If you have an Amazon Associates account, you’re doing charitable organizations a disservice if you’re not stacking your affiliate links with 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 Amazon will donate .5% of the purchases made through my affiliate account to a charity chosen by the reader–which could easily be yours if you pitch it to him/her within the post.
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 one or more charities a solid forever after.
What your readers need to know:
The first time they visit smile.amazon.com, they’ll be asked to choose a charity from Amazon’s list. Again, you can pitch them to use your favorite or they can select their own. But be aware that this means if your favorite charity hasn’t yet signed up in the Smile program, you need to work with them to do so. Amazon’s signup portal for charitable organizations is 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.
Thanks for the tip! I went ahead and signed up for smile because of this. However, one question…
If someone uses my affiliate URL with smile, does the donation actually go to my charity or go to theirs?
If theirs, what if they don’t have smile setup?
I feel smile may not be linked with an affiliate account but rather the amazon account that actually makes the purchase. Let me know if I’ve got it all wrong.
Thanks again!
Sure thing.
>If someone uses my affiliate URL with smile, does the donation actually go to my charity or go to theirs?
Theirs. Affiliates can’t “push” a charity, but as I mentioned, you can pitch the reader to pick yours.
>If theirs, what if they don’t have smile setup?
There’s not a “setup” process for your readers, as such. The first time they visit a Smile page, Amazon will ask them to pick a charity from Amazon’s list. Nonprofits, however, have to go through a setup process to be included in that list, so if the reader’s target charity isn’t included, he/she will have to pick a different one.