12.02.06
Posted in money making, web
at 12:23 pm
Pasted from Amazon Associate’s newsletter…
As a user of Omakase Links, you may want to know that the Amazon Associates program recently enhanced the display of these links. Product images in Omakase ads now include discount stickers showing the percentage that our price has been discounted from the regular list price for Amazon products. Amazon.com customers appreciate this added information, and we believe your site visitors will as well. This feature was requested by many Associates worldwide, and we thought it was a great idea.
This feature has been applied to all active Omakase ads on the bottom right corner of the product images where the discount is greater than 10%. We have also enabled you to turn this feature off by going to the Build Links page for Omakase and selecting the “Remove Discount Sticker†pulldown from the Amazon Discount menu option.
Remember that all items referred through Omakase Links between November 14, 2006 and December 31, 2006 earn an extra 4% (up to $500 per Associate). Omakase – Leave it up to us!
I like updates which require no action from my side.
amazon, omakase, ads
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10.11.06
Posted in javascript, money making, web
at 12:21 pm
So, not much to be said really. You add piece of javascript to the bottom of your page, and add some kind of link to some kind of great book about game design, like Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design
and you’re done. It’s just great. If not for selling products, at least for presenting them. It’s like linking weird words to wikipedia – I suppose not everyone knows what game design is, so why not let wikipedia explain them? And if someone doesn’t remember how does Nokia 6682 Phone
look like, they can just hover their mouses over the link and look at it without leaving current web page – which probably will be exceptionally useful for those who are scared (or just simply hate) when they’re redirected to some online store and think everyone’s trying to steal their credit card number. :)
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09.09.06
Posted in money making, web
at 07:52 pm
What the heck? This post has been erased… probably by the evil EDGE modem I use. So, where was I?
The idea behind affiliate networks is simple, but cool – gather as much merchants and webmasters as they can. They attract each other – it’s easy for webmasters to sign up just to one service – for free – and pick from thousands of affiliates. And earn money.
Likewise, merchants must like the idea of registering on one web and then choosing from thousands of webs to refer to their products/services (or allow anyone to link to them).
On Shareasale, one of these affiliate networks, currently 90% of 2080 affiliate merchants use Pay-Per-Sale program, so there’s only little chance of fraud, unlike in pay-per-click programs. (Approximately 10% are Pay-Per-Lead and only 0.5% are Pay-Per-Click programs, which are available only to webmasters who already recieved their first payment (earned more than $50 on Shareasale).)
The idea behind affiliate networks, like Shareasale, is great – you put some relevant links/banner to your web and get payed when merchant really sells something – in theory, merchant, Shareasale and you are all happy, because you’re earning. Where’s the catch? I don’t know, but most merchants are just so damn offtopic for most webs I can imagine. Can you imagine blog about pool supplies, “including spa and pool supplies and accessories”? Or gift baskets? Quality machine made and hand made area rugs, anyone? OK, I’m of course there are sites where these would fit, I’m just used to more universal and/or tech-oriented offers.
Piece of warning. There is bunch of pretty lame merchants out there. When you get paid, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your visitor / their customer doesn’t get ripped off. I’ve seen there dozens of “submit your site to million search engines” and “earn tons of cash by filling up surveys”. I don’t trust these cheap types with questionable reputation. When you link to someone who fools your visitors, you got your visitors fooled. Think what it will do to your reputation.
Further reading: rather comprehensive list of affiliate networks.
affiliate, money making, shareasale, money, blog, earning
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08.30.06
Posted in money making, web
at 04:10 pm
Idea behind Omakase links is clear – contextual advertising with one important advantage over classical contextual ads (like AdSense) – Amazon’s “unique understanding of the site, the user, and the page itself” (we can ignore “the site, the page itself” part, as it just means “our bot will crawl and analyse your page”). Amazon is well-known for their (IMHO excellent) user tracking and suggesting products related to those already bought, viewed and wishlisted. But then of course, AdSense terms and conditions forbid you to have another contextual ads on page, so it’s either it or Omakase, never both. AdSense support stated that “At this time, I can confirm that you may run Omakase ads and AdSense ads on the same pages as they are considered affiliate ads.” – which is nice. I’m gonna try it right now.
