AffiliateBrand.com by Gene Kavner

Brand New Amazon Associates Landing Page Experiment

This week, Amazon Associates started running a brand new test of their program in preparation for the 2006 shopping season.  It is clear Amazon would like to figure out how to maximize sales which affects  their revenues and your commissions.  Good for them.  Let's take a look at what they are doing.

In the past, when you have put a link on your site to a particular product, when clicked, it took your visitors to a page that Amazon calls "Similarities Explorer Page".  Similarities Explorer Page is a page where just a small portion at the top is devoted to the product your visitor clicked on.  The remainder of the page presented images of various other products that are in some way similar to the original  product selected by the viewer.  Take a look at the following example of a typical ad and a resulting Similarities Explorer page:

Amazon Product Ad	click-through	Amazon Similarities Explorer Page

A test that Amazon ran a number of years ago has shown that this page is more likely to generate a sale than the product detail page (see below).  The reason for this was that if the potential consumer  clicks on a product and it is not exactly what he is looking for, then he may find a different product that is similar to the first one he clicked on that is more to his liking.

Amazon Product Ad	click-through	Amazon Product Detail Page

However, a number of improvements have been made over the years to the product detail page.  Today, the Amazon Product Detail page has significantly more information about the product than the Similarities  Explorer page, namely:

• More buying options, better pricing, image, special offer, and delivery information.
• Better Together section: bundles that can save you even more money.
• What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item.
• Product technical details.
• Miscellaneous product details, such as dimensions, weight, sales rank.
• Link to a product manual.
• Product Description.
• Accessories and service.
• Customers who bought this item also bought...
• Help others find this item.
• Tag this product.
• Rate this item.
• Spotlight reviews.
• Customer reviews.
• Customer discussions.
• ProductWiki: Product Information from Our Customers.
• News and Reviews About This Product.
• Listmania!
• So You'd Like to... guides.
• Look for related items by keyword.
• Look for similar items by category.

Whew!  Amazon has certainly packed a lot of information on their product detail pages.  It is certainly reasonable to assume that all this information may give a customer better incentive to purchase the  product.

So, staring September 25, Amazon Associates is starting a test in which clicks on Amazon product ads will be randomly directed to either a Similarities Explorer Page or to a Product Detail Page.  Amazon will then tabulate all results to see which page is resulting in better sales.  They will then cause all of the clicks to go to that page.  This test will run through October 24, 2006.

I have tried building links to Amazon products and took a look at what happens when I clicked on them.  It seems like the very first time you click on an ad, Amazon flips a virtual coin to see to which page  (product detail or similarities explorer) the click will take you.  After that, all clicks on Amazon ads will lead you to go to the same type of a page.  I tried this on Firefox first and all of my clicks led  me to the Similarities Explorer page.  I then tried this in Internet Explorer and all of my Amazon clicks went to the Product Detail page.  So now we wait and see what the results will show.

Having described this test, I'll be bold and make a prediction.  I think that the Associates team will learn that the Similarities Explorer page will continue to generate better results than the Product  Detail page.  I think that if you click on an ad, having an opportunity to see a number of product choices will give you a better ability to make a decision to purchase one of them.  We should all find out  the results on October 24.

Gene Kavner

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Should you link to your Amazon aStore or put it in an IFRAME?

Update:  This post was originally posted on September 29, 2006 and is transferred from http://Blog.AMZN-Associates.com, my earlier blog which I will be transferring to Amazon.com per their request.

Amazon Associates team released aStore into Beta mid-August, just about a month-and-a-half ago and tens of thousands of people have already tried building a store.  They have done a superb job of taking the complexity of building a site and adding products to it using their traditional build links mechanism. 

Before I jump into describing aStore, let me show you a couple of aStore implementations on the net:

Adam Kalsey Store
Adam incorporated various books, camera and photo, Cell Phone & Service, Computers, and Electronics categories in his store.  Each category has a fairly large number of products, which made it a bit difficult for me to understand how he chose the products to feature in his store.  This implementation uses a linked store approach because the store is linked to by Adam’s main site.

John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing
John built his store with inline frames (read IFRAME tutorial here), so the store appears as if it were a part of his own site.  It is a much better looking site than Adam Kelsey’s store.

When I worked with my team to design the Amazon Associates aStore, we never really envisioned it to be used as a stand-alone store where sites would simply link to.  There are a couple of reasons why linking to an aStore is not a good idea:

• Once a customer clicks on a link to an aStore, he is lost there.  Other than making a purchase at the store, there is really no way to get back to the original site other than clicking on a non-intuitive Back button on the browser.


