I haven’t quite settled on what service I’ll use as my main advertising platform but I am going to partake in the Amazon Affiliates program to build a store for my blog, filled with products my readers may be interested in. So I’m going to show you how to add a good Amazon eStore to your blog or site.

Firstly, let me set one thing straight. Your readers aren’t going to read a laptop review you did and suddenly make the decision to buy it in your store. It just doesn’t happen. Sorry. So the answer to the question on the tip of your tongue is no, you won’t earn 15% on a $2,000 laptop from your store.

I want you to to sit down with a pen and paper with your blog open in your browser and really ask yourself – what would I buy having read this blog?  If it’s a how-to blog with cool homemade gadgets, maybe you could have a store that sells cheap tools, LEDs, wiring etc. That people will actually buy because they want to build a project on your blog. If you run a gardening blog, rare seeds or weird tools would be good picks. All of this boils down to three rules.

1. Is it under $10? If not, most people won’t make a split-second decision and buy from YOUR store. They’ll think about it and then buy direct later.
2. Can they get it around the corner from their home? If they can walk into WalMart and get the item today they won’t buy from you. Try to add items you’d only find on the internet.
3. Would you buy it? Honestly – ask yourself. Having read a blog post about a product, would you really want that product enough to buy it?

Ensure each and every one of your products answers yes to these questions.

Now join the Amazon Associates program. It will take them a few days to verify your blog is worthy of bearing their brand. If you post more than once a week and the content isn’t questionable then you should get through no problem.

On the affiliates homepage, click ‘Create aStore‘. This will display the page below.

Click ‘Add Category‘ to add a new section to your store. For example, I entered ‘Electronics’. Then, click on the ‘Add products’ button seen on the right. This will take you to the page below.

Here, simply browse through the products clicking ‘Add‘ next to the products you want in your store. I encourage you to consult the three rules mentioned above while doing this. When you have all the categories and products added, click ‘Continue‘ to bring you onto the design and customization phase.

In the screenshot above you can see the page where you can customize how your store will look. To the left there is a sidebar where you can change the colours of the different aspects of your store using the dropdown menus or, for the more tech savvy, the colour codes (ex. #FFFFFF for white etc…)

You can also name your store and add a logo. When adding a logo, you’ll be required to enter in an image URL. A good idea is to make this the logo of your blog if you have one. Simply right click on the your blog’s logo and select ‘Copy Image URL‘. Then paste it into the appropriate box on the ‘Customize Store’ page. Then click ‘Continue‘.

The next page is further customization of your store. This is merely placement of the sidebar and selecting which widgets (advertisements) you want to appear in your store alongside your ads. You earn revenue from these as well. When you’re finished click ‘Finish & Get Link‘.

You’re then presented with three options.

The first is the most basic. You can simply copy the link to your store and place a button on your blog/site. Preferably in the main menu section. When a reader clicks this button they’ll be redirected to your store on Amazon.

The second is to embed your store using an inline frame. An inline frame is kind of like a mini browser within your website. To do this, select that option along the top of the page. Then, copy all of the HTML code that is presented to you and create a new page on your blog. Then copy the HTML into your blogging platform’s HTML editor and your store should appear when you save the HTML.

The third, and perhaps the most desirable, is to fully place your store on your site. However, this is for more experienced users only. The inline frame will work just fine for most blogs and is a lot easier to do. This is similar to embedding the in-line frame, however it will be wider and take up all of the webpage below the header and menu bars.

Here are the steps:

Select the appropriate option at the top of the page. Then:

1. Create a new frameset page using the code sample provided to you. You can alter the dimensions of this to fit your site better.
2. Place your site’s navigation in one of the frames and your aStore URL in another frame.
3. Add a “Store” link to your site’s main navigation and link it to the new frameset you just created.

Your store should now be live on your website.

