Affiliate links have become hugely popular among internet content creators. In many ways, they’ve replaced or strongly augmented advertising and sponsorships as a way to support publications and productions.
I recently added affiliate links to my newsletter and YouTube channel but made an undocumented mistake that cost me the holiday boost I was hoping for. In this article, I’ll show you what that mistake was and how to avoid it. But first, let’s quickly define what affiliate links are and how they work.
Understanding affiliate links
You may have seen a small disclosure statement at the top or bottom of many of our articles saying, “When you buy through our links, we may earn a commission.” Those links are affiliate links. Most successful content-oriented websites these days are at least partially supported through those commissions.
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They’re actually a creative and fairly ethical way for sellers and creators to support each other.
An affiliate link is a link to a product that contains a special code identifying the affiliate (the site where the link is displayed). When a reader clicks on one of those links and makes a purchase, a small commission is credited to the sending site.
Clicking an affiliate link doesn’t change the price you pay for a product, so visiting a site through an affiliate link doesn’t cost consumers extra. The seller (in my case, Amazon) shares a small amount of the overall sale price if a sale occurs. It has the potential to be fairly profitable for content creators because Amazon will send a payment for almost any purchase within 24 hours by that reader, not just purchases of the item linked to.
There are, of course, terms and conditions and products that have higher or lower commissions or none at all. But the general approach is fairly sound.
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Yes, content creators make some money if someone buys a product that’s been linked to, but creators need to support all the time and cost of infrastructure. Affiliate links are certainly less in-your-face than ads, which we as an industry have relied on for about a hundred years.
My decision to add affiliate links
For years, I’ve avoided putting affiliate links into my personal content. But my newsletter and YouTube channel grew quite nicely in 2024, and I’ve been spending fairly heavily building out infrastructure to produce high-quality videos. I have an entire army of video robots that do some of what a camera person would do, and those robots are not cheap.
People subscribe to my newsletter to see what articles I’ve written here on ZDNET, to see some of my projects while they’re in progress, to get tool recommendations, to watch some very cool YouTube videos, and to read interesting articles I spotlight — usually including one or more ZDNET articles by my colleagues.
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My videos are generally build videos of some of my outlandish projects. That’s why they often spotlight tools I use or gear I’ve invested in.
The videos point viewers to my newsletter and the newsletter points readers to my content here on ZDNET, so it all becomes a virtuous cycle that provides my “fans” and me with a more comprehensive way to connect on a variety of levels.
But, like I said, it seemed time to help cover the costs for some of the gear that goes into producing the content I do, so I decided to add Amazon affiliate links to my holiday recommendation newsletter and then continue into 2025.
That’s where things went wrong.
Amazon has strict rules
As you might imagine with any program that involves vendors making payouts, there are strict rules designed to protect the vendors’ interests and prevent payout fraud. Amazon has many rules for its Amazon Associates program that I wanted to make sure I was following.
Amazon has an Associates program, which works off individual item links. It also has an Influencer’s program, which allows you to set up a store page and recommend entire categories of products. I signed up for the Associates program. I haven’t yet looked into the Influencer’s program. So all of what I’m going to say is about the Associates program.
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When I decided to set up my links to Amazon, two rules caught my eye. The first is this: you need to drive three fully organic purchases through the affiliate links within the first six months to be accepted into the affiliate program.
This was interesting. In watching video after video about the Amazon program, and reading the detailed rules documents and corresponding with Amazon Associates support, it was clear that you could not just go ahead and make three purchases through your own links. YouTubers said that people had been denied access if even family or friends made those purchases, implying that, like Santa, Amazon knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.
Apparently, those who didn’t drive three fully organic purchases in that six months, or who cheated by using family or friends, were banned from the program.
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The second rule that caught my eye is the one where you can only use links on web pages that are visible to the public. That means Amazon strictly prohibits using links from email newsletters, Facebook groups, and so on.
This kind of shot a major hole in my wanting to put affiliate links in my email newsletter. After some research, I found a fully Amazon-approved way around this using a service called GeniusLink, which charges $6/month for up to 2,000 clicks (and a sliding scale upwards as your volume increases).
GeniusLink has a service called ChoicePages that creates landing pages for all your links. When a reader clicks a link in one of my email newsletters, the link takes the reader to a GeniusLink landing page that is public on the internet. The reader then has to click the Amazon logo to see the product on Amazon.
This way, Amazon can see the public page sending the reader to Amazon, and it fulfills the public pages option. Make sure to add geni.us to your “Edit Your Website, Mobile App, and Alexa Skill List” on your Associates setup page to tell Amazon this is one of the domains you’ll be using to send links to Amazon.
