That Holiday Gift Guide Might Be More Trouble Than You Thought

If you’re adding a holiday gift guide to your website or blog using Amazon affiliate links, it could just get you in some trouble.

Get a Social Boost - Social Media Management Facebook posted on 11/16/2017  Lately I have been having fun learning how to make gift guides more successful. I have been taking some great gift guide training's and was concerned with some of the teachings when it came to use of Amazon product pictures. I wondered if Amazon policies had changed since I last looked. So, I reached out to Amazon Associates yesterday to get the low down before I went any further. Some of the training on how to produce awesome gift guides are saying it's OK to download product photos from Amazon and use in collage images for blogs/Pinterest, etc. I was hoping things had changed and that we could do that but…. Nope, Amazon policies haven’t changed. You cannot download product photos from Amazon to use on your blog/Pinterest/social media, etc. It could potentially get you banned from your account. Are you willing to risk that? Here’s more info should you be interested: Amazon Associates confirmed yesterday, it is not permitted to download photos and use on blog/images for any reason. You can find the specific info in their policies under program participation requirements (section 8 Content on Site - see A & J plus in the Trademark Section #8). Hopefully this helps. Please feel free to share.

I see this happening every year. Bloggers putting loads of work into gift guides, only to have to go back and practically start over because they don’t want to break the Amazon affiliate terms of service.

You can’t turn that gift guide into a PDF for distribution all around the internet with all those Amazon affiliate links either. That’s another thing they don’t allow.

You can’t email your list with those links live either. Yet another thing not allowed.

Not to mention how incredibly time consuming a good holiday gift guide post can be!

Things You Need to Know About Posting Holiday Gift Guides with Amazon Affiliate Links

What CAN you do?

You can create the gift guide on your website or blog, using the embedded image features from Amazon and you can send traffic to it.

You can create a generic pinnable image with a title and some holiday cheer, just don’t use the images from Amazon.

You can email your list and send them to your website to view the gift guide without linking directly to any products inside the email.

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