Before I sign off – a few tips about integrating a new store on a blog:

• It can be very tempting to make a big announcement to all of your readers and pretty much beg them to buy from you. However, all this will do is turn your great blog into a blog that’s losing readers and annoying people. Nobody likes to be constantly asked to buy things. It’s annoying.
• Instead, make a short post informing your readers about the new store. Tell them it contains some good products and be honest about the fact that it earns the blog some income. Also, the odd link in a post when it’s relevant and actually helps the reader works wonders.
• Finally, resist the temptation to add products that don’t follow the three rules above. You won’t make much sales. Think like a reader of your blog!

What revenue streams do you have for your blog?   We have previously covered a few other possibilities such as e-cards and 5 Adsense alternatives.   Which other ones do you prefer?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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A better solution, if you have a Google Apps-run domain, is a service called Google Short Apps. This is a Google powered URL-shortening service you can run using your own domain and which you can customise the way you want it. 

The advantages include :

• With every short link you send out, the name of your domain is attached to it. If that link goes viral around the web, so does your web domain name. Good advertising!
• Most importantly, you can decide what the short URL should be called. So instead of the ending being 28jenq (which tells people nothing about where the link leads to), you can instead tell people that a link comes to MakeUseOf by inserting makeuseof into the tiny URL link.
• It requires zero setup on your part. Unlike other domain-based URL-shortening services we have profiled in the past which seem to require that you have a degree in IT to understand how to set it all up. With Short Links, you just press a button and it is instantly installed on your Google Apps domain. Then you just need to do a little tweaking to get it the way you want it. Typically Google – very easy, direct and to the point. No messing around.

To get the whole lot set up on your Google Apps domain, first go here and press the “add it now” button. This immediately puts a new link on your Google Apps Dashboard.

You’ll see on the screenshot, the URL http://tinylinks.markoneill.org. That isn’t there on your Dashboard immediately. You have to go into the options and decide what you are going to call your URL-shortening service (and “tinylinks” is what I decided on).  It’s to your advantage to not make it a long name though because all of that becomes part of the shortened URL. The longer you make the URL….well you would be eventually defeating the whole purpose of a short URL service in the first place!

So, the next step is to customise things the way you want them. Go to the Service Settings at the top of the Apps Dashboard page and choose Short Links. The first option you will see is naming your URL service. As I said, I chose “tinylinks” but you can choose whatever you want. But being a short URL, make your choice as small as possible. I initially contemplated “tl” but I wanted to give my shortening service a proper name. Saying that, you can have as many links as you want. So I have http://tinylinks.markoneill.org but I will also shortly set up http://tl.markoneill.org (which I will probably exclusively use from then on as it’s shorter and therefore easier to remember and type.

Once you have chosen your URL-shortening name, you then have to your domain webhosting panel and make what is called a CNAME record.  This is basically an instruction to your website that everytime someone goes to your URL-shortening weblink, it should automatically redirect to Google so they can do their shortening magic. Once you have set up a name for your service, Google then sets out, step-by-step, what you have to do to set up a CNAME record and it is very easy.

The other options are not really that important, such as enabling API access and creating IP Whitelists. There are a couple of good options though that you should consider.   They are :

• Only Administrators can create new links :  this is handy if you have other people using your Google Apps domain for email and you don’t want them using the URL shortening to send out their own links.
• If a link cannot be found, do a lowercase search
• Convert all new links to lowercase

OK, now that you have successfully set up your very own URL-shortening service, it’s time to start using it.   Just go to your weblink that you set up and you should now see this screen :

To make a short URL, just enter the URL into the URL box. Then on the left hand side, decide what you want the link to be called and enter it into the box after your domain name. So a link to MakeUseOf could be called http://tinylinks.markoneill.org/makeuseof (click it, it works).

You can also have a “hashed short link” created which is the same as TinyURL. By entering the URL and then pressing the button for a hashed short link, you would get something like http://tinylinks.markoneill.org/vhzvc. But as I said at the beginning, URL’s like that tell you nothing about the link destination so I personally won’t be using that option.