• aStore itself resides on the Amazon domain, namely http://aStore.Amazon.com/AssocID.  This takes your readers away from your domain, so they may not easily know how they ended up at Amazon or what they should do next. 

It is a much better experience for you to put your own aStore on your site as an IFRAME, in a similar way done by John Jantsch above.  This gives you an opportunity to continue offering your visitors a consistent user interface of your site.  You also have all the associated navigation which allows your readers to return to other parts of your site should then choose to not make a purchase. 

In all of my searching of various posts on the web, I have found a significant level of excitement around aStore initiative.  What Amazon has done for the first time is make it insanely easy for anyone to create their own store and put it on your site.

However, while many of you are raving about aStore, I am not convinced that many people are actually promoting your store and are using it as a revenue-generating tool.  If you know of a good implementation of aStore that is generating revenue today, please drop me a comment by email or in this post and I will highlight your site in my blog.

For those of you who haven’t yet built the Amazon aStore, my colleague Dave Taylor (a very smart individual who I had the pleasure of visiting this week) has already done a good job of describing of how to build one in his post a few weeks ago titled What is Amazon aStore?

   Gene Kavner

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Email me your questions at:

Monitor where your traffic comes from with the Traffic Widget

I spent the last few days developing a pretty interesting Traffic Widget. 

As I will spend more time discussing in my future posts, having good analytics about your site is important when you make decisions which affiliate programs to join, what part of your site works to generate both interest on the part of your viewers and income for you, and whether you should or shouldn’t continue with a special promotion on your site. 

Analytics is nothing more than analysis of data.  Before you can analyze data, you have to obtain it.  So, before continuing with my posts, I wanted to see where my visitors (aka traffic) were coming from.  This will help me figure out who is linking to my site and who I should link to from my own blog.

Besides obtaining data, I also wanted something interesting to show to my readers.  Displaying live statistics on my traffic to the users seemed like an intriguing proposition – something that I’m hoping will generate more interaction between my readers and AffiliateBrand.com. 

I did some searching around and haven’t found any widget that would help me. So, with some amount of technical knowledge about .NET and SQL, I spent a few days working on the Traffic Widget.

My extensive amount of entrepreneurship experience as well as running the largest affiliate program in the world at Amazon.com has taught me one important lesson.  Execution and deployment of a project is more important than iterating for a long, long time while perfecting every feature (Microsoft Vista development team, take notice!).  This attitude allowed Amazon.com Associates team to release more new exciting products in the last year that they have in the previous several years.

So, I took this attitude with me into the entrepreneurial world.  As a result, I decided to deploy the Traffic Widget on my site while there are so many other things I can still do to it.  You will see me making changes to the widget and I will announce them here. 

In the meantime, you can take the Traffic Widget and put it on your site today.  Simply copy the following code and paste it on your site or blog in the space where you would like the widget to appear.

 

<script language=javascript type="text/javascript"> // How many lines do you want to show? lines=10 height=70 + lines*15 scr1="<iframe height="+height+" width=100% scrolling=no  src=http://AffiliateBrand.com/Traffic.aspx" scr2="></iframe><BR>" r=document.referrer l=document.URL t="?ref="+r+"&land="+l+"&lines="+lines document.writeln(scr1+t+scr2) </script>

Good luck and let me know what you think!

Gene Kavner

Affiliate Program : Merchants : Direct Traffic

As I mentioned in my last post, the Merchant already has some means by which they generate revenues from its traffic. Obviously, Merchants would like to grow their business by increasing the amount of traffic they receive.

There are 5 distinct ways that a Merchant receives traffic on their site:

1.    Direct / Repeat Traffic (see below)
2.    Free Search Traffic
3.    Sponsored Link Traffic
4.    Advertising Traffic
5.    Affiliate Traffic

Let’s discuss each one in detail:

    1. Direct / Repeat Traffic

Direct traffic is traffic a site receives when users type in the URL of the site in the address line of the browser, or link to the site from either the bookmark they have saved previously or from an email message they have received from the site.

This is the best but at the same time the most difficult type of traffic a site can receive. While it costs nothing to the site when Monetizable events occur from this type of traffic, Merchants have to have spent significant amount of time in business before amount of Direct traffic becomes significant.

