We use a WordPress plugin called Amazon Showcase WordPress Plugin to put books from Amazon on some of our client’s sites. Well, we used to, until recently.
This plugin produces ridiculously long Amazon links for Amazon Affiliate Program (which let’s you make money advertising Amazon products):
http://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Over-Artist-Fiction-Thomas-Beller/dp/0393321711%3FSubscriptionId%3D(Access-Key-ID-here)%26tag%3Dfoliovision-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0393321711
There are parts of this long URL which seem to be pretty easy to understand and they seem important and there are some part which seem to be redundant.
After reading some articles on this topic we decided to create a quick tool to generating these Amazon Affiliate Links. The basic idea comes from this nice article from 2008 and even nicer from 2009.
Check out our tool here:
http://foliovision.com/seo-tools/marketing/amazon-affiliate-link-generator
Other thing which bugs us about the Amazon Showcase WordPress Plugin is that it’s not caching the images. The images are always loading from Amazon servers – slowing down your page load.
That’s why we are working on our own Amazon plugin which we may release on wordpress.com when it’s ready (it will have nice URLs and will store the images locally, among other cool features).
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