Product Style

The first plugin of mine that I am going to talk about is Product Style. This plugin can be used to make standalone ads and/or comparison charts.

First, I need to install it on the site.

Go to Plugins -> Add New in the WordPress admin menu. This is where we went to search for plugins. However, this time we want to upload the plugin that was downloaded from my website, so click the Upload link at the top.

Click the Browse button and select the amzps file that you downloaded.

Once you have that selected, just click Install Now. Then click on the Activate text link on the following page.

You should now be able to find Product Style in the sidebar menu. Click on it to start the plugin setup process.

This setup process exists to ensure that the plugin has the information that it needs to be able to work and so you can earn commissions from the ads it creates.

The first part of the setup process involves selecting an affiliate network. This really just controls what type of settings it will ask you for next to ensure that it has everything it needs to run. Just select Amazon here and click Continue.

This takes us to the Amazon setup.

First, specify whether you will use one or multiple Amazon affiliate locales on this site.

I will just be using Amazon.com on this particular site. However, the plugin can be used with more Amazon locales to automatically attempt to change ads depending on where a visitor lives. Specific information on using the plugin in that manner can be found in the plugin guidebook, linked from the download page.

Next, just select the Amazon site to use:

Now provide your Amazon.com affiliate id:

Enter your Access Key and Secret Access Key from AWS API:

Now select a link type to use. I will just be using the Direct (Standard) Affiliate Links.

The other two options are for use with the Amazon API shopping cart system. I will actually be using that system in this tutorial, but I am going to be doing it with ExtendAzon and not Product Style (I'll get to more on that in the ExtendAzon chapter).

After this step, the plugin is ready to use. A variety of tutorial video links are available there, but extended information on everything the plugin can do can be found in the plugin guidebook.

I am now going to go to the Auto Amazon page of the plugin to start creating ads to use on this site.

To start, I just provide a keyword phrase to search for products. I'll be using pinzon down comforter for this search to pull up the two products I want to promote for that brand.

After I click Search, the two products I want can be found at the top of the results:

To start, I am going to click on the Pyrenees product at the top (either the Image or the Title of the product).

Clicking on the product opens a very long window. At the top, you'll find a product summary and additional product info.

Scroll down and look for the section with the header Plugin Category Selection.

Now, click on the New Category button here. Provide a name for the category that you will use for this product. Nobody will see this name but you. It is used to group together products and also controls memory settings for Auto Amazon (will get to memory settings in a few).

I will just call this category Comforters. Click Save New Category when done.

After the category is created, you can see it automatically selected in the drop-down box:

Now, scroll down to the next section called Product Information Selection:

In this section, there are many different items listed. All of this is the product information available through Amazon API.

Product Style allows you to pick and choose what information you want to display with your products.

Just click on the checkbox next to one or more items in the list to add the information to the ad for this product. You can drag and drop items to rearrange the order they will display in the live ad.

You can choose to edit the product information provided here, if you want. There are two boxes for each row. The first is the Field Title and the second is the Field Information.

If you select an item, change the order of items, and/or change the Field Title for an item, that also gets stored in the category memory. Future products in the same category will have those selections and customizations automatically done for you (both manually created product ads, like this one, or using Quick Ads, which I will get to shortly).

I have selected three items to show with this ad:

Notice my Product Summary item. The information for that is quite long and actually includes HTML code. Anytime I see HTML code here, I want to be sure the ad isn't going to look messed up (since that HTML can potentially break the design of the ad HTML). Just click on Preview Ad at the bottom to see what it will look like.

For this ad, I need to remove that HTML because it is an image file that has a specific size and will force my ad size to change beyond the size that will fit on my site. The Product Summary section is typically the only place you will find really long text and/or HTML like this that could break the ads.

At the bottom of the window, you have some Ad Creation Options.

Style controls the design of the ad (preview to see how these look). I will use Grey for this ad.

For the image, I will select the Medium size.

The only other changes I have made here involve shortening the Link Anchor Text and Header Title. This text will be shown in the actual advertisement and sometimes Amazon can provide too much text here, so I often find myself shortening it.

Once I am satisfied with the ad, I click on Create Product Ad.

Proceed with creating additional ads to use on the site, depending on your plans.

If you find yourself wanting to edit text or make changes to each ad, just proceed with creating your ads in the same manner. If you select an existing category, it will recall your information fields and ad creation options from the first ad, which helps to save time. If you find that you want a few different variations of product information for different kinds of product ads, just create new categories to use for each variation.

The other option is to create Quick Ads, as long as you have created one ad using the method I just described. To do this, first select one or more products in the search results. I've selected the other Pinzon comforter here:

Now scroll to the bottom of the page and look for the drop-down and Quick Add button. Just select a category here and click the button. The ad(s) will be automatically created for you based on the memory settings from that category!

The automatically created product information can later be manually edited through the Products admin page, if you later find that you need to make some changes to the ads you didn't create yourself.

If I need to arrange some of the ads together into a comparison chart, I can do that from the Charts page of the plugin.

Ads and comparison charts can then be inserted into the live site through the page editor.

Just look for the blue PS icon above the post editor window:

That will open a window where I can add saved ads or comparison charts to the page. Just click the Saved Ads button, select the ad, and click the Insert Ad button.

This inserts the ad shortcode into the page content where I had the text cursor:

[amzps id=lrl"]

On the live site, the ad will show up where this shortcode is placed. Here is this ad on the live site: