I had an email yesterday from the developers of BloggerKit.com – a nice looking system that helps you to integrate Amazon affiliate ads into your blog in a semi automatic way.
The system allows you to trigger relevant ads by simply adding a tag to the end of your blog posts that includes a product name. This tag triggers the relevant ads.
The system has some pros and cons associated with it:
Pros
- you get paid directly from Amazon for any earnings
- The ads are able to be configured to match your blog’s design (in terms of colours and sizes)
- The ads have product images in them (this will draw the eye and increase CTR)
- The set up of the ads is reasonably quick
- They are allowable with systems like AdSense as they are not automatically contextual (ie you trigger the ads)
Cons
- As payment for the service you allow Blogger Kits to run their affiliate ads in 15% of the products your blog shows (not a massive amount (less than some similar services I’ve seen), but it’s worth remembering there is a cost involved).
- It seems that the tags you insert into your posts actually appear to your readers. Check out the example blog they have here and you’ll see at the bottom of each post that there is a tag ‘bk_keywords:…’ They write on their site that you can make them invisible by making them the same color as your background. This rings a few warning bells for me as I know search engines look for invisible text and penalize it if they think it’s trying to scam the system (which this is not – but I’d worry a little about it).
- Remember you get paid a commission with Amazon IF a sale is made and you are not getting paid for a click through. Publishers should consider this when deciding whether to run these type of affiliate programs or whether to run other CPC ads (AdSense, Chitika etc). Depending upon the products you’re writing about they can convert better or worse than other ads. I find that text ads to Amazon work quite well but haven’t had much luck with image ones (but it’s worth a try).
For those bloggers who heavily use Amazon on their blogs this will probably be a useful service. I’m not going to use it on my blogs at this point but would be interested to hear from others who do to see how it goes.
Is this like the wordpress plugin? You can see it on my blog. I can choose which keywords I wan’t to associate with Amazon. Take a look.
@ Mr. SEO: I don’t think it’s the same idea. I stand to be corrected, but I’m pretty sure WordPress’ plugin simply adds your Amazon Affiliate ID to any links that direct to Amazon on your site – but I haven’t seen a keywords option. Again, I’ve not looked much into it. I did however look at your site and didn’t find anything about Amazon or any Amazon links there.
@All: the Bloggerkit idea is a good one, but not as a business idea I don’t think (meaning, if they’re banking on this bringing them a lot of cash). It will be about 30 seconds before an open source/plugin is developed for this. And as Amazon’s affiliate site is pretty good, it wont be long before they adopt it into how they offer adding their products to your site.
There are a few varieties out there. One Amazon system that comes to me is TicTap. TicTap can search user-defined strings, your blog title, meta descriptions, meta keywords to serve up Amazon products.
Here’s a plus.. it also gives a pretty popup with product details when your mouse hovers over the Amazon links, and you keep 100% of your clickthrough earnings!
http://www.tictap.com/free
It seems like they should be able to work this out with a custom field that doesn’t require showing additional text in your post.
I run a faith dictionary called the Ginktionary and rely heavily on Amazon Affiliate ads. I do agree that it is much harder to make money through these affiliates. I was wondering if anyone knew of any good strategies to get a better turnover or maybe a CPC book affiliate instead of commission purchase?
Not to be confused with the original BlogKits.com. :), which will finally have an announcement about our future in the next few weeks. And no, it’s not a system where you can integrate with Amazon.
Much more complex.
@Stephen Miracle
I heard that online people buy in average at their fifth visit. Amazon.com uses a 24 hours cookie. So you see it is a Win-lose situation. I myself rarely buy books the first day that I see them on Amazon. The online good I can buy on impulse are the cheap online softwares like the Add-on I bought this morning for MSN messenger. Last quarter I made 13 sales for them, which net me around 6 dollars.
I’m into other affiliate program where if I make 13 sales I will have $650.
I think it is best to look for a more profitable affiliate program than Amazon.
Thanks for writing about it. It does not look to me very pressive. I believe that CPC ads are better and Google Adsense has contributed a lot in the increase of blogs in the first place.
@Louis… or anyone else
Hey, you mentioned that you have ad affiliate programs that net you around 650 a month, would you mind dropping the name? We really could use some good book affiliate programs on our site, but can’t really find any good ones on Google..
@Stephen Miracle
You have to look for specific merchants in your own niche/industry.
Go at Linkshare, CJ or site like this check out what they have.
Go to google and type : your kewords + “affiliate program” and see what you get, thats the way, I found some merchants to work with.
I use a combination of the wordpress plugin which gives me book images and the affiliate link to amazon, my own amazon storefront built with Associate-0-matic, plus pages with amazon product links. Why rely on one space as a sales tool?
Amazon is my best paying affiliate but is not making me rich (yet).
Whatever….Google adsense is the best!!!!
I’ve been using the website http://www.adsymphony.com to do the same thing as blogerkit and it does not cost anything. It only offers text links, but the payout on conversion is pretty big on the items.