I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I do my best to support the shows that I listen to by using their sponsors, buying some swag and using their affiliate codes when possible. But I’m always looking for ways to support people and companies that bring me so much information and entertainment for free.
A lot of my favorite shows have an Amazon Affiliate link somewhere on their site where you can click through when you’re going to buy something and kick a few pennies back to the referring site. I’ve got no problem with doing this. I buy a lot of stuff off of Amazon and if I can help someone out at the same time then I’m all for it.
The problem with this strategy is that I usually forget to navigate to someone’s website, search for the Amazon banner and then click through. And even if I do remember to do this or even if I bookmark the links, how do I decide who to support and when?
I needed a process that would allow me to easily shop with Amazon while helping my favorite shows and try to “spread the wealth” evenly among the shows.
Initially I was going to try (and probably fail) to write a Chrome extension that would let me store links and then randomly open a link when clicked. So, in theory I could add a bunch of Amazon affiliate links to my extension and then when I wanted to shop on Amazon I could click that extension and it would randomly send me to one of the affiliate pages. That way I could support a show at random. Luckily, I found an already existing extension in the Chrome store to do the heavy lifting for me.
This simple extension will randomly open a bookmark when triggered, that’s it. Of course, no one is just going to have bookmarks for Amazon, so conveniently the tool let’s you set a specific folder which to randomly open links from. Perfect.
So, here’s how to setup the extension to support multiple shows via Amazon’s affiliate links:
1. Grab the Chrome extension called Random Bookmark and install it.
2. After it’s installed create a new bookmark folder in your browser. I called mine Amazon.
3. Go to each webpage that you want to support via their special Amazon affiliate link and then bookmark the Amazon page you land on that has the site’s affiliate data in the URL. Be sure you’re bookmarking the page’s in your newly created folder from which you want the extension to open URLs from.
4. Right-click on the newly installed Random Bookmark extension and click “Options”
5. Set the tool to only open bookmarks from the Amazon bookmark folder with the drop down menu.
6. Exit the tool page.
Now test it. Click on extension and it should navigate you to a random Amazon page with the site you want to support’s affiliate code.
You’re all set. Now when you want to buy something on Amazon just click that little tool and you’ll be directed to a random Amazon affiliate page and you can support your favorite blogs, sites, podcasts, etc.