How to Add an Amazon aStore Affiliate Store to a Wordpress Site

Adding an Amazon Affiliate Store to a Wordpress Website or Blog was a lot easier than I thought.

After creating the aStore at Amazon Associates I created a page in Wordpress and embedded the aStore code into the page. It was that easy!

Creating an Amazon Affiliate Store with WordPress is EASY!

The Amazon affiliate store was embedded into the HTML code for the using an iFrame, which meant all I had to add was one line of code in Wordpress and you get this given to you by Amazon as the last stage of building the aStore. So it was just copy and paste.

Note: Make sure to change the width from 90% to 100% otherwise some of your store will be missing!

In this example I created an Affiliate Marketing Book Store using various categories of books that are very relevant to all Affiliate Marketers, such as web design, SEO, Adwords, Adsense, blogging, Wordpress, YouTube and social media etc. I think you get the picture.

Of course you can create an Amazon aStore for any product that Amazon sells online, which means you have a huge selection of products to choose from for any niche you might have a Wordpress blog or site for. Even if you do not have a Wordpress site you can still embed the same code in a standard HTML page.

Technical Issues with Amazon aStores in Wordpress

There are only really 2 issues that you need to be aware of when add an Amazon aStore to your Wordpress website or blog and they are:

[1] The Amazon aStore Can Be Too Wide When Displayed

This is going to be perhaps the biggest issue for Wordpress web site builders as the Amazon aStore is quite wide when displayed and can take up almost the full width of your website. This means that if your pages display inside a standard 2 column or 3 column Wordpress design, then it is not going to work for you.

What you need is a page template that has no columns in it to make sure that you have the width you need to display the aStore in full. You can mess around with the CCS Stylesheet provided by Amazon in the Associates aStore development area, but this is tricky, takes time and the end result never looks real good.

So it is best to use a one column Worpdress page template if you can. Some of the better, and probably more expensive premium Wordpress themes, will come with different templates for both post and pages and these will normally include a one-column option.

WP-Remix Rocks!

The Wordpress theme I use on this site is the WP-Remix Theme that has a whole bunch of different page and post templates purposely designed for afffiliate marketing. So if you don't have a good theme for your Wordpress site yet then I can totally recommend WP-Remix as being great for all affiliate sites.

The menu and page templating system in WP-Remix combine to make a Wordpress website look just like a traditional website, but you get all the benefits of Wordpress thrown in! This theme is also compatible with the new re-designed Wordpress 2.7+ release.

UPDATE:

Here are a couple of excellent Wordpress Themes I have been using recently that both have full width page templates, which make it easy to add Amazon aStores using the iFrame method above.

1. The FlexSqueeze Theme by Ryan Grabenstein

2. The StudioPress Themes (many great deisgns) by Brian Gardner

Both these themes are  also highly recommended for any Wordpress site you want to build!

[2] The aStore Code Can Disappear From Your Wordpress Page

Strangley, and I am not sure if this is just because I am using an older version of Wordpres on this site, but if when editing the page with the Amazon affiliate book store on it, I went into VISUAL mode instead of HTML mode and then saved the Page, the iframe code for the Amazon aStore would just disappear!

So take this as a warning and make sure when you add the iFrame for the aStore do it in the HTML code mode and save it in this mode too. In fact once you have it working then never save that page in Visual mode as you will lose your Amazon aStore!

If anyone knows why this is happening or knows how to fix it I would appreciate a comment to let me know.

Thanks.

ps Make sure you add a decent amount of content to your aStore page or post, otherwise it will not get indexed by the search engines, as the content of the iframe is not seen by the search engine spiders and they will think the page is empty if that's all you have on it.

Have fun store building with Amazon !