Comments on: Amazon Announce Amazon Widgets for Associates

By: Buy Anime

Buy Anime — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:08:46 +0000

I make limited use of the widgets; what’s more important to me is the layout of the site, the colors being used, and the construction of proper meta tags.

What people need to understand is that the amazon affiliate site needs to load as fast as possible.. the shopper’s experience must be as easy as possible.. and the search engines should not have “to struggle” in order “to read” what the site’s content is about.

By: Saiakew Diary of Affiliates

Saiakew Diary of Affiliates — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:05:19 +0000

I never applied any other except simple text link.
But this time, the recent widget are cool. I wil ltry one in near future

Thanks for this anyway

By: Oliver Chesler

Oliver Chesler — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 07:55:34 +0000

Hi Darren,

Do you think the javascript issue is a big one? On my newest blog Im considering using the Quicklinker whenever I mention any product. What percentage of people use adblockers? I want my blog to be as futureproof as possible.

By the way if your on a mac a little tip is check out a program called Textexpander… it lets you have a little text and trigger it with a key combo. It will even put the cursor in the middle of the expanded text. So this is perfect for quicklinker… no affilation with that software by the way… just something I use.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:25:55 +0000

Cool widgets … but all of the Amazon widgets incorporate javascript. This means it will not work on sites like MySpace that block javascript.

If you want to display your Amazon wishlist on any social website (including MySpace) — use the first flash based Amazon wishlist on the web — http://www.JunkIWant.com

By: Melody

Melody — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 22:00:58 +0000

It seems google is getitng on board with widgets too. I have to say, your advice on ads and what it does to newer blogs was well headed. I ended up scaring off more than a few subscribers with my adsense implementation. I am excited about the widgets though and think it might have a different effect because they are useful.

By: Israel

Israel — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:59:22 +0000

awesome, i have been an associate for a while but havent used them in a few months. time to start again.

By: Irie

Irie — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:07:11 +0000

Thank you so much for this information. I wanted to monetize my site and was looking into Affiliates. Your information was timely and I have always used Amazon products, so naturally it made sense to offer it to others. Thanks

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 22:03:28 +0000

My blog has only been running for a little over a month now but I find the astore to be my best earner so far. It’s only one or two sales a week at the moment but it’s steady and I could see it growing.

By: Todd K. Edwards

Todd K. Edwards — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:27:36 +0000

I was messing with these new widgets for amazon last night, and really like the improvement. Hope they continue to spice these up for us bloggers!!

By: Protestant

Protestant — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:05:51 +0000

I also haven’t had much luck with Amazon, but I’ll definitely give the new widgets a try.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:13:41 +0000

I haven’t had much luck with Amazon but these new widgets are at least something to play around with, hopefully I’ll have better luck with them.

By: Coqui

Coqui — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:48:52 +0000

I’ll take a look at these at the weekend. I need to utilize amazon better on my site, although in my travel niche, I’m a bit limited. The slideshow might be useful.

Thanks Darren for the heads up…

By: Jermayn Parker

Jermayn Parker — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 05:22:04 +0000

I have played with affilities and have some scattered on my website and like what I see so far.

I am thinking of a new redesign so when that happens I will incorporate some of these widgets, as some look tasty indeed :)

By: Harri Lammi

Harri Lammi — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 04:47:25 +0000

Peter Cooper,

I’ve thought about the same thing. One solution which works for text links is link cloaking. It means you create a wrapper for your affiliate link, e.g. yoursite.com/your_amazon_aff.php. When the user clicks the link, the PHP page finds out where the user is from and sends him to the right site. This kind of scripts can be found by googleing “php visitor country”.

But I’m also waiting Amazon to solve this issue :)

By: Chris Coyier

Chris Coyier — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 04:03:56 +0000

I think these new widgets from Amazon are spectacular. There are enough different styles of them that they really should fit a lot of different sites needs.

By: Peter Cooper

Peter Cooper — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:21:53 +0000

I need to look into this more deeply, but one thing Amazon needs to do to enter the 21st century is to automatically show products in the visitor’s region, rather than the one you use. It’s annoying when you put Amazon.com ads, then UK users don’t see UK prices / products.. so you lose out on sales, etc, and the same vice versa :(

By: Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:12:52 +0000

geomark – yes they have lower commissions (although it depends on the item – I earn around 8% on some items with Amazon) and shorter cookies than some – however there are a lot of people who still make a lot of money from them.

Here’s a post I wrote on the topic – 9 Reasons Why I am an Amazon Affiliate – it shares why I use Amazon and why it’s one of my biggest earners now.

By: geomark

geomark — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 02:30:38 +0000

Is it true that Amazon still has a 4% starting commission rate and 1 day cookie duration? If so, then why would anyone waste a single minute on them? So many other merchant affiliate programs with decent commission rate and cookie duration. If you are driving enough traffic to make money with Amazon you could kill with dozens of other merchants.

By: Bill

Bill — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:25:31 +0000

I use Amazon whenever I talk about a product and have found it to be a pretty good source of income – it’s just one heck of a hassle to build a proper associate link.

The “Quick Linker” looked promising until I realized it required JavaScript. One of the benefits of building traditional Associate links is that they won’t be blocked if your visitor is using Ad blocking or JavaScript blocking software.

With “Quick Linker” it looks like any visitors with blocking software is going to see broken links whenever a writer tried quick linking to an Amazon product – not good.

In all I think these are some great additions to the service, I just wish Amazon would work on fixing up their method for generating basic text links.

By: Rob Malon

Rob Malon — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:10:04 +0000

Its about time they spiced those up a bit.