Web Dev Notes

Amazon is a great way to monetize a highly trafficed website. Amazon is one of the worlds leading e-commerce websites which allows people to buy just about anything online. Joining Amazon as an associate allows you to earn a commission on any sales you generate from your website.

I’ve never used Amazon before because I never had enough traffic to make it worthwhile. However, thanks to the growth of BattleCity, I’ve decided to experiment with Amazon as a possible income stream which could help support the costs of running the game.

Many websites like to use affiliate links directly in their articles to specific items they may currently be writing about. For example, if I was writing an article about how awesome my Canon PowerShot A550 7.1MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Zoomis, I might use a link to Amazon where people could buy the camera like so! However, for BattleCity, there is no good way of doing this while remaining on topic unless Amazon begins selling tanks, land mines, etc… =p

For the above reason, I instead decided to create an Amazon store! Take a look at the BattleCity Amazon Store to see what it looks like. If you have visited the BattleCity Classic website, you will notice that it is even possible to customize the look of the store to match your website!

When you create an Amazon store, you can even specify exactly what you would like to display in it. For example, you will notice that in the BattleCity Amazon Store, the first items you are presented with are Video Games and Video Game Consoles. I felt this would be the best landing page considering this is a store for BattleCity which is a computer game! On the right-hand side, there are other categories users can browse as well.

Will this store actually generate any income for the game? If there are players who do shop online, some may be persuaded to use the Amazon store in order to help the game. I’ll post about the stores success or failure in a few months! I expect that the store would generally remain a very small income stream given the nature of the BattleCity website, but any little bit helps!

So how do you setup your own store? Visit Amazon.com and click the Join Associates link to sign up with Amazon. Once your account is created, login and click aStore. Then select, Add an aStore. To show you how it’s done, I’ll create an aStore for Web Dev Notes!

At this point, I am assuming you were able to create an Amazon Associates account and have found the aStore button. Click the Add an aStore button as shown below! As you can see in the screenshot, I already have two Amazon aStores! You are allowed to create up to 100 which should be more than you will ever need!

Next you will be presented with the “Create aStore Pages” area which will allow you to setup your different store categories and select the items to display. You can select specific items, or specific Amazon categories. Since I want something related to Web Dev Notes, I’ll add Web Development Software and Books to my store! The screenshots below show how I have done this! If any of the screenshots are unclear, click them to see the full-size view.

First we want to “Add a Category Page”

Next, select the category to begin editing it. I will select the “Add products by Amazon.com category” option so that I can include the entire Web Development section. Click “Select an Amazon Category” to browse the categories and to select the one you want in your store.

Since I am looking for Web Development Software, I will first select the Software category. I will then specify that I only want to display Web Development software.

After saving all these selections and changes and giving my category an appropriate name, I am taken back to the beginning where I can add another category, or continue to the next step. I’ll add one more category for books then show a preview of what the Web Dev Notes Store looks like so far!

First, a look at the Category Pages screen which now has two categories! Before going on, I’ll hit that up arrow to move the Books category above the Software category because I believe books are more popular with my readers than software. The category shown at the top of this list will be the default one displayed first.

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And, a preview of the store so far!

Wow, that was all pretty easy so far! Next step is to customize the look to match your website better! There are some themes you can select from or you can define your own colors and edit the CSS file.

How did I match up the colors to resemble my website? First, I took a screenshot of my website and then pasted it in Paint. Then using the color selector tool, you can get the exact RGB value for the colors. Since you need the hexadecimal value of the color, I used this RBG to Hex Converter.

First, I define my new theme.

Here is a new preview of the store with the updated theme.

Before you continue, give your store a name!

The next step is to check a bunch of configuration options such as whether you want to display the sidebar menu on the right or left, if you want to show similar items or not, etc… I put my sidebar on the right and then checked every box! Once you’re done that, click finish and you are done!

Want to see the final product? Visit my Web Dev Notes Store!

As you can see creating an Amazon store is very simple. You can also now easily browse your store to find products you think your readers might be interested or which you own and highlight them with links to your store in future articles!