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I use Amazon affiliate links on my blog. If I'm reviewing a book, or piece of kit, I make the links point at Amazon's UK site with my tracking ID. If a user c
by edent 12y ago
I use Amazon affiliate links on my blog. If I'm reviewing a book, or piece of kit, I make the links point at Amazon's UK site with my tracking ID.
If a user clicks on the link, and either buys the product or something else, I get ~6% of the purchase price.
In a good quarter (100 - 200k views) I can make ~£150. Not "quit my job" money, but "offsets the hosting, and lets me buy toys" cash.
Downsides are:
- UK only. There's no (easy) way to send US traffic to the Amazon.com site. So all my international traffic isn't making me money.
- Not all my blog posts talk about a product. So I can go months without any new "money making" content.
- Can feel a bit scummy. I'm conscious that I'm writing a post not to impart information, but to entice people to click on links.
- While AdBlock doesn't seem to interfere with the links, services like Ghostery do.
Overall, I'd say that running a blog is cheap. You probably don't need advertising on it. You're not going to make retirement money unless you're literally getting millions of hits per day.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago> - While AdBlock doesn't seem to interfere with the links, services like Ghostery do. If you're using an ordinary link, it shouldn't; are you using some kind of magic JavaScript from Amazon or an affiliate handling service there?
- edent 12y agoJust a regular HTML link to Amazon which includes `&tag=whatever` on it. Ghostery will throw up a warning if you've asked it to block affiliate links (and rightly so).
- slig 12y ago> There's no (easy) way to send US traffic to the Amazon.com site You can run a small snippet of JS that replaces all the links with amazon.co.uk to amazon.com. You have to figure out that the user is from the US (maybe reading the Accept-Language, don't know if that's reliable) // untested var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a'); for (i=0; i<links.length; i++){ var link = links[i]; if (link.href.match(/amazon.co.uk/)) link.href = link.href.replace('.co.uk', '.com') }
- unwiredben 12y agonavigator.language will return a string like "en-US", "en-GB", or "fr-FR" depending on the user's selected locale. That could be used to map different Amazon URLs, although it looks like you may get a fair number of en-US false reports. See https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#navigatorlanguage https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#navig....