AffiliateBrand.com by Gene Kavner

Amazon.com Associates Team Launches Product Previews

Over the last year, Amazon.com Associates team has been running a beta test of new JavaScript-based technology called Product Previews. Over the last couple of days, Amazon has quietly launched this new feature.



Actually, I'm quite impressed with the technology and am surprised that this launch was so quiet. Let's take a look!

What makes the Amazon Associates program so interesting is that you can link to most any product Amazon sells (and they have millions!) and generate cash commission on each sale. If you do a really good job of picking the product by matching it to the content of your web site or blog, you can bring great value to your readers and monetize your site well.

The look and feel of your site is also very important -- it brings your readers back! And this is where the new Product Previews come in. I've been a great fan of this technology while it was in beta (showing 50% of the time) and am very excited now that Amazon has finally rolled it out.

Check out these two product placements. They look very similar, don't they? Now, roll your mouse over each one.

Garmin Nuvi 360 Pocket Vehicle GPS Navigator and Personal Travel Assistant Purchase Today at Amazon!		Garmin Nuvi 360 Pocket Vehicle GPS Navigator and Personal Travel Assistant Purchase Today at Amazon!
Amazon Ad Without Product Preview		Amazon Ad With Product Preview

When you mouse over the ad with product preview, you should see this Pop-Over next to the ad itself:



I think the ad on the right is more engaging and interactive. It makes your site come alive. It gives the sense of your site "talking" to your customers and selling them on your product. I highly recommend you try the new Product Previews from Amazon.

So how do you make this work?

Unfortunatly, Amazon made it a bit confusing as to how to make Product Previews work on your site, so let me make this process a bit more clear.

1. If you are not already a registered member of Amazon Associates, join Amazon Associates right now.

2. Log in to Amazon Associates Central and click on "Build Links" link on the navigation menu.

3. Product Preview works only on Product Links, so you will need to choose one or more specific products that you will feature on your site. You should then decide what products to feature, whether you would like to show an image of the product, text of the product, or both. You should now click on button next to the Product Links section of the Available Link Types for Amazon.com.

4. Enter the ASIN number of the product (you can find this number on any Amazon.com product detail page) or just the keywords that you think describes the product.

5. Click on for the product you want to feature.

6. You will now see that the default link type chosen is Text and Image. Unfortunately, Product Preview does not work on the Text and Image link type. For Product Preview to work, you must change selection to either Image Only or Text Only. You can combine both Image Only and Text Only on the same page but you will not be able to show the price of the product right there on your page (it will show up on the preview page). As you can see, in my example above, I have combined both the Image Only and Text Only links.

October 10, 2006 UPDATE: When you select "Image Only" link option, the HTML code you get assumes that you copy the graphic and host it on your site in the same directory as the page which contains this image. If you do not perform this step, you will not see an image on your page. This is NOT the same behavior as the "Text and Image" link option which gets the image from the Amazon server. I understand that Amazon is planning to make this process easier in the upcoming update. In the meantime, please read my comment to this post for what I suggest you should do to work around this issue.

7. You should copy the HTML produced and paste it on your site where you would like to feature the product.

8. You are not done yet! You must now copy the Product Preview JavaScript in section 4. This is what is going to enable the Product Preview on your page. Place this script anywhere inside the <BODY> tag of your site. You only need to do this once, no matter how many Product Links you have built on your page. They will all convert to Product Preview links! Now you are done!

If you already have text and/or image product links on your site, you must still follow the above steps (skip step 7) to get the JavaScript you will need to enable Product Previews.

If you have build the new Product Preview links on your site, please leave a comment and let me know your site -- I will review it and offer as an example for others to follow. Good luck!

Gene Kavner

Be Careful of Affiliate Spammers!

I was reading some blogs recently and have come across two reports titled "The Death of AdSense" and "Life After AdSense". 

