You all know I make money blogging about knitting. Since that works fairly well, I decided I’d start thing blog to create another revenue stream. Knowing you can’t make money until you have visitors, I initially building traffic and links. I’ve got some now, so I need to work on testing out a full range of monetizing methods.
Today, I’m testing Amazon’s Omakaze links.
Amazon provides a simple code you can insert on your web pages; they promise to deliver appropriate targeted ads. Will they be appropriate? Will anyone click, buy and make me money?
I’ve found contextual links on my other niche blogs convert very well. But, I’m not so sure contextual works as well on this “make money / blog about blogging ” blog. I think this may be because we all visit each others blogs see the same ads over and over.
But not many of us are running the Amazon ads, so that seems worth a try.
The only way to find out if I can make money to test out the ads and see what happens. If you read this, tell me what ads you see when you arrive, then I’ll know how “contextual” they are.
Haha, it was very much related to the theme of your blog
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“Miller/Hull: Architects of the Pacific Northwest (Paperback)”
I suppose it’s a way of making money
, I’d say you’d probably have more luck picking out items yourself and writing a little plugin for it in which you can add those to be shown on random. So far I’ve never seen the Omakase links work out well on making money blogs, it’s just such a vague subject for a bot.
Hey, Amazon showed me diet and knitting books, so I figured it knew that’s what I buy? But now I’m seeing an album called “everything ecstatic”! Hey… whatever!
I am going to try to feed it search terms, but I figure it’s worth at least seeing what Amazon shows!
“I figured it knew that’s what I buy?”
Interesting point there actually, I refreshed it a couple of times to see and it showed me items out of my interest. Simply put, stuff which I searched for on amazon or related to that.
Unless of course there’s anything contextual in this post related to drawing books, system of a down and nightwish music albums, architectural books and some CSS titles.
With the topics varying so greatly though and matching my search history on Amazon I’d say it’s probably more directed at my Amazon account rather than truly being contextual for this entry.
Lucia, I went round and round with Amazon on Omakase links. I have a site, memoirista.com, with two blogs, process.memoirista.com, and reviews.memoirista.com. Since the topic, memoir, is entirely book related, and is a category within Amazon, I expected that customers would be served a variety of ads for books about memoir, in Omakase links. What I was seeing was the incredible variety of things that interest me, that are distant from or inappropriate for, the topic of memoir. I finally relaxed when Amazon assured me that blog visitors did NOT see *my* variety of interests in their Omakase ads, but rather they saw material based on THEIR use of Amazon.
Ultimately I changed the ads; now Amazon does rotate ads for books in the genre memoir, all over the site. There is also an Amazon store on each blog. Unfortunately, I have many other things to do and have fallen off in content production, so there is little traffic. It’s got pretty good PageRank ™, though!
So…I guess these should work well if my visitors are fairly regular Amazon customers? I guess it’s worth alternating these a while with other ads just too see.
I’ll be interested to see how things pan out.
I run some of those ads, they don’t really do that great but they seem neat and I like Amazon so I keep using them. The results vary a great deal over time – even without me making any changes. The ads are nice in that you can set them and forget them.
I tried the amazon ads taking more of my ad inventory but based on experience reduced the times they are shown.
I also make ads pretty unobtrusive on my sites so I get many fewer clicks (and then sales) than I could I am sure. Basically I like having very little “screen estate” taken up by ads so since I can decide what to do, I get to have limited ads.
@John,
On my knitting blog, all ads are shoved over to the right. On this blog, I put them in the articles. Normally I keep them off the front page (using Kontera Control) for two days. But this article wouldn’t make sense without the ad so I set it to show the ads on the front page today!
I’ve run a small block of these Omakase links on the main page of my site for several months and results have been pretty dismal.
I’m not sure they are very good at deciding what might be relevant to my readership. The site is a web hosting directory with some tech and gadget areas but these links insist on showing garbage like The Secret and Law Of Attraction nonsense.
It’s too embarrassing – particularly as I ripped into one of those products on my blog. I think I’m going to take them down and perhaps link to one of my Amazon stores instead. At least Amazon give plenty of options to Associates.
Maybe with a defined niche like “Crochet Jane” has
it would be a little more precise. Good luck with the experiment though, I hope it works better for you
@Maurice: The other problem is AdBlockerPlus blocks these. I’m working on something it doesn’t block!
Let us know what you think of the new amazon ad thing. I’ve got to say I’m not a big amazon advertiser for a variety of reasons, mostly because their payouts are so darn low…however, other people seem to have success with them. Maybe this new thing will change things.