It wasn't long ago that Amazon.com turned Twitter into a sales machine — giving people a way to tweet links to Amazon products and get a cut of any resulting sales. Now Amazon is boosting its effort to turn bloggers into sales affiliates as well. In a partnership announced today, Amazon is giving users of Google Blogger a quick way to add Amazon product images and links to their posts. If someone clicks on a link and buys something on Amazon, the blogger gets "up to 15 percent" in referral fees.

Here's a summary from Google's Blogger Buzz:

Starting today, you can search the Amazon product catalog without leaving the Blogger interface and insert links to the products you find into your posts. Not only is the process of linking to products more efficient, but Amazon makes it easy for you to earn money whenever your readers actually buy the products you write about.

It's not just Twitter and blogs that are exploring these kinds of partnerships with Amazon. The Washington Post is getting in on the action as well. When books are mentioned in Post articles and reviews, the newspaper links to an online store powered by Amazon, where readers can buy the books in question. The Post then receives a percentage of any sales.

I'm not clear yet on how the Federal Trade Commission's new endorsement rules for bloggers applies to this new Amazon-Blogger deal. When Amazon launched its Twitter sales feature, some expressed fears that it would flood Twitter with more hidden advertising.

Follow my updates on Twitter.