A number of different blogs, some that I follow regularly, have discussed the report as a legitimate, thought-provoking analysis of the change in market conditions that have resulted in Google AdSense becoming an ineffective revenue-generation mechanism for an average Internet site.  The following is a list of blogs where I have found various discussions of this report:

• http://www.clicknewz.com/235/adsense-debate/
• http://www.sandbergventures.com/blog/2006/09/13/the-death-of-adsense/
• http://www.askjinger.com/2006/09/14/the-death-of-adsense/
• http://www.kedaiemas.com/blog/2006/09/22/the-life-after-adsense/
• Many other blog mentions from Technorati

Having contemplated various aspects of AdSense for much of the past several years, I yearned for an intellectual stimulation of a controversially-named report.  I then went ahead and downloaded it.  I came  to a realization of the true nature of this report this morning when I opened my inbox.  This realization and how it applies to affiliate marketing is behind my current post.

My first warning of something strange happened while I read the report.  It was very poorly worded and the two major points it made were repeated over and over for the entire duration of 50+ pages it  contained.  In my estimate, the points the report made could be discussed, even in detail, in as few as perhaps 5 pages.  There was another fundamental problem with the report.  It made very broad assertions  without any back-up of those assertions.  None of the examples it provided were believable and seemed to be targeted to the uneducated, ill-informed audience.  Lastly, the report writer had his own affiliate  program, claiming to pay $0.50 to anyone who distributes his free report.  So, what was his business model?

To spare you the trouble of downloading the report, I will quickly state the two major points it made:

• AdSense is "dead" because it significantly lowered payouts when Google separated the advertiser platform from a single advertising marketplace where advertisers bid on combined, AdWords (Google Search)  and AdSense (publisher network) into two marketplaces where advertisers bid separately on AdWords and AdSense.  The writer claims that this caused the advertisers to bid significantly less on AdSense inventory,  resulting in smaller payouts to individual web sites that display AdSense ads.  This assertion is well-documented and has clear business reasons for Google and advertisers who vocally complained about  the combined AdWords/AdSense advertising marketplace.


• Publishers should instead engage in "Click Flipping", a technique by which they themselves bid on AdSense or AdWords keywords at pennies per click, lead the user to their own site where they "convince" him or her  to provide an email address which the publisher should later sell to anyone wishing to pay per free lead at significantly higher price.

The fact that a number of bloggers have covered this report in a positive manner has shown me that if one ignores the poor writing, Death to AdSense and Life After Adsense are believable reports to an average reader.  I  also have no doubt that as a result of this blog coverage, quite a number of unsuspecting people have downloaded the free reports. 

Let's take a look  at the concept of "Click Flipping".  While the Internet was full of people who paid significant amounts for "free leads" in the late 1990's, the big Internet bust of 2000 quickly eliminated anyone paying so  much in large quantities to grab a "free lead".  It is simply not possible to have a single customer pay more for an opt-in email address than an average publisher site can spend in obtaining this lead.    What is lucrative is having an opportunity for you to obtain the lead and then sell the lead to a large number of customers, none of who really care how you got the email address in the first place, as long  as it is a valid address.  This group is conventionally described as unsolicited mailers or spammers.

What the report effectively teaches you is that obtaining someone's email address and selling it to a large group of spammers is a valid business model which will cause the "Death of AdSense".  Whether this  is the business you ultimately want to be in depends on your ethics.  It also depends on whether you would like to live on the edge of the law that has significant criminal penalties for generating and  abetting un-requested emails.  I am sure that very few of my readers, readers of the Death of AdSense report, and bloggers discussing this report are interested in this business  model.  And this brings me to the last two points of this post.

1.  It seems that the big motivation for why these bloggers have implicitly and explicitly  encouraged distribution of these reports is because of the hefty affiliate payout ($0.50 per download) that the writers of these reports have offered.  Have we as a community become so complacent that we are  willing to endanger our credibility by promoting a senseless piece of material in the hope of an affiliate payout?  I certainly hope that this case allows us all to revisit the business we are in and the  service we are offering to our readers.

