you add 1 product to a table, you can search and continue adding other products to  a table.

A quick search for headsets for example and I can quickly and easily build a table selecting the headsets that I like and think are a good fit for this table.

After you add the products to the table and are done, click on finish table button, then you get to customize the attributes that list in your table.  First you get to rename any of the products so that the text matches what you want to say, typically though most product names are fine unless the company tries to shove every keyword possible into the product name where you may want to trim it down.

You then select which attributes you want in your table by checking them, once you select the attributes you want you can re-order them in how you want them to display.

Now, there are some limitations of the EasyAzon Tables plugin, one is that you can’t select a product image as an attribute, I SO WISH that a little thumbnail (smallest size pic) was an option as an attribute, because a picture tells a thousand words and just having a link and text is fine (hover over it and it will show more product details like below if configured).

But it would have been nice to have that little thumbnail image next to the product name that was also a clickable image.  Second it is hard to know exactly which attributes you really want the first time around, in this case Brand, Manufacturer, Publisher were all pretty much same thing so I really only needed Brand.  Sizing was blank for 1/2 the products, and Feature is nice but can be long winded on some products and short winded or not really list features but shipping info on other products.

The other issue is once you insert the table, there is no easy way to back in and edit it, like add or remove existing attributes (well you can modify the shortcode directly but only if you know exactly what attributes to add.

It would have been ideal to list the star rating with stars for each product too, I think seeing 4+ star rating for products in a table would be an incentive to click, but that isn’t an attribute option.  I also find release date would be awesome if it was accurately filled out for each product, but as you can see on the EazyAzon Table below it isn’t always filled out.

So I think EasyAzon Table can help build tables of information, but product name, brand and list price are about the most useful fields, the rest of the fields seemed unreliable and I wish current price, thumbnail image and star rating of the product listed in the table were listed.

Here is sample output of an EasyAzon Table below:

Overall though, if you want to list multiple products in a table, I think the EasyAzon Tables or TableZon  plugin has potential, maybe it should also give you a “custom field” where you can enter your own data (name the column and add your own details) like if you want to give your short 1 or 2 sentence summary of the product.

It is more efficient to buy EasyAzon 4 with the TableZon extension than buying it separately but if you already have EasyAzon 4 you can buy TableZon separately for $27.