To celebrate my first sales on Amazon :p here’s a small Amazon-related tutorial. It’s about how to make a Recommended Product Links which automatically adapted to our post title or category. If we posted about Firefox, the Recommended Product Links box would display any products that related to Firefox. If we posted about Girls, it’d display any girls-related product. And so on.

To get a better idea of how it works, check this page. I used this method on Song Lyric Collection website, to display Recommended Product Links based on the post category (artist/band name). As you can see in the sample page above, the Recommended Product Links box automatically display any Music product which is related to Backstreet Boys. If you move on to another category, the content of the Recommended Product Links box will also changed.

Now let the tutorial begin.

First, login to your Amazon Associates account, and choose Build Links - Recommended Product Links.

Next, choose the type of product (Product Line) you want to display on the Recommended Product Links box. For example, choose Books. Then in the Keyword textbox, just put anything inside it (I wrote the text ‘dummy‘). We’re going to change it later, so it doesn’t matter what keyword you write right now. See screenshot below.

Select your preferred Recommended Product Links box dimension. I use 480×240 box on Song Lyric Collection website.

Now you got the HTML code for this Recommended Product Links. Highlight and Copy the code.

<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=your_id&o=1&p=15&l=st1&mode=books&search=dummy&fc1=&=1&lc1=&lt1=&bg1=&f=ifr” marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ width=”468″ height=”240″ border=”0″ frameborder=”0″ style=”border:none;” scrolling=”no”></iframe>

Look at the bold part of the code, &search=dummy. As I already mentioned above, we’re going to changed this. So, cut that piece of code and move it to the end of the src property. Here’s how it’d look like after the changed:

<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=your_id&o=1&p=15&l=st1&mode=books&fc1=&=1&lc1=&lt1=&bg1=&f=ifr&search=dummy” marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ width=”468″ height=”240″ border=”0″ frameborder=”0″ style=”border:none;” scrolling=”no”></iframe>

Our last step before we put the code to our Wordpress theme.

Change the ‘dummy’ text with:

<?php the_title(); ?>

if you want the Recommended Product Links box to display any product related to your post title.

Or,

<?php single_cat_title(); ?>

if you want the Recommended Product Links box to display any product related to your post category.

Here’s the final code after all the changes:

<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=your_id&o=1&p=15&l=st1&mode=books&fc1=&=1&lc1=&lt1=&bg1=&f=ifr&search=< ?php the_title(); ?>” marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ width=”468″ height=”240″ border=”0″ frameborder=”0″ style=”border:none;” scrolling=”no”></iframe>

Now update your theme and watch the result. Remember, if you make the box to adapted to your post title, you can’t use it on your Archive template. You can only use it on your Post and Page template. For category adaption, it’d work on Archive, Post, and Page template.

Have fun with Amazon :))