Member Profile Page
Your profile page contains a section where you can choose products that you recommend from Amazon. If people buy any of the products from your profile page *you* get the commission.
Your profile page can also display the top 5 entries from your RSS feed (let me know if you want more displayed). You can also register your Flickr account name and 7 random photos from your account will be displayed. You can see what my member profile looks like here.
If you are member who is actively participating through the community features, your profile page is exposed more often which should help drive traffic to your personal blog or site. If a user buys a product from your profile page then you may make a few bob on the side too. Read on to find out how to set up your profile page...
These are the new fields available for edit from the Profile Edit page.
Choose a category for your website. This field is used to filter which category your site is displayed in the up n coming directories. if you dont choose a category, your site will be found under "everything".
Some blurb about yourself which will appear near the top of your profile page.
If you have a blog, you will most likely have an RSS Feed - stick your feed address in this field. If you are not sure what RSS feeds are, then Wikipedia will tell you.
By registering your feed, you will be exposing your content to others who have similar interests and hopefully generate incremental readers for your site.
If you have a Flickr account, you can register your account name in this field. The account name I need from you is the original name that Flickr assigns to you when you set up a new account. For example, go to my Flickr account page and right click on my avatar. Then click on 'properties' to see the name of the avatar image. In this case, you will see its 88444437@N00.jpg. "88444437@N00" is my Flickr user name - stick yours in this field.
Amazon currently exists in JP, US, FR, DE, UK and CA. They have a Chinese website but that does not support the associates platform yet. You can choose up to 20 products from any one of these locales to display on your profile page. The products you choose have to be form the same locale. If people buy any of these products, you get a commission from Amazon. Your tag will be embedded in the product links 100% of the time.
You first need to go to amazon to sign up for their affiliate account which is called Associates. Its up to you to decide which account you want to signup for. Amazon.com ships worldwide so you may want to chose US - you can sign up for a US account at amazon.com/associates. To sign up for a UK associates account its amazon.co.uk/associates, for DE its amazon.de/associates etc.
From the select menu, you must choose the locale representing the products you want to recommend. For example, you cant choose products from Amazon Japan and then set this field to "Amazon.com". If you want to recommend products from Amazon.com, you must set this field to "Amazon.com".
If you are in Singapore, Netherlands or Pluto (for example) where Amazon has not set up stall yet, you may want to consider choosing Amazon.com as your locale. This is because Amazon.com ships worldwide and Amazon can pay your commision in USD.
When applying for an Associates account, Amazon will ask you for your home page URL. If you dont have one, give them your dannychoo.com profile url which is http://www.dannychoo.com/home/eng/your-user-name-here.
What happens next is that Amazon will review your site/page and then send you an Associate Tag. You must put you tag in this field correctly in order for you to earn money.
If you hover over one of product images on my member profile page, you will see that the URL contains "dannychoocom-20" - thats my US associate tag. If you leave this blank then nobody will get a commission.
Its important that you choose the correct locale otherwise users will be sent to the wrong site. For example, the products you see on my member profile page are chosen from Amazon.com. If I chose "Amazon.co.jp" as my locale, I would be sending users to Amazon Japan which is not want I want.
ASIN stands for "Amazon Standard Identification Number" and is basically the product ID. Each product in the amazon catalog has its own unique ASIN. No two products share the same ASIN.
What you need to do first is to get yourself to wikipedia and read their explanation of how to find out what the ASIN is for a product. Once you know how, you will string ASINS separated by a comma and stick them in this field. The products you see on my member profile page is made up of the following.
B000E8NRNA,B00067YYEK,B0001BMMG8,B0001BMMGI,B000E4FDAE
You can stick up to 20 ASINs in this field. Once you have saved the changes to your profile, when you go to your profile page, you should see the list of products that you chose. If Amazon does not have an image for that product, it will be replaced by a generic image. if you do not see a product, then check the ASIN again. If you dont separate the ASINs correctly with a comma, the products wont show up on your profile page. You can copy the ASINs that I have strung together above and set your locale to Amazon.com to test it out.
