This post is a response to a comment that I received on my eHow – The Gift that Keeps Giving post. In the earlier post I mentioned that I use my Amazon affiliate links in some of my eHow articles. I wasn’t very explicit when I wrote the post and it generated a comment question on how to insert the Amazon links. So, so rather than burying the answer in a comment box I decided to make it a full-blown explanation so that other folks with the same question can find the answer easily (It’s also easier for me to insert a bunch of images in a post than a comment). Here it goes:

If you haven’t used your Amazon account in a while, you’ll love the way Amazon has made it easier to link to products.

Let’s say I was looking for a bottle opener. So I go to Amazon.com and search for a bottle opener. I find one that I like so I click on the link to the opener. At the top of the web page is a toolbar that gives me the option to: “hide, Link to this page, Add to Store, etc…”  If you don’t see the toolbar when you search, sign into your Amazon Affiliate account first.

Click on the “Link to this page” option and you’ll be taken to the Amazon Associates page to sign into your affiliate account.

After you sign into your account you’ll see the “Customize and Get HTML” page.

Select on the “Text Only (Basic Display)” option in the “Select Link Type: box.

Then navigate down to the “Get HTML Code For This Product Link” and highlight the link beginning with “http://www.amazon.com/……” Be sure to scroll all the way across to get the entire link. The links are pretty long.

Copy and paste the link into the Resource box in your eHow article

Give the link a user-friendly description and you’re done.

Word of advice: I’ve found the eHow resource box accepts links to specific Amazon products just fine, but linking to a general page, doesn’t seem to work because the Amazon links for general pages has too many characters and the eHow resource box won’t accept them all.

For example, to find my bottle opener, I had to do a search for bottle openers which initially displayed several products. If I tried to link to the first result page, the link would be too long. Therefore, I had to select one product from the results page to link to.

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