Affiliate marketing is a steady source of income for many blogs. Amazon’s affiliate program is one of the largest and most popular program in the market. Due to the large number of products available, there is always something you can recommend and earn a commission. Did you know that Amazon also offers a short URL service? In this article, we will show you how to easily create short amazon affiliate links in WordPress.
Why Use Short Affiliate Links for Amazon?
By default an Amazon affiliate link is a long URL containing strings and IDs.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470560541/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0470560541&linkCode=as2&tag=wpb09-20
This link is lengthy, and it is hard to look at. It also increases your chances of accidentally making a typo and breaking the URL.
One possible solution is to cloak affiliate links in WordPress by using a plugin like ThirstyAffiliates. Using an affiliate link manager allows you to redirect users while using your own custom short URLs like this:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/refer/prowp
The problem with using a cloacked URL is that users do not know where they will be taken when they click on that link. You may want to show users that they will be redirected to Amazon’s website, because Amazon is a trusted brand name.
This could potentially increase your earnings, particularly if you most recommend products from Amazon.
Amazon comes with its own short URL option that allows affiliates to easily transform any Amazon link into a short URL using amzn.com domain name.
Video Tutorial
If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.
Creating Short Amazon Affiliate Links
There are two type of short URLs that you can create for your Amazon affiliate links. The first one uses Amazon.com domain name.
You need to simply add /dp/yourproductid/?tag=youraffiliatetag.
Take a look at this example:
http://amazon.com/dp/0470560541/?tag=wpb09-20
You can create an even shorter URL by using amzn.com domain name. Simply remove the /dp/ prefix and add your product id with your affiliate tag.
http://amzn.com/0470560541/?tag=wpb09-20
That’s all, we hope this article helped you easily create short amazon affiliate links in WordPress. You may also want to see our list of the 10 best affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress.
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Thanks for the Video Tutorial and Reading Instructions.
I already use short links for my Site!!
How do you do Canonical URL so crawlers will see only Amazon.com instead of https://www.wpbeginner.com/refer/prowp
Cloaking the links is explicitly against the Amazon affiliate operating agreement and will get your account terminated if/when they find it. So it’s probably not the best idea to be recommending it….
The specific language is: “you must not use a link shortening service in a manner that makes it unclear that you are linking to an Amazon Site.” It can be found half-way down here:
very nice information but i just want to know that ,can we use amazon affiliate link on articles because it will very helpful to get traffic on my website and amazon affiliate link
Really helpful article.Thanks for shareing.
Can i put up a link for amazon.in home page and if any one going through this link and ended in purchasing any item from amazon in any category, will i be able to get a commission?
Good tip on the shortened links! I actually just found out about the shortened version of links that use the amzn.com domain. I am the author of the WordPress Plugin Check Amazon Links and currently it won’t check shortened links, but I am trying to figure out if there’s a way I can add that feature. Right now my plugin can check any amazon.com link that has the ASIN in the URL. When I started writing the plugin I didn’t realize just how many variations there are in how people link to Amazon…. Well live and learn I guess!
So glad I found this post. This is what I’ve been trying to figure out how to do for over a month! Can I even do this if I have very few page views? I just recently got my social sites working right and haven’t spent enough time marketing yet.
Yes you can.