Amazon adds more features to widgets

Since launching affiliate widgets in september last year, Amazon announced today that affliates have created over 200,000 of these nifty web 2.0 marketing small-wonders already.

“Many of you came back with great suggestions and we’ve picked the most requested features and implemented them in this release.”

Amazon also announced today the addition of various new features that are being added to associate widgets starting today. Some of these new features include:

• Shuffle Products: While building ‘My Favorites’ and ‘Slideshow’ widgets, associates can now select the Shuffle Products option to show your products in random order each time the widget is displayed. one can also go to My Widgets and enable this option in previously saved widgets
• Default Search Term: With the new ‘Use default search term’ option in the Search widget you can specify a search term that will be used to populate the Search widget when it is first displayed. Remember, you can always add a default search term to previously saved widgets by going to My Widgets and editing your saved Search widgets
• Delete Widgets: Is your My Widgets page cluttered with widgets that you no longer use? Use the delete icon besides each widget on the My Widgets page to permanently delete unused widgets
• Tracking Ids: Monitoring your widgets with custom Tracking Ids has never been easier. You can now easily change the tracking id associated with each widget by locating the widget on My Widgets and clicking the change link in the Tracking Id column.

Power to affiliate widgetry!

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First(?) Widget ad spotted on CJ

No, Commission Junction hasn’t joined the cool affiliate networks and launched a widget advertising platform.

GAP, who have an affiliate program there, today announced something they call an AdPod - It’s a javascript that can be embedded to your website, and the widget will use meta-tags and keywords to dynamically display products and ads from gap that complement your web-page’s content; much like how adsense works with text-ads from google.

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Google’s widget ads announced

Suddenly, a lot of major players have started announcing widget advertising initiatives. This time, it’s google announcing the launch of their widget gadget ads, which will now be available to select adwords advertisers.

Google Gadget Ads have been spotted before, but now Google made them official with a press release – albeit they’re still only available to some select AdWords advertisers. Gadget Ads, as opposed to normal text link or image ads, contain interactive content such as Flash or HTML connected to a potentially updating data source… as they’re part of the iGoogle gadgets API. Google presents a gadget ad example (a small Flash game, basically) saying that of the 94.5 million impressions the ad got, it was interacted with 0.3% of the time.

Google Gadget Ads - Google Blogoscoped

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BTW, In other (bigger) google news that I just read (I’m catching up with the RSS feeds after almost a week of social media inactivity), Adsense for Mobile was also announced yesterday!

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Amazon 2.0s it’s affiliate program even more, launches (monetizable) Widgets

After context-links, Amazon has taken yet another step to let the latest generation of internet publishers make use of amazon’s huge catalog to monetize their web properties/presence.

According to a press release sent out earlier today…

“Bloggers and active online social networkers have asked us for a fun and interesting way to display Amazon products on their pages as a way to showcase their favorite things. With Amazon Widgets, they can now do this and make money at the same time,” said Sean McMullan, Manager, Amazon Associates.

Amazon today launched seven new widgets in the Amazon Widgets Gallery, and there are more specialized widgets coming soon.

Some of the widgets released today (available at widgets.amazon.com) include widgets for wish lists, product searches, product previews, slideshows and amazon unbox videos previews.

This widget below is a tag cloud of some of the popular products on amazon:

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Widgets now live on shareasale

Brian littleton just twittered that shareasale’s much anticipated widget ad platform has just been activated.

Update: Announcement on shareasale’s blog.

As an affiliate, you can now preview and retrieve widget code for live use. Have fun!!!

Click the yellow link under the “Get Links” menu titled “Get Widgets”….

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P.S: this is my first blog post from a mobile phone ever!

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Chitika introduces “Linx” - in-content contextual text ads

Chitika - A favourite CPC product ad platform of many bloggers has just introduced “linx”, a new system similar to Amazon’s Context Links that will automatically identify key products/keywords mentioned in the content on a website or blog and link those keywords to product comparison listings from the chitika network (which, if I remember correctly, runs on top of the shopping.com API)

As can be seen in the image, chitika’s javascript code will automatically recognize product names and keywords from a blog’s content and double-underline them, if a user hovers their mouse cursor over any of these links, they see the chitika widget pop up with links - monetized for the blogger - to products on various online stores via chitika’s network.

This new system is currently in closed beta and available only to select chitika publishers by invitation.

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Linkshare testing widget-ads

The Internet’s first big affiliate network - Linkshare, is also one of the first affiliate networks to be able to adapt itself to the new internet.

Linkshare is currently beta testing an ad network that they will be opening up to bloggers and product review sites called Linkshare Showcase. This network will focus on specific products from leading merchants and allow publishers to highly customize the ads with features and reviews. Publishers will be able to choose which products they want to recommend to their users from participating merchants

Reports Salvo.ws

Linkshare showcase is what will probably be a linkshare sub-network targeted towards bloggers and other web2.0 ish content heavy websites that will offer:

• One simple interface for choosing the products you want.
• One small piece of Javascript to copy and paste onto your site.
• LinkShare Showcase is optimized for peak performance.
• No waiting for your money. Fast payments, from the first $1.

There are, of course, other companies that offer such advertising networks, linkshare, however, is the first major affiliate network to talk about offering widget-merchandizing besides shareasale, which started offering widget ads earlier this month

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eBay takes on Auctionads with “togo”

Just saw this on techcrunch. Looks like e-Bay’s answer to AuctionAds. Not sure if it’s possible to integrate tracking code into the widgets, but I’m sure that’s comming soon. Meanwhile, the widget is great for ebay sellers with blogs and web-stores.

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