You are also provided with bookmarklets which you can drag up to your browser toolbar. So any time you want to make a Google short link, just go to the webpage link you want to send out and click on the bookmarklet. You will then be taken directly to the Short Links page with the URL boxes already pre-filled with the website URL you were just on.

The last feature I should mention is the stats page.  The Short Links service gives you a page where you can see how many people have went to your short URLs :

On this page, each entry has an edit button so if you messed up typing the destination URL or if you want to delete one of your short URL’s, then you can do so at the click of a mouse button.

All in all, this is a very nice service and I have noticed visits to my personal domain increase since I started using this.  So if you do short URL’s a lot and you are also looking for a free easy way to advertise your domain, then give Short Links a try.

If you don’t have your domain attached to Google Apps, then I highly recommend that you do it now. Your email can be run via Gmail and you can store all your documents via Google Docs, as well as some of the other usual Google Services (but not Google Reader, which is very strange). Plus you get little Apps goodies like Short Links.  Setting up on Google Apps is also very easy and can be done in under 30 minutes. I showed you how to do it here.

Which URL shortening service do you use? Do you use Google Short Links? If so, what has been your experience with it?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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For example, if you use TinyURL to shorten the long URL http://makeuseof.com/this-is-a-long-url-and-I-want-to-shorten-it.html, you will get something like http://tinyurl.com/2h4kud. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this but, what if, instead of using TinyURL, you can do it on your own server and brand it with your domain name?

Shorty is a simple tool for creating shorter, human- readable links from long URLs. You can install Shorty on your server, so the links are based on your own domain name and it never goes away. You can also manage your links and see how often people click on them.

Advantages of creating a short URL with your domain name

There are several advantages of creating short URL on your own server:

1. Branding your own domain name

When you use services like tinyurl.com, you are promoting tinyurl rather than your own domain. Your readers/visitors/followers have absolutely no idea where the link leads to and which site it ends up with. With your own domain name, you can better brand yourself and at the same time give your readers a clear direction where the link is leading them to.

2. The short URL is your own property and does not go down with the third-party site

When you create short URL’s on your own server, the URL is present as long as your server is running. If you use third party services, when their site is down, your short URL goes down with them. The more URL’s you created with them, the more risk you subject yourself to.

3. Give a meaningful phrase rather than a random string of numbers

If I want to shorten a URL such as http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-ways-to-turn-your-iphone-into-an-external-hard-disk/, which one is more meaningful: http://tinyurl.com1/3×4fphre or http://makeuseof.com/s/iphone-drive?

4. Statistical purpose

Services such as Tinyurl does not come with a tracking code and you are not able to find out how many people clicked that link. When you create it on your own server, you can implement a tracking script to monitor the number of click throughs.

In Shorty, there are three different ways that you can use it to generate short URL’s:

Auto

The tool automatically grabs a word from the long URL and appends it to the end of your domain name. This is useful if you want a quick and easy way to generate a short URL.

Keyword

Using the Keyword option, you can customize your short URL with meaningful keywords or short words that you can identify the link with. For example, you can customize the long URL: http://makeuseof.com/this-is-a-long-url-and-I-want-to-shorten-it-with-shorty.html to http://makeuseof.com/s/shorty.

Random

Random allows you to generate short URL’s the TinyURL way. It will generate a short URL with random alphabets and numbers.

Admin

The Admin page is where you can modify/delete your short URL’s and check how many times your links have been clicked on.

To install Shorty, you need to have Apache, MySQL and PHP installed on your server. As a rule of thumb, if your server can run WordPress or any other PHP-based applications, it is good enough to install Shorty.

In conclusion, if you are constantly using third party sites to generate short URLs, you might as well use Shorty since it is easy to install, use and you are able to market your domain at the same time. However, if you just want to create short URLs (that link to other sites) quickly so you can post in Twitter, then TinyURL (or any other URL shortening sites) might be the one to go for.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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However, if your blog is pretty niche-focused, meaning that your reader base is expecting similar sorts of subjects with each post, then you may actually be able to dramatically increase your revenue by selecting targeted CPA (Cost Per Action) advertisements for your reader. CPA meaning that you are NOT getting paid by the click, but rather by the action such as a purchase that a user may take after the click.

