About Affiliate Script

What does Affiliate Script do for me?

First and foremost Affiliate Script ensures that your website's visitors see Amazon product ads that point to their country's Amazon.com web store. If your visitor is from the US the product links shows dollar prices and links to the United States Amazon store. If your visitor is from Canada they see the price in Canadian dollars and the ad links to Amazon.ca

Not only is this more convenient for your visitors but it also ensures that you receive credit for the referral. Ordinarily if you refer a visitor to the US store and they are from Canada when they purchase the product Amazon forwards them to the proper Canadian store but you don't get credited for the referral. Affiliate Script solves that by linking to the proper store in the first place.

Second Affiliate Script provides dynamic script widgets and plugins that can be used to show product ads based on keywords. This helps automate your ad process and can ensure that your ads always show recent products and latest editions. For example if you add an ad widget that uses the keyword "iPod" the ad widget will always show the latest popular selling iPod models.

Is Affiliate Script always accurate in determining a visitor's country?

Affiliate Script pays a yearly fee so that we have access to a premium database of IP address ranges and the countries they are assigned to. We use this database to look up where your visitors live. The internet is constantly changing as new computers are added and old ones are removed from the network. This means that we can't ensure 100% accuracy, but we're fairly confident that we can determine the country of almost all of of visitors. If you find a discrepancy please feel free to contact us and let us know. We'll bring it up with our IP database provider and complain that we aren't getting our money's worth.

How does Affiliate Script pay the bills?

Currently we pay our expenses by making one in seven of the ad widgets that we output use our own Amazon Affiliate Ad. So over time we are paid by getting referral credits for one in seven customers.

Soon we plan to release a paid service that doesn't take a percentage of the ad widgets. This means that for one low monthly fee you don't lose any of the sales referral income.

I looked at the ad code created by your system and it doesn't seem to take just one in seven referrals. I saw you take two referrals in a row!

Affiliate Script uses a random "lottery" type system to choose when we use our own Amazon referral ID rather than your ID. So there may be times when we end up using our ID in your widgets more often than one in seven times. However, there will also be times when you get many widgets in a row without ever having a widget that uses our Amazon ID. So over time it balances out to one and seven widgets.

We use a completely random system to ensure that it can't be scammed. If we didn't do this then someone could simply put one visible ad widget on the page and six more hidden ones such that the visible ad widget always had their Affiliate ID and the widget with our Affiliate ID was always hidden. By using a random system we ensure that neither you nor us can get scammed.

How to Use Affiliate Script

How do I get started with Affiliate Script?

If you are looking for a quick tutorial on how to use Affiliate Script then we recommend that you go through the step by step getting started tutorial. It will help you configure Affiliate Script and use Affiliate Script to put your first ads on your blog.

How do I put ads on my website using Affiliate Script?

Affiliate Script is designed to provide ads in two different ways.

If you are slightly obsessive compulsive or just devoted to perfection you will appreciate the ad widget designer, which allows you design ad widgets one by one and embed these into your blog posts or place them in your website sidebar. These widgets allow you to pick a product category, a desired number of products, and a keyword to search for products. Then Affiliate Script constructs ad ad widget based on the currently popular selling products. The ad widget is dynamic so if you choose generic keyword "MacBook" as the keyword it will always show the current MacBook model. This can be very handy because it ensures that your ads always stay fresh and up-to-date.

If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog there is a second technique that you can use to put ads on your blog. Affiliate Script has a custom plugin which you can install on your blog. This plugin allows you to put ads in a blog post by simply typing <!--affiliateScript--> where you want them to appear. The plugin will automatically use the post title or category to find products. If you don't like the results you can fine-tune them by using post custom fields to tell Affiliate Script exactly how you want the ad to appear on that post. The WordPress plugin can also be used to pick out ads and put them at the end of all posts. This can be useful if you have an older blog with hundreds of posts and you don't really want to go through each one picking out ads one by one.

For more information about each ad creation option and how to use it on your website see the respective documentation section.

About Ad Widgets

How do I use the Affiliate Script ad widget designer?

The ad widget designer currently allows you to search for products based on product genre and keywords. For example, if you choose the genre "books" and the keyword "Grapes of Wrath" you will find books related to "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck. You can choose to show anywhere from one to ten products related to the keyword your supply.

