If you have an Amazon Associates account, you’re doing your favorite charity a disservice if you’re not stacking your affiliate links with Amazon’s charity program: Amazon Smile.
Background on Smile
From Amazon.com:
“Amazon Smile is a simple and automatic way for you to support your favorite charitable organization every time you shop, at no cost to you. When you shop at smile.amazon.com, Amazon will donate a portion of the purchase price to your favorite charitable organization. You can choose from nearly one million organizations to support.”
Again from Amazon.com: Smile’s donation percentage is .5%.
What’s the procedure for stacking Smile and your affiliate link?
Couldn’t be simpler. For example, here’s my affiliate link to Amazon’s home page:
Note the part of the link in bold: “tag=thegeequiandh-20”. That’s my affiliate ID.
If I copy that link, paste it into, say, a blog post, and replace the “www” in “www.amazon.com” with “smile”, I’d have this:
Now my favorite charity–in this case an animal rescue program–will get .5% of my affiliate purchases. Not .5% of my commissions, but .5% of the gross.
Is this allowed by Amazon?
Absolutely. From Amazon’s program overview:
“Amazon Associates may earn referral fees by sending traffic to smile.amazon.com or www.amazon.com.”
So you MUST do this. Takes just a few seconds to set up, and you’ll be doing your favorite charity a solid forever after.
How to sign up for Smile:
If your favorite charity isn’t signed up for Smile, you can create a gateway for them in just a matter of minutes by going here.
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Interesting. I’ve got Smile set as my default Amazon page for shopping, but I set up my affiliate links using the Amazon Site Stripe, which gives me URLs that look like this: http://amzn.to/2pPDFWQ
Do you know if I can add “smile” to a URL like that?
Best,
-PoF
Good question, and I don’t know the answer. The sure way to stack Smile is to use the extended URL rather than the shortened one.