A typical CPA is basically referring a user to a website and they buy a product and you get a set percentage. Other valuable CPA’s are for example referring a user to a subscription for Netflix and you get paid a considerable bounty.

These 5 networks may give you dramatically increased monetization. They are worth a look!

eBay Partner Network

Good ole eBay.   What most don’t know is that they offer a massive affiliate program for website owners.   Anybody who clicks through on your eBay link will get a 7 day cookie and you will receive 50%-75% (for US traffic) of the final value fees of any product that the user buys from eBay within the next seven days.

Now to get eBay integrated, the easiest way is through the eBay toolkit which offers geo-targeting, custom displays and RSS feeds. However I have found that when using the toolkit, the click-though is rather low because nobody wants to click advertisements blaring eBay.

To solve this, you could spend considerable time in development or grab the free version of PhpBay Wordpress Plugin which takes the RSS feeds and formats them in an visually pleasing way. For the power user there is also a premium version which will give added functionality.

Payments on EPN are via Paypal or Direct Deposit.

Amazon Associates

The great thing about promoting Amazon is that people are always happy to buy. They will give you 4%-8% commission depending on quantity shipped on a 1 day cookie. There are so many ways to use this service, but a great place to start is a recent article on MakeUseOf on how to turn your traffic into Amazon Cash

Personally one of the coolest things they have is the MP3 widget which you can dynamically call MP3s and albums from their DRM free catalog to be advertised to your users. That and also make sure to check out the UnBox and Carosel Widget.

Commission Junction

CJ is one of the big daddies in the industry sporting advertisers such as Apple, Dell and players from almost any niche you can think of. After being accepted by CJ, you will have to manually apply to many of the advertisers who will hand review your website for quality before determining whether to accept you or not. Anybody seriously into CPA should get with CJ as they are the best.

Linkshare

One Word about LinkShare. iTunes. That is right. Among other outstanding programs, the iTunes affiliate program is run through LinkShare. What does this mean? It means that with a single click on your iTunes affiliate link you get a 365 day 10% cookie. Meaning that you will get 10% of anything that users purchase on iTunes for the next year.

Why is this a goldmine? Well because just think of everybody that has an iPod or iPhone and how much they spend. Wouldn’t you love 10% of that?

Neverblue

Last but not least we have NeverBlue Ads. They are one of the better mid-level CPA providers. You will generally find a different type of promotion here than on the big boys. Expect to find more promotions for ringtones, insurance, dating, online universities, auctions and those sort of things. If your audience is inclined, then this may be a potential goldmine.  Payments are via Paypal.

In Closing

As we mentioned above, CPA networks are not for everybody. The first thing to note is that international traffic will be lost on many of them, with you having to pick your country for the promotions. So unless you are using some sort of geo-targeting such as OpenX and have time to tinker then you may wish to look elsewhere.

Other things are that you only get paid if your user does an action. Meaning that certain types of audiences are more than happy to click on Adsense to get you paid, but would never actually buy anything. You have to determine this yourself.

Lastly, most of these networks require some sort of approval either by location or quality of site as they are only looking for the best of websites to represent their advertisers.

We might follow up in later posts about other ways to replace Adsense with alternative CPC (Cost per Click) and CPM (Cost per impression) networks.

What are your thoughts on these networks? Have you had any positive or negative experiences with any of them? Would you recommend a network not on this list? Is there one on this list that you would not recommend? Let us know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Different from an ad network, an affiliate program is based on sales instead of impressions and clicks. The Amazon Associates Program allows you to benefit from every sale that results from one of your recommendations. Even if you don’t regularly devote a post to reviewing items like those that people typically buy from Amazon, you probably mention the odd book or movie here and there around your site. If you were in the affiliate program, your offhand comment could be turned into actual revenue.