When you click "Preview / Get Code" the ad designer will show a preview of what the ad widget looks like. Below that it will show you the code required to put the ad widget in a blog post or website. To use the ad widget simply copy that code onto your website. Where you place the code the ad will appear.

The diagram above shows the process of generating an ad widget. It also shows the results as they appear when embedded in a blog post.

I don't like the way your ad widget looks. It sticks over the text below it and/or the text below it squeezes up along the side of the widget.

By default the ad widget is designed to float to the left. This means that it can be embedded in a paragraph and the paragraph will surround the widget. However, in some blog themes this may look really bad especially at the end of the post if the blog theme is not designed well. To fix any problems with text squeezing up along the side of the ad widget you can type the following code after your ad widget:

<div style='clear: both;'></div>

I know a little coding. Can you describe more about how to create custom widgets with code?

The Amazon ad widgets are created by a script located at http://affiliate-script.com/widgetBuilder.php

You can load the script into your webpage using a simple HTML script statement:

<script type='text/javascript' src='http://affiliate-script.com/widgetBuilder.php'></script>

However the above example isn't going to do much. By default it will show the single top product in the Amazon store. To do more with the widget you will have to use the query string.

The query string adds a question mark and then extra parameters seperated by ampersands. For example:

<script type='text/javascript' src='http://affiliate-script.com/widgetBuilder.php?userID=1&keywords=Kingston&maxresults=5'></script>

The above example outputs the top five best selling Kingston products. To learn more about the query options and what they do read on.....

What are the ad builder's query options and what do they do?
  • userID

    This is a very important option that is used to determine what affiliate ID is used in your Amazon product ads. If you use the wrong user ID the ads on your site will give the referrals to another person. You can find your user ID number by generating a script in the script builder and checking the value in the generated code.

  • keywords

    This value is what the ad builder will use to search for products. It is typically best if you keep keywords short and to the point, preferably just a manufacturer or product name.

  • fallbackKeywords

    If Affiliate Script can't find any results based on the initial keywords then by default it will output nothing. However, if you provide fallback keywords for it to try then the script has a second chance to find something to display. For best results the fallback keywords should be more general than the specific first keywords.

  • maxresults

    How many ad results to return. Currently this value can not be greater than ten. Obviously setting it to zero will be worthless.

  • itemList

    A comma seperated list of ASIN's as returned by the product search tool (only accessible to logged in users). If you specify handpicked Amazon products the ad widget will place those first in the list. If there are not "maxresults" hand picked products to fill the widget it uses the "keywords" value, if present, to search for more unique products to fill the widget.

  • searchIndex

    What type of product to search for. For example if your blog is about books you can specify "Books" to limit ad results to the books genre. The values that can be used for this option are very specific. You can use the drop down list in the script designer to find values that are valid.

  • outputType

    There are two possible values for this option: AJAX and JavaScript. Setting the output type to JavaScript is the easiest and default technique. JavaScript output causes the widget builder to output the code needed to build the ad widgets. The AJAX output type causes the widget builder to output the pure ad code, but unless you know how to do server side programming you won't be able to use this feature. For best results just leave this option alone and it will default to normal JavaScript operation.

  • showASIN

    Setting this option to "true" causes the widget builder to output the ASIN of each product above its product ad. This is not something that you would normally want on your site. It is used by the Affiliate Script product search tool.

  • outputDiv

    Setting this value causes the script to search for an HTML <div> tag with that ID. It then puts the Amazon ads into that <div> container.

    For example:
    <div id='placeToPutTheAds'></div>

    ...there can be many lines of code between these two statements...
    <script type='text/javascript' src='http://affiliate-script.com/widgetBuilder.php?keywords=Inkworld&maxresults=3&outputDiv=placeToPutTheAds'></script>

    The above example shows an "outputDiv" in action. The container for the ads might be placed at the very top of the website page, but the script to actually load the ad can be placed at the bottom of the page so that it loads last. Even if it loads last it will load into the specified container at the top of the page.

  • allowNoImage

    Sometimes when you do a search for a product, particularly an older product, you may find Amazon products which do not have a product image associated with them. This results in a "No Image Available" product ad. By default Affiliate Script is set to remove these results and only return results that have a preview or product image associated with them.

    However, if you want to see all results, regardless of quality, you can set this option to "true" to allow product ads that don't have an image.

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