How To Reach All Amazon Stores Around The World With A Single Link

By Patricia de Hemricourt

The post reblogged below gives a tool enabling using a single link for all Amazon stores around the world, thus enabling reaching a larger audience than simply Amazon.com.

Keeping in mind that sales resulting from say Amazon.ca in Canada will not raise your visibility in Amazon.com or inn any other shop, running a single promotion campaign enabling potential readers to uy your book from their local Amazon shop considerably enlarges your potential audience for the same campaign. So it is worth a try.

Create a Single Global Link for All Your Amazon Titles with A-FWD

By Nick Daws

One problem I’ve had to face, however, is that Amazon has stores in many countries, and you need to be at the right store for your country to make a purchase. If you’re in the UK you can’t even buy a Kindle e-book from Amazon.com, for example, although with online delivery you might think it would be simple.

This creates a particular problem when you’re trying to promote books and e-books on Amazon, whether your own or as an affiliate. If you don’t provide a link to a visitor’s home store, your chances of a sale are much reduced, and your chances of an affiliate commission are zero.

Until recently, my only solution was to provide links to the title on Amazon UK (my own national Amazon store) and Amazon.com. That covered my two biggest markets, but still meant I was potentially losing many sales to customers in Canada (Amazon.ca), France (Amazon.fr), Germany (Amazon.de), and so on.

Last week, however, I discovered what appears to be an excellent – and free – solution to this problem. A-FWD is a web-based service that allows you to create just one ‘global’ link for your Amazon book or e-book that automatically directs visitors to their own national Amazon store using geo-tracking – optionally with your affiliate/tracking ID included as well.

You can visit the A-FWD website here.

If you want to see how A-FWD works, here is a link to my Kindle e-book Three Great Techniques for Plotting Your Novel or Screenplay. Click on this and you should be taken to the book’s page at your own national Amazon store. If by any chance it doesn’t work, please let me know!

A-FWD is entirely free, and you don’t even have to register on the site to use it. They make their money by changing a tiny proportion (1 percent) of click-throughs to their affiliate ID instead of yours. They also add their own ID if you don’t specify one for a certain Amazon store your user is redirected to.

As they say in their FAQs, if you are writing in the English language it makes sense to sign up for the affiliate programs for Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca. You may or may not think it worthwhile signing up to the non-English-language stores’ affiliate programs as well.

Admittedly the A-FWD global IDs do look a bit cumbersome, but you can convert them to something much neater and more concise by using any URL shortening service, such as Tinyurl or bit.ly.

So far I am very impressed with A-FWD, and plan on using it whenever I link to one of my own books on Amazon from now on. And yes, in case anyone wonders, there is no objection to using affiliate links to your own titles. Indeed, there is much to be said for doing so, as you will then also earn commission on any other purchases a visitor makes at the same time.

If you have any comments or questions about the A-FWD service, please feel free to post them below.