Amazon Affiliate program members have received an email today announcing the new referral fee rates for the second quarter of 2006. There are a few significant changes.

The first is a ‘simplified’ structure for link premiums. As you’ll see from the following image the commission earned has increased in each number of items shipped except for 1-20 items when it goes down by 1%.

This covers all products EXCEPT consumer electronics which will now earn a flat 4% fee regardless of units volume.

It also means the loss of the ‘direct link premium’ which was confusing but it was also quite lucrative for some publishers who now how to use it. This means that instead of getting 7.5% commission on CE products if you use direct links to specific products you’ll be getting 4% – quite a hit!

This is disappointing for me as someone who makes most of his money in the Amazon program by referring business to Amazon in the form of gadgets. I understand that the margin on electronics is not high but this will lead to significant downturns in income for some publishers.

I’m not sure that this is really a good move from Amazon – while the percentages are very small they do have an impact, especially when you’re selling products that are worth thousands of dollars. For example I had one sale today that earned me $30 (it was at 7.5% commission from a direct link premium) – if the same sale went through in a few days time it would be almost halved.

My own Amazon earnings are not massive (I stand to loose an estimated $400+ a quarter) but I do know some CE publishers who look carefully at these tiers and work very hard to climb them and I can imagine the feedback Amazon will get as a result of this announcement as a result of their income being slashed.

Update – the Amazon publisher discussion boards are going crazy. The main compaints:

• Not enough notice – on the second last day of the quarter they tell of the changes
• No acknowledgement that the changes will impact some people hard – the email notification presents it as if it was the publishers who asked for the changes. They may have asked for a simpler structure but no one asked for a cut on earnings of up to 50%.
• The only people who seem to benefit from this are those who send untargetted traffic to Amazon. The ones who go to the effort of directly linking to specific products will lose out.
• Amazon has previously promised no more major changes to their commission structure.
• Other CE affiliates offer 5% with 30 day cookies – Amazon is now down to 4% with 1 day cookies – many are suggesting other alternatives and are talking about moving on from Amazon.

To say that there is real anger among Amazon publishers would be an understatement and there are lots of people calling for people to let Amazon know what they think of the changes.

Contact Details:

Amazon Associates: 701-787-9740 (US number)
Email: [email protected]

Here’s a tip that I shared with ProBlogger Newsletter subscribers a couple of weeks back (slightly adapted).

Those of you who use BlogAds.com ads on your blogs will probably notice that the service allows you to offer free ads using a promotional code.

This enables you to offer free ads to advertisers or to run some of your own ads on your blog.

The idea of running your own ads on your own blog might seem a little odd at first, but it has a number of benefits.

Firstly it gives the perception that your blog is in demand for advertisers - this could well entice other advertisers to sign up.

Secondly it gives you an easy way to highlight products that you might want to highlight. Particularly you might like to highlight an affiliate program that has relevance to your blog.

I’ve been doing this a bit lately on one of my blogs with some success. Here’s all you have to do:

[Read more...]

There was some good news for Clickbank Affiliates on their ClickBank Web Log a couple of days ago. They’ve added search capabilities to their Marketplace area (where affiliates go to find products to promote). This has been a much needed feature and something many will be very happy to see.

If you’re unfamiliar with them you might be interested in reading my review of the ClickBank program.

Some Clickbank affiliates (including me) have been having problems logging into their admin area over the past day or two.

On reporting difficulties logging in publishers get the following message from Clickbank:

“Due to an attempted denial-of-service attack that started Sunday, we have been filtering suspect traffic. It is possible that if you are sharing an IP (such as AOL web proxies) with a zombie computer on the same network, you may be temporarily blocked from reaching our site. This will not affect the ability of customers on “clean” IP’s from reaching our site.”

No news on when we’ll be back online at this point.

update: They look like they are back up and running again.

Perhaps I’m a little slow on the update here and they’ve been doing it a while but today I noticed for the first time that Gizmodo have started linking to products in Amazon with their affiliate ID (see screen cap left) – obviously trying out the Amazon Associates Program.