Now, I’m not usually in the habit of “selling” an advertising program to my readers. The reason I’m so emphatic about Amazon’s program is that it’s incredibly easy to use and built for regular bloggers (Joe the Blogger anyone?) and web professionals alike. Beyond this, it doesn’t require you to bend your page format out of shape just so you can use their system. This is an exceedingly rare trait for an on-site advertiser, as you may already know.

The most useful feature of the Amazon Associates Program (AAP, as I’ll call it) is their linking service. With a number of tools, you can take any link to an Amazon product and convert it into one that will give you credit for the sale. The best way to do this is to simply log-on to the AAP and then visit the page in question. Above the site a collapsible toolbar (web-based) will appear and give you several options. For now, the only one we’re interested in is the “link to this page option”

While unfortunately there is no Ajax drop-down, it does take you to another page with several options in crafting your link. From there, you can paste it wherever you need it to go and you’re all set. If you want to go a little farther, they offer a small script that will create a “fly-out” about the product when your readers roll over it. This modification is up to you. Some people find this kind of advertising very obnoxious, but as they becomes more and more prevalent, less people may mind fly-outs as long as they are well coded.

If you want to simplify the process of creating links (when creating lists and so forth) you can add in another script and cause the link to go directly to the search results for your link’s text. It’s called Quick Linker and more information about installing it is available here (you must have an account first).

Another more traditional option is a simple banner that directs users to a specific part of Amazon. This is one of those things that will distort your pretty page layout. I’m not saying these kinds of ads are bad, but the only difference between these banners and the ones in an ad network is that all users have to do is click a banner ad, whereas users have to actually buy something after clicking one of these. One advantage that I can see is that AAP ads will never diverge from “ads about books” or “ads about electronics” if that’s how you set them.

The final way that the APP can help you monetize recommendations actually combines the two above ad types. Amazon gives you the option to create an “aStore” that is essentially a list of all the books and things that you like. From this list, which can be categorized by type, you can generate not just custom banner ads, but a complete mini-store for your readers to pursue. Personally, I don’t recommend the full-sized store unless you meet one of the following requirements:

• You specialize in recommendations and reviews
• Your website is very niche and people look to you for guidance
• Your blog is very “lifestyle” based – you subscribe to a very specific philosophy
• You have many readers who are interested in your personality and essentially want to be like you

To know if you fit into this last category, just look at how you interact with people on the web. Do people tweet back and forth with you on Twitter a lot? Are there a lot of commenters on your blog and/or do you get into a lot of conversations in the comments? If so, an aStore might actually be a good way to share your favorite books (for instance) with your “fans.” There’s nothing wrong with recognizing you’re a bit of a celebrity in the eyes of some people.

The controls for the aStore are very elaborate and allow you to create a fairly attractive page that can even match your site’s color palate if you so choose. As you can see, mine is fairly plain, but I created two categories to divide up the books I’ve read by genre. The system lists the books in the order that you added them, so I suggest possibly making a “featured” category at the top so that certain stand-out products aren’t lost in the crowd.

From the list of items in your aStore, you can generate a number of widgets on the “widgets” tab of the interface. Personally I was disappointed with the variety of widget sizes available to you. Since boxes are generated from a nicely packaged database, one would think that more numerous and more attractive templates could have been created for publishers. Even so, if you tinker about with the size and template controls you should be able to find something that suits you.

When everything is set up how you like it, your account activity can be monitored on the account summary. It is clean and concise and there are many options for viewing the raw data if you’re addicted to checking stats like me.  If you want an example of several of these advertisement types, check out this book review I wrote.

Overall, I have been impressed by the Amazon Associates Program, for it has lived up to the name given it by other bloggers who suggested it to me. The interface is very simple yet full of options. Also, it provides a number of different strategies for administering advertising to a page. At the least, everyone should use this service whenever they create a link to an Amazon product. From there you can determine if it’s the right program for you.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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