We are about to start a company who will do Affiliate Marketing and we are wondering if Ghost can support our business model. Essentially, we want to start with a niche Product Review website.
We have narrowed down our CMS to 2 choices : Ghost or Wordpress. We know that Wordpress can do the job because some major Affiliate Marketer are using it but we would prefer to use Ghost because we feel that it has some major advantages over Wordpress: JAMstack architecture, better technology, better performance, simpler configuration for SEO).
There’s a lot of comparisons for Ghost vs Wordpress, but so far we haven’t found any material that clearly states whether or not Ghost can use the same monetization tools that are available to WordPress.
We need a clear answer as to whether or not it is possible to use the following two monetization tools with Ghost :
Amazon Affiliate
Google Adsense
Regarding Amazon Affiliate, we found two posts on the Ghost forum that speaks about Affiliate Marketing but neither of the two posts provides a clear answer as to whether or not it is possible to include links amazon.
If you don’t want to roll your own link tracking, there are services which will do that for you (e.g. bitly). Ghost doesn’t have support for anything specific in that realm, although you can configure path-based redirects.
To put it simply, Ghost is designed for publishing, and requires you to do everything else - if you want to integrate Google Adsense, you need to add the script via code injection. If you want to have link tracking, there are plenty of services that offer that as their only product, meaning the service will be more featureful and battle-tested. Let me know if that doesn’t make sense
I think it make sense but I have a few more questions.
Let say that we want to include a card with a product picture and a button link “View offer on Amazon” inside our article. If I understand correctly, the writer would have to create a button inside Ghost post, put the link tracking code (e.g. bitly) in the button related to the product and it would work. Am i correct? If yes, how can we insert the bitly link inside the button, is it the same for a regular text link?
Concerning Adsense and the Code Injection feature, I understand that I will be able to insert the Adsence script only in the header or the footer of the page but I will not be able to insert an Adsense Ads in the middle of the article. Am i correct?
Sorry for my english, it’s not my first language.
That’s correct. If you want amazon links to look like a button, you should style the link tag to look like a button, but you shouldn’t modify a button to function like a link - Buttons and links serve different purposes! You can use css to target affiliate-links specifically - e.g. a:not([href^="http://your-website.com"]) { /* styles */ }
I’m not entirely sure how adsense works, but if you need to add a target element, you can do that via javascript on the client side, or you can have your writers insert it at the time of writing.
FYI Here’s an integration page for AdSense - You should be able to insert your AdSense code inline in your content using an HTML card in the editor, across your site using code injection, or directly in your theme files.
Regarding Amazon Affiliate links - there’s no restrictions on what URLs you include in your publication. You can use affiliate links and style them in any way you want via your theme. Some of our free themes have elements such as buttons and forms, so you might want to check out the Theme Marketplace.