There are 4 ways by which Merchants generate Direct traffic:

a.  Brand Recognition

A Merchant’s brand is considered recognized when potential customers immediately think of this Merchant when they are interested in purchasing a product or taking advantage of service that this particular Merchant offers. Conversely, when you think of a Merchant with a recognized brand, you instantly know what products / services this Merchant offers. For example, when you need to find something on the Internet, you think of Google, when you need to purchase a book, you think of Amazon.com.

Brand recognition takes a lot of effort, time, and expense for a company to build. Companies build brand with positive press coverage, purchased advertising (eg TV Commercials), and by word of mouth. Very few companies have a well-recognized brand and for those that do, it has come at a significant price. Even some well-known brands have a difficult time getting known for all of their products/services. For example, how many of you know that Amazon.com sells lipstick or windshield wipers? However, once Merchants have brand recognition, they receive lucrative traffic from users who simply type in their site in the browser. This is the holy grail of Internet marketing.

b.  Free Links from Other Sites / Word of Mouth

If a Merchant offers a product or service that people find interesting, useful, or just cool, they will build links to the Merchant from their own sites. As an example of this, I will be linking from AffiliateBrand.com to sites offering interesting products / services in the affiliate marketing space. And I will happily do so without getting paid in return because I find that these products / services will be of particular interest to my readers. Effectively, this is the equivalent of “word of mouth” advertising in the offline world. Sites such as MySpace.com and YouTube.com have grown very quickly over the last year from this type of Direct traffic.

New sites must find way to offer compelling content, updated frequently, to maintain this level of excitement in the Internet community. Remember that other than this excitement for the Merchant’s products or services, nothing else is motivating Publishers to link to the Merchant, and thus driving traffic to the Merchant site.

This is the best type of Direct traffic that can flow into the new sites, especially before they become a recognized brand. These links will also significantly contribute, albeit in an indirect and not very measurable way, to the Free Search traffic described below.

c.  Saved Links / RSS Feeds by Repeat Customers

Once merchant establishes a following, many users will save off a link to the Merchant or subscribe to the Merchant’s RSS feed. This will allow users easy means to get back to the Merchant’s site and thus drive additional Direct traffic. Anything a merchant can do to encourage customers to link to the site or subscribe to the RSS feed is extremely important in building free Direct traffic to the Merchant’s site.

d.  Email to Repeat Customers

It is a well-known fact that it is easier and less expensive for a Merchant to have a customer come back rather than finding a customer who will visit the Merchant for the first time. To ensure that customers come back again and again, Merchants must have not only excellent customer service but a relationship with the customer that goes well beyond the first visit. Customers enjoy relevant follow-up communication from the Merchant where they have had positive experience. This is something many Merchants (that are sometimes the size of Amazon.com) overlook. Establishing email strategy to connect with the customer and maintaining this relationship will ensure that Merchant’s brand remains high enough to remind their old customers to come back for repeat purchases.

New sites rarely have brand recognition or enough following to ensure a significant amount of Direct traffic. Thus, they need to also focus on other traffic-generating means.  Stay tuned!

What is an Affiliate Program?

While this question may seem trivial, the answer to it is anything but straightforward.  There are dozens of sites out there discussing what it takes to make money in the affiliate business but few have attempted at a good answer as to what the affiliate program actually is.  Understanding this definition is going to help you make this program work for you.

An Internet Affiliate Program is essentially a contract between two entities:

1.    Merchant

A Merchant is any site that is able to derive some financial benefit from visitors (aka Internet traffic) consuming its products or services.  This could be anyone from a large eCommerce conglomerate such as Amazon.com to a small site selling a single software product.

Are you a Merchant with an Affiliate Program?  Please leave comment and I will see if I can highlight you in my follow-on post.

2.    Publisher

A publisher is any site that has particular content (subject matter that the site is about) and an existing set of consumers who already visit the site regularly and interact with it for business or personal reasons.  These sites could be large portals such as Earthlink.net to smaller blog sites covering a particular topic that readers find interesting.

Are you a Publisher successful with one or more Affiliate Programs?   Please leave a comment with your experience and I will see if I can highlight you in my follow-on post.

The Affiliate Program Contract

The contract between the Merchant and the Publisher involves a promise that the Merchant will pay the Publisher some amount of money when the Publisher refers some qualified users to the Merchant site.  Typically, a Merchant will pay the Publisher a percentage of revenues collected from the customers that the Merchant referred (aka Revenue-Share basis).  Amazon.com, Buy.com, Vonage.com are all examples of such programs. 

