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.
