If you haven’t tried Amazon.com’s associates system you should consider creating an account and trying it out. They have some really good tools that could possibly help your monetization efforts pay off if you have good readership on your site. For the uninitiated, monetization is blog-speak for making your blog site an income generator.

I’ve been toying around with some of the simpler and more advanced Amazon features today and I think I’ve come up with an arrangement that I like. There’s an assortment of Widgets and Links & Banners you can install on your page. Then there’s the aStore. It’s the shopping cart that you can customize and add to your site in either of three configurations.

In fact my aStore is the Marty’s Amazon Store tab at the top of the page. I chose the standalone option that links out to a separate browser tab and gives you a full page shopping cart to push around the virtual store. When you go to the Marty’s Amazon Store tab you’ll see the link that you can click to actually go to the store. Go ahead and try it out. Tell me what you think.

I also added a customized book widget, a gift card banner and a vertical banner. Here’s how they work.

The customized widget option allows you to pick from a set of pre-sized widgets or you can customize the size and the recommended selections that show in the box. You’ll see a couple of good choices that I’m recommending initially from Steve Harvey and Voddie Baucham, Jr. Since it’s a file that’s saved in my Amazon account I can go in and add or delete book selections as I choose.

Then I’ve made life easy for my readers who are bad shoppers like me. Have no idea what your gift recipient would like? No problem pally. Send them a gift card. You’ll find this option under Links and Banners -Banners-Add Banners Now-Gift Cards. Pick your favorite banner link and drop the code into your site.

And you can add a scrolling banner too. I added a vertical banner that makes recommendations based on the content of the site. Amazon obviously has a serious artificial intelligence algorithm that feeds in its suggestions to the banner to pique your readers interests.

Of course you’re not limited to the category of books. Amazon sells just about everything online. It just happens to be what I like to focus on. Should I be more expansive? Tell me what you think. I really am open to suggestion, especially if you’re already good at monetization. For those of us who are just now truly trying to get on the good foot with this I don’t think you can go wrong trying some of these suggestions for starters.