So, what’s the aStore thingie? Usually I don’t like things that are described by “professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills“, but their demo page intrigued me. It’s tempting to have “your own” Amazon store. So, how do you create one?
- Login to you Amazon.com Associates Central.
- Click on aStore beta link, then “build now” button.
- Select up to nine featured products that will be displayed on front page. Use user friendly search to add them and then add up to 128 char description if you want to. Preview store or continue if your satisfied.
- Select categories (e.g. books, baby, electronics, music, software) and [optional] subcategories (e.g. in books: Computer & Internet, Law, Medicine, Science, Romance) and [optional] filter for each one (I chose to show only books with keyword “php”). It currently doesn’t support operators like “,”, “+”, “and”, “or” in their search. Amazon claims that best results will be displayed without filtering in place. When you’re done, you can again preview your store.
- Next step will be boring – or so I thought. Choosing colors is done in neat javascripty user-friendly way. Then you type store title and url of company logo.
- Well now, do you want to have sidebar on the left or right side? Do you want to include Listmania, Similar Items, visitor’s Wishlist, Customers who bought this also bought… and Accessories? Where do you want to include it, in Featured Products, Product Detail Page, Search Result Page, Shopping Cart Page? Do you want to include Customer Reviews and/or Editorial Revies in Product Detail Page? It’s all as easy as [un]checking 15 checkboxes with javascripty mouseover preview. Couldn’t have been more simple.
- Get link, code for inline frame (width is 750px) or code for frameset. And see the results in this browser window/tab or get scared by inline implementation on web with insufficient space.
Looking good there. Just one miniature problem – getting people to click it and buy something :D But I guess this web isn’t suitable for such things, but I’m sure many webmasters will be exceptionally pleased to have amazon store integrated on web. Nice move, Amazon.com.
omakase, aStore, Amazon, money making, affiliates
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04.05.06
Posted in freelance, money making, webdev
at 12:27 am
It’s been some time since I’ve finished last job. Well, today I’ve finally recieved money from last thing I’ve done – bugfixes on kvhf.be. It was interesting experience since the site is bilingual and neither language is English, so sometimes it took me a while to understand ‘what the heck should this page do?’
Anyway, I’ve “met” (if you consider Skyping, Yahooing and emailing as meeting) empathic and thankful client – it’s nice to hear “could you please” and “I enjoy working with you” instead of “why it isn’t done yet?”. I hope I’ll work with him again, but in any case, I still can use Get A Freelancer to find another job – now with 3 ratings with average score 9.67. Cool.
money, earning, freelance, job
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02.06.06
Posted in SEO, freelance, money making, web
at 06:02 pm
Well, there are thousands of bloggers with few hundreds visits a month and they are happy that they’ve created something that people actually read. But most bloggers would like to monetise their blog – so how much traffic do they need? Thousands of visitors every month? Thousands of visitors every day?
Well, if you’ve read Steve Pavlina’s statistics, you’ve realised that you’ll probably need some 70k visits a month to earn $50 for starting up blog or 250k visits to earn $500. Way to go, way to go…
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12.09.05
Posted in freelance, money making, webdev
at 11:08 am
Well, some money at last. In fact, it’s only $90, because Get-A-Freelancer took 10% as project fee, but still nice for one week work.
Maybe I’ve been lucky to get relatively easy project, except that I’ve had to use PHP 4 and some strange XML library instead of sweet sweet SimpleXML from PHP 5. Anyway, that guy promised me some more work, so I won’t have to waste another $15 per $100 (I think) by withdrawing money by Western Union.
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