Amazon has other rules and I strongly recommend you read all of its guidelines.
Where I went wrong
Once I started down the Amazon Associates road, I found I was obsessing on getting those first three organic purchases. I wasn’t sure that a link to spare WD-40 spray straws would inspire many clicks or purchases, but useful-but-somewhat-obscure finds were what I wanted to spotlight in my newsletters and videos.
Since we were in the last stages of the holiday shopping season at the time, I decided to do a special newsletter on Dave’s favorite tools of 2024. I put together a list of 12 of my favorite tools, copied the Amazon links, dutifully pasted those into the GeniusLink system, generated Choice Pages, got the URLs for those, and pasted those into my newsletter, one for each product.
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Then I did my mailing. By the next day, my mailer stats told me that 48% of my subscribers opened the newsletter. But the Amazon Associates status page said there had been no purchases, and more concerningly, no clicks in. This despite the fact that GeniusLink showed some clicks.
This concerned me, but both GeniusLink and Amazon told me that it can take some time for the Associates portal to update and reflect new traffic. So I gave it a week. I even did another mailing, this time for David’s favorite gadgets of 2024, and still the Associates program showed no clicks into the Amazon site.
By this time, I had chased down Amazon support and gone very far down the rabbit hole, showing them my links, my URLs, my results, and on and on and on. Their advice was that it looked like I was doing everything correctly, and just wait.
I also went back to GeniusLink support and went down a similar rabbit hole. I have to give them credit because I was still just a trial customer, but they took the time to dig into what was happening.
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By this point, I had sent 90 clicks into Amazon, and not a single one was recorded. I was three weeks into my six-month deadline, and nothing was happening.
The URL conundrum (and its solution)
Then someone at GeniusLink decided to live up to their company name and put forth a theory — which turned out to be correct.
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I used Amazon’s short links, which are available from the share button on every Amazon product page. I even did an article about how to use them.
Rather than one of the big long links up in the browser’s address bar, you get a clear and clean link like https://a.co/d/XXXXXX. So, when I set up my GeniusLink links, I pasted these a.co links into the GeniusLink interface.
Big mistake.
The GeniusLink support rep speculated that since the a.co link and the geni.us links were both shortened links, perhaps Amazon couldn’t decipher the dual shortened links. I had never considered that a.co was explicitly a shortened link, because those links were also provided by Amazon.
If you don’t use GeniusLink and you use Amazon’s own affiliate system, you still can’t use the a.co links. If you use the Amazon Affiliate “smart bar,” that tool will give you a different short link variation in the form https://amzn.to/XXXXXX.
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Amazon doesn’t require you to use its amzn.to short link. Amazon allows you to paste your affiliate code (called a tracking ID) at the end of a URL, as a URL parameter in the form &tag=TRACKINGID.
But if you add the tracking tag as a URL parameter to an a.co URL, even though the URL is the one Amazon recommends for sharing, your affiliate referral traffic won’t be tracked.
So, here’s what I found out. As soon as I replaced the a.co URLs with full Amazon links from the address bar, Amazon started registering and tracking my affiliate traffic.
One benefit of using GeniusLink was that once I changed the URLs in their interface to ones that worked, people who clicked on the GeniusLink links in my “best of” lists that previously generated no referral traffic now were registered by Amazon.
Fortunately, just a day after I made the change to all my affiliate URLs, another site picked up my recommendation list and sent a very nice amount of traffic through my links. As of about two weeks later, I’ve registered 693 clicks (not counting those original 90) into Amazon. Those clicks led to 76 items ordered (and 69 shipped), which blew me way past the three-item requirement. Amazon sent me a note saying I have been accepted into the program.
Of interesting note is this: Amazon made $1,889.06 from my links. I made just under sixty bucks. That’s certainly not going to pay for more camera gear, but it’s also not inconsiderable. That will pay one or two streaming service fees, which is something.
In any case, there you go. Whatever you do, don’t use the sharing link Amazon provides to share your links with the affiliate program. If you do, Amazon won’t register any activity and won’t share any revenue with you. Sharing may be caring, but sharing links are kryptonite to Amazon Associates traffic.
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Are you using affiliate links for your content? Have you ever bought something from Amazon after clicking a link on a site that uses affiliate links? Of course you did. What was your favorite Amazon purchase this holiday season? Let us know in the comments below.
You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, on Bluesky at @DavidGewirtz.com, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.
