Amazon Associate

I have just become an Amazon.com Associate, which means I will be getting a 105% commission on any books sold that were recommended through my blog. While this will not yield a high payout as pointed out by John Chow on his blog, it will still help me considerably. I will be recommending a lot of books and PSP games in the future, and if any of you ever decide to purchase it I might as well get something out of it.

There are several tools that work with Amazon’s Affiliate program, one of them being integrated into a service I am already using: Feedburner. This tool adds my Associate ID to all the links pointing to Amazon.com. However I do not have it enabled for a simple reason; it only modifies my RSS feed. Most people will read this blog through their web browser and click the links there, so it is very important for me to include the ID in the page.

Apart from referrals, Amazon offers different types of banner ads. One is the “Recommendations” type which lets the publisher type in 4 keywords and the ad will display books according to them. But it does not seem to work very well, because I tried keywords like “physics”, “school” and “study guide” and the books recommended were some novels. Another type is “Search Box”, which just inserts, you guessed it, an Amazon.com search box. This will not be useful for a blog because the visitors are here for the content and not to search other websites. Another type is the “Context Links”, but they are still in beta testing. When I tried it, I could not see the ad on my blog, so I will wait for it to become stable and then switch to it. Ads based on context are the best because they match the reader’s current interests and expand on the topic discussed in my post. The final type that I looked at is called the “Omakase Links” and it claims to show books based on my web site and the visitor’s shopping habits. It will take some time for it to gather this information, so I have no idea how well it will work, but I am willing to test it. You can see it on the right sidebar under links, so buy away. 🙂

I end this post with my first recommendation: Chili Con Carnage. This is a great game for the PSP system because it is just the perfect mix of fun and challenges. Since it focuses more on the style of a kill instead on the aiming, it is quite simple for those of us with bad hand-eye coordination. Also you can do different moves like walking on a wall when shooting. The game is a mix between Tony Hawn Skateboarding and your average third person shooter.