2.  Lastly, back to the business model of The Death of AdSense and Life After AdSense.  It seems that all of us who have downloaded the reports have become victims of the very same business model that the report is encouraging.    Any business model that allows payouts of $0.50 for each distribution of the report has to make that back somewhere.  And where better can it make the money back if not to sell every email address generated  from its promotion to a large number of unsolicited marketers, one at a time, perhaps for pennies per name, until the total pay-back is far larger than the $0.50 it cost to generate the address in the  first place?  The following is the unsolicited email message I received this morning at the address I only provided at the time I downloaded the reports.  I now fully expect a large number of such emails  without any ability for me to ever put any stop to them in the future.

Would love your thoughts,

Gene Kavner

How to make money with Amazon Associates

With millions of products available for sale via Amazon Associates, Amazon.com has built a premier affiliate program.  However, with so much flexibility, the program's complexity frequently presents a challenge to both new publishers and current publishers.  As a result, many of you either let your links get outdated or you simply fail to keep up with many of the new features added by the Amazon Associates team.  This post and my upcoming posts will try to make it all easier for you.

So, which sites make the best Amazon affiliates?

Sites that make the best Amazon affiliates are well-organized with unique content about a particular topic for which Amazon sells products.  For example, sites with news about the latest cell phones would be perfect affiliates, linking to Amazon to fulfill their readers' demand for the latest, hottest gadgets.  My site is all about making money with affiliate programs, so I will be adding my own Amazon store full of excellent reading material about making money with your sites.

How do you make money with Amazon Associates program?

Amazon will pay you a percentage of revenues it generates from visitors that click over to Amazon from your site.  The amount depends on which compensation option you select. 

Compensation Option 1:  Performance Fee Structure

This is the default compensation structure.  As you will see, this is the only compensation structure you should use.

With this compensation structure, your commission rate is based on how many Amazon products you sell during any quarter, with the base commission being 4% going all the way up to 8.5%.  Here's the chart of the Performance Fee Structure:

Compensation Option 2:  Classic Fee Structure

This is a legacy fee structure that no longer makes sense for the publishers.  It pays a flat 4% commission on all sales.  Since 4% is the minimum commission in the Performance Fee Structure (Option 1), going up based on your sales volume, I suggest you do not consider Option 2. 

Since Option 1 is the default option, there is nothing that you need to do to select it.  The rest of my post will assume you have selected Compensation Option 1:  Performance Fee Structure.

Performance Fee Structure Considerations

There are a number of very important considerations that you should keep in mind:

• Referral-Fee Rate is retroactive.  This means that if you sell 1,000 items during the calendar quarter, your commission will be 7.5% on all of the non-electronic items you sold that quarter.
• Your commission on Electronics items will be 4% regardless of how many items you have sold during the quarter.  However, Electronics items do count towards your item total, so if you sell 20 Electronic items and 1 non-Electronic item, the non-Electronic item will generate a 6% commission for you.
• It is far better to sell 100 items priced at $10 each than 10 items priced at $100 each.  In the former case, you will earn $65 in commissions ($1000 in sales * 6.5% based on 100 sales = $65 in commissions).  In the latter case, you will earn $40 in commissions ($1000 in sales * 4% based on 10 sales = $40 in commissions).  Thus, you'll do better by selling more, lower-priced items than fewer higher-priced items.
• This fee structure applies to all products you sell that quarter, regardless of the links you used to promote them.  Thus, if you sell 20 products via the Amazon aStore and 10 products via the Omakase links, this means that you sold 30 products that quarter and your commission structure will reflect this quantity.
• You cannot receive any commission on sales you make to yourself.  However, anything you can do to encourage your website visitors and your friends/family to shop via your links will enable you to make money with Amazon Associates.

In my future post I will discuss how to build links to Amazon, including tips and tricks of navigating through the maze of link options Amazon has given you.