I’d actually wondered why they hadn’t done this previously as it seems such a logical move to make. They are constantly featuring gadgets that are in the Amazon range so it makes sense to add this income stream to their numerous advertising options.

My own experience with affiliate links like these is that they are nowhere near as lucrative as contextual advertising in terms of conversion but when you have a critical mass of visitors to your blog the income derived does add up. The key is to make the links as relevant to the content as possible – ie this is what Gizmodo is doing in only linking to products in Amazon that match with the actual product that they are writing about.

This method does take a little extra work to set up (ie finding the product and adding the link) but it’s been worth the investment of time for me over the last year or so.

I was just surfing through SitePoint forums this afternoon and came across a thread that was well worth a read. It starts with a post by a guy by the name of Jon who posts a screen capture of his Commission Junction affiliate earnings. In the last couple of months he’s earned over $81,000.

Now one needs to take posts about high earnings with a little caution because they are often followed with a ‘buy my e-book’ link. But in this case I think he’s the genuine deal and offers some very good advice to others wanting to follow in his footsteps.

Unfortunately the thread degenerates into a flame war over whether his screenshots are real and it all gets pretty snarky at times – but it’s worth persisting for his advice as he goes. I’ve included a few of his comments below.

Keep in mind that he doesn’t reveal his sites, and I don’t blame him for this, but does reveal at one point that at least some of them have a financial focus. He used to do adult sites but has gone more ‘mainstream’ and has been at this since 1994 (worth remembering – this is a long term game). Here’s a little of what Jon has to say:

[Read more...]

If you’re looking for a reasonably simple way to integrate the Amazon affiliate program into your blog you might like to check out MotionMall which is a service that is specifically for this purpose.

MotionMall leads you through a four part process of designing your ad unit selecting the topic of the ads you wish to show, selecting the category of Amazon you want ads to be drawn from, giving some contact information and then getting the code to paste into your blog.

The design of the ads is limited to two ad unit sizes (728 x 90 and 160 x 600) and 13 color themes (each has two options giving you 26 options). The designs will suit some blogs better than others.

The ads that it shows (there is one to the left) use flash to make them more interactive (ie on live ads if you click the arrows at the top and bottom of the product they will scroll to new ones and if you hover over the circles at the top it will give you options to view different categories of products from within Amazon.

Pros of MotionMall

You do not directly pay for these ads, but indirectly it does cost you as 15% of the ads shown have MotionMall’s Amazon affiliate code imbedded into them (the other 85% have your own). 15% is not too bad when you consider that some ad networks take 50% of the income earned from your site.

You don’t have to deal with MotionMall directly apart from generating the code. Payments still come from Amazon. You will need to have an Amazon Affiliate program membership (you can use this with either Amazon.com, Amazon UK or Amazon Canada).

Another thing in it’s favor is that these ads are non contextual and can therefor be used in conjunction with programs like AdSense and YPN. In fact it’s not difficult to set them up as alternative ads for these programs.

[Read more...]

Today’s post in the b5media 12 Days of Christmas series is another post by Hsien-Hsien Lei. She previously posted about ethics for science and health bloggers but this time she’s showing her diversity of blogging interests by writing about Product Placement on Consumer Blogs.

Hi. I’m Hsien-Hsien Lei and I write not only Genetics and Health but also Play Library. The approaches to these two blogs are dramatically different. For Genetics and Health, I present science/health news and analysis with no specific intention of selling anything (aside from the occasional book). For Play Library, it’s a constant show-and-tell of toys, book and things for children.

Almost all of the affiliate links I use on Play Library are from the Amazon Associates Program. It’s the most straightforward and comprehensive products catalog online. Amazon also makes it incredibly easy to create product links. Initially, I inserted the pre-fab ad buttons and banners into every post. They were ugly, but functional, and I did get the occasional sale.

When Arieanna Foley’s Cooking Gadgets blog went live, though, I knew I had a lot to learn. She was making sales left and right without a single ad button or banner in sight. Learning from Arieanna‚s successful example requires a little more work and these are the steps I now take for Play Library posts featuring products:
[Read more...]