I’m a die-hard Amazon fanatic, and finally looked into Amazon Associates. As you probably didn’t notice, since you’re a new visitor – I’ve added some links in posts, as well as a nifty widget in my sidebar. I was surprised to only find a few widgets that offered to do more than just insert specific product links into posts, and I really liked the default Amazon widgets. The easiest to templatize, and that required the least Amazon API work were those delivered through IFRAMEs, which ended up being the two I most liked: Recommended Products, and Omakase.
I’ve hacked together a very rough plugin, with a sidebar widget to allow you to:
- Include Amazon Associates widget in the sidebar
- Multi-post can be configured for Recommended Products from a chosen cateory, or default to Omakase.
- Each post can be configured with a specific product category, and subcategory or keywords to display recommend products from.
It’s not pretty, but gives you dead simple contextual advertising as to what YOU deem your post to be about, with more flexibility using keywords.
Right now you can grab this and install manually from: https://github.com/garrettpatterson/amazonassociates-widget-widget
I’d like to wait to submit it to WordPress until I get the first two off the TODO list:
- Use the Widget API model and extend the WP_Widget class
- Configurable display types for sidebar
- Configure colors
- Add more than one widget
- Add widgets to posts (in content or as a footer)
- Add additional widget types
- Support regions other than .com