Add a Product Catalog Link to Your Mom Blog Post

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

It’s very easy to add affiliate links to your blog; it isn’t much different from adding any other text link or image to a blog post. Many merchants have a product catalog, a selection of some or all of the products they sell on the company website, with a direct link to each and every one. These links are the most effective at generating sales.

Product catalog links work best when you’re talking about a specific product, and you want to send your readers directly to it rather than to the merchant’s home page.

Here’s how to create a product catalog text link in Commission Junction. This option will only be available to you if you have been accepted into at least one merchant program:

From your CJ Dashboard, scroll to the bottom of the page and select the merchant you want to link to from the My Advertisers drop-down list. Then click the Go button.
Under the Get Links box on the upper-right of the page, click Product under the By Type heading.

If that option is grayed out, then this merchant doesn’t offer product catalog links.
Find the product you want to link to by scrolling through the product list or searching by keyword.

If this merchant has fewer than 1,000 products in its catalog, a list will appear with all the available products in its catalog. If this merchant has over 1,000 products in its catalog, then you can only search by keyword for the product you’re looking for.
Click Get HTML under the Get Links heading in the last column.
Set your link options as shown.
- If you have multiple websites, use The Tracking Code Is For drop-down list to select the site that you’re going to place the text link on.
- Select the Yes check box beside Set Link to Open a New Window if you want the link to open in a new window.
- Select the Yes check box beside Hide Tracking Code in Link. Hiding the tracking code displays the final destination URL rather than an unreadable tracking URL, which can be confusing to readers. The tracking URL sends the reader to the right destination; it just does it by first linking through one of CJ’s domain names.
  
  This option doesn’t work in all browsers, by the way, so if you test it when you’re done and it doesn’t seem to work, try a different browser to view your page.
- Select the Yes check box beside Encrypt Link. Encrypting a link disguises your standard affiliate number in the link URL. This prevents other people from putting their own affiliate numbers in place of yours and stealing your commission.
- The SID field is a place you can put your own additional tracking ID into the link. You may want to do this if you want to track more specifically where the final sale came from.
- Set your Destination URL if you want to change the default page that you’re linking to. Not all affiliate links have this option. The option won’t be visible if it isn’t available.
- Enter a URL in the Image URL field if you want to use a different image from the one that’s offered. Again, not all affiliate links have this option.
- Click the Update Link Code button if you’ve made any changes.
Choose an option for copying the link code as follows; place your cursor in the appropriate link code box, click the Highlight Code button, and copy it by pressing Ctrl+C or Command+C.
- The first box of link code actually creates a full product feature link, including a photo and description. You can preview this at the bottom of the page.
- The second box of link code creates a plain text link.
- The third box of link code creates a plain product image link without text.
Go to your blog post, place your cursor where you want the link to go, and paste the code into your post by pressing Ctrl+P or Command+P.

Make sure you’re viewing the post in HTML mode and not the WYSIWYG mode.
Test your link by clicking on it and ensuring it directs your browser to the intended page.