However, a Merchant may also pay the Publisher on leads that do not necessarily convert into sales.  Some merchants will allow a Publisher to sign up a lead and pass it off to the Merchant while most will require that such sign-ups take place on the Merchant site.  Other Merchants pay Publishers on a per-click or on a per-impression basis.  Google AdSense is the premier program paying Publishers on a pay-per-click model.  Lastly, some Merchants even pay Publishers for finding other Publishers that join the Merchant’s affiliate program (aka 2nd-tier affiliate pay-out). 

Each action that causes a Merchant to pay a Publisher is called a Monetizable Event.

An overwhelming majority of the Merchants pay Publishers on the revenue-share basis.  This offers Merchants a low-risk proposition:  they will only pay a Publisher once they themselves make money on the lead that the Publisher has brought to the Merchant site.  Revenue-share basis puts the most pressure on the Publisher to figure out how to best promote the Merchant’s offer that would generate maximum sales.  Publishers, of course, would prefer to receive payment based on a non-financial transaction (such as a simple click or impression), which would theoretically lead to more frequent Monetizable events for which the Publisher would get paid.

In order to ensure that each Publisher gets paid correctly based on the right set of Monetizable events, Merchants implement sophisticated tracking systems that are able to recognize when a Monetizable event has occurred and which Publisher has caused this event to happen.  Merchants with significant resources, such as Amazon.com, have implemented their own tracking systems while most other Merchants are taking advantage of affiliate aggregators such as Commission Junction or LinkShare. 

By now, you already know whether your site more closely identified with the Merchant or the Publisher.  Keep in mind that a site could be a Merchant and a Publisher at the same time – you may have your own affiliate program while taking advantage of 3rd-party affiliate programs on your own site.

In my follow-on post, I will discuss more details from the vantage point of Merchants and Publishers individually.

Read next post: Affiliate Program : Merchants : Direct Traffic.

Introduction from Gene Kavner

Hello and welcome to AffiliateBrand.com and my blog.

I have recently left Amazon.com after having had an incredible opportunity to run the world-wide Associates Program that is the oldest and most successful affiliate program on the Internet.

Amazon Associates affiliate program operates in 6 countries and contributes significantly to the Amazon revenue stream, which was reported at $8.5 Billion in 2005. Between Associates, Sponsored Search, and a couple of other marketing initiatives, Amazon has spent $168 Million in 2005. Recognizing that the Associates program pays out between 4% and 8.5% of all revenues in fees to the hundreds of thousands of affiliates, you can easily calculate the amount of revenue Amazon’s affiliate program is generating per year.

The purpose of this blog is to share my vast expertise in this space with anyone interested in making money on the web. There is significant money made in the affiliate business. Whether you are:

• Already in business,
• Just thinking of creating your first site / blog,
• Making over $1 Million in annual eCommerce revenues,
• Just tinkering with AdSense and/or other affiliate programs,
• Interested in becoming an Affiliate and not sure where to start, or
• Have your own affiliate program --

-- you will benefit from having a subscription to AffiliateBrand.com.

AffiliateBrand.com, in conjunction with the web site I will be launching shortly, will offer comprehensive review of the affiliate trends, products, and technologies. I will go well beyond the Amazon Associates program and cover in depth areas such as:

•  Affiliate Marketing,
• Free Search Optimization,
• Advertising,
• Sponsored Links,
• Blogging,
• e-Commerce,
• Affiliate Tools,
• Web Services,
• Mashups, and
• Many more!

I will also create an easy way for any of you to participate in the discussion, to share your experience with and rate various commercial offerings. By participating on AffiliateBrand.com, you will also receive substantial page rank boost as I will link directly to your site. I welcome your participation.

I also intend to give you practical, unbiased advice on what you need to do to grow your online business. In order to give you the best advice possible, I will personally try many of the affiliate products and services available on the Internet today and evaluate them. I will even offer these products for you to try and let everyone know what you think.

It is also my goal to evaluate what it is like to interact with various vendors, how easy it is to get their help, how often they pay, and how compelling / effective their offer is. In an effort to be the best judge of their services, some of my links to these vendors will include my own affiliate id. I will also not shy away from suggesting vendors that do not already have their own affiliate program. Overall, I will help you decide whether you should or should not use their products and services to make money on the Internet.

If you have a substantial amount of experience in this space and have something valuable to say, please get in touch with me for a consideration to become a contributing author in this blog.

Lastly, I am available to discuss with you any opportunity for me to offer you direct consulting help. If you would like to reach me, please email me at:

Again, welcome to AffiliateBrand.com!

Gene Kavner