| Recommended Product Links Based on a product category or keyword, random set of products are displayed to the visitors. This is appropriate if your website content is quite generic but related to high-level category such as electronics or apparel. However, note that there are more targeted options available which are mentioned below. | |
| Search Box Use this when the real-estate is limited on the page. This is usually a good choice when you already are displaying a lot of products on your page. Goes really well with Amazon Web Services based rich-content websites that present several products on a page. When a visitor comes to such a page based on searching for a product (if you are lucky enough to be picked up by one of the top search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN or Live.com), if they don't see the product they are looking for (perhaps from the time of indexing your page to the time of visiting, content on your page has changed), then having this search box at the most prominent place would help the users use it to search for other products. | |
| Banner Most people pretty much hate or ignore banners. So, use them sparingly and typically good to use during holiday season or during promotions. |
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| Omakase If you have a lot of content such as blog or forum and you don't have much time to carefully pick and add the most appropriate products, then go with this option. Amazon would automatically pick the most appropriate products and display them. However, this may not happen as soon as you place your script on a page. It would take some time for Amazon to crawl your page and identify the critical keywords and then start displaying appropriate content. Also, you have a choice between using Omakase and Content Links. If you want to embed the affiliate links as part of your content, then go with the Context Links. However, if you see success with people clicking the products displayed explicitly in a box (placed where ever it brings the best click-through-rate), then you can go with the Omakase option as well. The big difference between these two options is, in case of Omakase, there is an instant visual feedback on what the product is. However in context links, unless the user clicks or mouse-overs the links, the visual feedback is not available. So, if your content and the target audience is not too focused on the content and see a lot of random visitors, then the Omakase may be a good option. | |
| Context Links This is similar to the Omakase, except that the product links, instead of product images, are directly merged into your content. Use this when there is a lot of user generated content on your website such as Forums or if you have less time picking specific products and linking them on your website. Further the good thing with Context Links, Omakase and Recommended Product Links widgets is that even after a couple of months or years, they would continue to display the latest and available products and you don't have to worry about removing the specific products that are no longer available. | You will not see any widget here, but the rest of the text on this page should be displayed with a few hyperlinks identified by Omakase. |
| Text Links You have full control with this option. You can pick a product or keyword of your choice and create a very targeted page on Amazon. Go with this option if you typically review or write about a specific topic and you have identified a great product that goes with it. If the review is directly about a product itself, then this would be very ideal. If your content can include an image as well, then go with the product links. Some blogs like wordpress.com do not allow placing javascript or iframe tags and this restricts to putting only the text links on such blogs. |
Books For Affiliates
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| Product Previews This option merely enables product preview of an existing Amazon link so that the user doesn't have to leave your website to see the product image or the current price and ratings. This is definitely a good choice in conjunction with Context Links and Text Links. |
Kindle (mouseover on this link to see the product preview) 
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| Product Links These are similar to Text Links, where you can pick the exact product (multiple products one shown at random is also possible) and target the visitors. Great for content that talks about a specific product or topic so that the related product(s) goes along with it. | |
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aStore
When you visit http://astore.amazon.com/ , the homepage of the Amazon aStore service, it is very simple. It doesn't have a directory of all the astores or the latest or the popular astores or any such details. So, when you build an aStore, unless you link it on some page on the web, it will never see the light of the world (or should I say, a search engine?). So, use this when you have a high pagerank website so that you can link to your astore from that site and eventually your astore would get a good pagerank and starts showing up in search results when someone searches for the relavant keywords. Alternatively, you can use aStore Proxy, a solution that allows to embed an astore without frames and that should help in aStore SEO as well.
However, note that you won't be able to track some of the user interaction on the aStore. Also, by creating an aStore and linking to it, you are actually building a pagerank to aStore website rather than doing the same to your own website. So, it could have a negative effect if you try to promote the same set of products on other parts of your website or your other websites. The key reason for building an aStore is because you have a specific area that contains several products that can't all be displayed on your website due to lack of realestate. In this case, by building an aStore and organizing the products into multiple pages and categories, it makes it easy to navigate. While the users can certainly do the same browsing directly on Amazon, it is expected that you did some good research and identified the best and most valuable products for your aStore theme that would otherwise be hard to find directly on Amazon. | Healthy Vegetarian Recipes |
| aStore widget Assuming you already created an aStore, you can certainly use this widget to promote your aStore and the products in it to your users. This is also useful when the realestate is limited on your site but you still want to provide the product images on your website. | |
| Search Use this when you have enough real-estate on your website to dedicate space for both search box and the results. | |
| Quick Linker This widget is good for those who have blogs or social networking web page that allows you to put in some javascript code on your pages. Then, as you write your content regularly, pick the right keywords and use the special and simple notation to be able to link to Amazon. |
Books For Affiliates Syntax: <a type='amzn' search='affiliates' category='books'>Books For Affiliates</a> |
| Wish List It makes sense to use this widget if your relatives or close friends follow your website and know what you are wishing so that they can buy it and gift you. Otherwise, it may not make sense. | Similar to other widgets except that the products are from your wishlist. |
| My Favorites If you have a website or blog where you make yourself public as to who you are and there is a good loyal and repeat visitors or followers of your blog, then this is a good widget. The people who are interested in reading your articles or blog posts are likely to be also interested in the type of things that you read/use and are your favorites. | Similar to other widgets except that the products aer from your favorites list. |
| Product Cloud Use this if you think your website visitors are tech-savvy, familiar with the latest and greatest internet technology such as the product clouds. Even otherwise, a person not familiar might end up clicking the tags in the cloud and might end up going to Amazon, but the changes of making money this way could be very limited. | |
| Slideshow Use this if you think your website visitors are the type that are interested in sitting back and relaxing and letting the computer to do it's work. When most people have so little attention span to look at the main content of the website itself, I doubt they would have enough time to look at the slideshow. | |
| Unbox Videos This widget makes sense only if your website is about movies or tv serials. | |
| Deals Widget Use this if your website attracts a lot of bargain hunters. Also, good to use this during the holiday rush, especially the thanksgiving sale and other discount seasons. |