What Is a Clean Link & How Do You Make One?

When someone asks you for the buy link to your book, do you give them a long rambling link that may break when someone tries to cut and paste it?

(This article reprints twice a year to help new authors.)

Example:

http://www.amazon.com/Still-The-One-Romantic-Comedy-ebook/dp/B005062SLS/ref=pd_sim_kstore_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=158W5YVPQ6JV5T1BTC6H

The link above resulted from clicking the cover for Still The One in the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section that appears on every book page.

Professionals give the shortest, cleanest link possible.

Clean It Up

Sure, that link will get you to the book, but why give a potential reader such an awkward link? Clean it up. Everything beyond the B005062SLS/ is referral code that relates to the source URL which you clicked to go to the book page.

In other words, this is the actual URL.

http://www.amazon.com/Still-The-One-Romantic-Comedy-ebook/dp/B005062SLS/

That's better, but it's still not as short as it can be. A much shorter Amazon link is created by doing away with www and abbreviating Amazon as AMZN and omitting everything beyond .com except the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) which is the string of letters and numbers that is the Product ID code.

Everything sold on Amazon has this 10 character alphabetical/numerical identifying number called the ASIN, or Amazon Standard Identification Number.

You can create any short clean link for an Amazon product by using: http://amzn.com/+the ASIN.

That gives us a clean short link: http://amzn.com/B005062SLS for my romantic comedy, Still The One.

But, Wait, There's More

It's possible to get an even shorter, clean link for any Amazon Product.

For Still The One, this link would be: http://a.co/d/21Y8dVQ which Amazon generated.

I simply went to the right sidebar and clicked the small Share box that shows icons for an envelope (to send link by email), Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, (for getting HTML Code).

Just click the Envelope icon and a window opens where you can email the link to someone. If all you want is the shortest clean link, then copy the generated short link you see for the book or product.

Tips

1. Set up an easy to access text document (Notepad) or Flashnote file (which is always plain text) with your book title and every buy link for it. List the official URL for the book and the short Amazon link too. That way you can easily cut and paste links wherever you need them.

By the way, do you know why it's preferable to paste from a text file rather than a Word file when filling out web forms? Because sometimes default formats inherent in Word can cause the pasted text to turn out screwy or contain odd random characters.

2. If you want to try to shorten a link so that you can track the number of clicks for it, use any of the popular link shortening services like Goo.gl, TinyURL, Bitly, Smart URL. Amazon has its own now: Amzn.to, a link shortener hosted by Bitly. All the link shortening services work basically the same, but each has some pros and cons.

3. If you want to create a buy link with your Amazon Associate Referral Code added to give to your fans, it's nice to shorten the really long resulting link by clicking Get Link / Text on the Amazon Associates "stripe" then just copy and paste.

Takeaway Truth

Short links are infinitely easier to work with. Try them and always give them out when you're guest blogging are sharing the link so that others might use it on social media.

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