Advertising

New Amazon Context Links

A couple of days ago, I read on the 5 star blog that Amazon has announced the public beta for a brand new linking technology for the amazon associates program – Context links beta.

Today, I finally decided to check out the new links and try and figure out what they are.

After playing around a little bit with context links on some of my sites, I’m starting to think that Amazon is already taking the newly-found competition from Google pretty seriously. In one word, the new context linking is revolutionary – and I am not exaggerating!

So, What are context links?:
Context links are a cool way to monetize your content rich websites (and blogs) using the amazon associates program.

Put up a javascript code before your </body> tag, and the code will do the rest; i.e place links on special keywords like names of authors who’s books are sold on amazon, Brand names who’s products are sold on amazon or the product names themselves; the text will automatically get linked to the product page on amazon. Not only that, you can also add some blin to your blog by selecting the feature where if users hover their mouse over the link, a snap like popup with the product name, image, rating, and price is displayed.

Okay, so It’s not that something like this hasn’t been done before, such links have been around for a long time on lesser advertising platforms, but this is the first time that a major affiliate program that actually pays per sale has come up with such a linking method. Besides, Amazon sells almost EVERYTHING! so there shouldn’t be need to “optimize” your content or something like that. whatever you write about there will probably be something on amazon selling around the subject.

Other cool features?
Sure, you can:

1. select the number of context links you want to display on each page.
2. Choose to make the context links stand out by customizing their look with a different color and an extra underline
3. Select not to include context links in parts of your content (code available in FAQs)
4. Completely configure the sample preview mouseover popup.
5. Increase conversions by selecting to link only products from select amazon categories

Drawbacks?

1. It makes your pages slower to load, it’s written in javascript and calls a .js file from a remote server.
2. Still in beta, some links are not going to the right places and I can’t see any context links when I open my webpage in IE (they are there on firefox).

I think I am in like with these new links already, there’s the slowing down of the website thing that’s kinda bad, but over all a brilliant product from amazon – now let’s see how much actual revenue it can generate!

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Tags: blogging, web 2.0