RORY HANSEN

Introduction to Amazon aStore
As you’ve seen with DealDotCom, when new affiliate services come out, I generally give each of them an honest shot, to see how they work, as well as to gauge the return one might expect with minimal time investment into the service.

That was exactly the case when I set up a niche Amazon aStore a couple months back. At the time, I was already no stranger to Amazon’s affiliate programs; I had used their AWS services to add content to other websites I had setup, as well as hotlinked individual products from time to time. But as you probably know, Amazon aStore is a little different. In the most basic sense, it’s a personal online store that you can setup, where you list Amazon products to sell. You can leave this as a stand-alone website or embed this store into your existing website in an <iframe>. Then, each time someone visits your aStore and makes a purchase, you are rewarded with a small referral fee in the 5% to 7% range of the purchase cost.

Well, anyway, after choosing my niche and setting up my Amazon sStore, I did the #1 most important thing to drive visitors to the website: I linked to it from a couple of my other websites. I really only did that so that Google and the other search engines would have an easier time finding my site to index. Other than that, I did no SEO activities at all. Nor did I do any online advertising or marketing. I basically let the site sit.

My Amazon aStore results
Anyway, the first month passed and I made a whopping $0.75 from my Amazon aStore. One person had purchased one item from my site and that $0.75 was my take from the purchase.

But things seem to be totally different this month. We’re only 3 weeks into September and my affiliate income has already accumulated to nearly $13, based on purchases of over $225 with Amazon aStore. Again, this is with No Advertising and No SEO!

Here’s a quick snapshot of the recent purchases that have come through my Amazon aStore:

You should be able to identify my niche market pretty easily from the product list above. ;-)

My impressions thus far
Anyway, I’m rather pleased with the performance so far of my Amazon aStore. I really didn’t expect anything, and considering I didn’t invest much time at all, I think the site is doing rather well. I did a quick guess of some of the keywords that my visitors may be using to find my site, and in Google, my aStore has SERPSs of #1, #2, and a couple other high positions.

My only gripe so far is that I don’t think Amazon has any built-in web analytics for their aStores, so I cannot be sure to the means at which visitors are come to my store. On top of that, there doesn’t seem to be any way to embed third-party web statistics either.

Stay tuned for a month-end summary.

The other day, I mentioned BlogRush, which is a new service that hopes to drive more traffic to your page through a multi-level blog advertising widget.

Another new service that is gaining a lot of publicity as of late is DealDotCom. Unlike BlogRush, whose goal is to increase your website traffic, DealDotCom is a pretty typical affiliate program, that will hopefully let you use some of that new traffic to make an extra buck or two. What makes DealDotCom attractive are two things:

1. First of all, their affiliate program pays out at 35% for tier-1 referrals. Tier-2 referrals pay out at 15%, which is still decent.
2. Secondly, the products they sell are generally of interest to other bloggers, especially those hoping to make the leap from blogger to “pro-blogger”.

Just take a look at some of their recent deals:

• BayRSS 2.0 – Affiliate Plugin for WordPress (Sold for $22.87) - A WordPress plugin which allows you to “outsource” the creation of content to other authors, and share revenue with the content creators.
• Product Blueprint (Sold for $7.95) – An eBook and 30 minute video which explain how to find profitable markets fast and what to charge for products in these profitable market spaces.
• WPAffiliatePro – Marketed as the “Ultimate WordPress Affiliate Solution”, this is a WordPress plug-in which allows you to better manage affiliate links and understand how your links are doing.
• Long Tail Traffic Secrets (Sold for $39) - Another eBook, this one talking about blogs, podcasting, and social networking and how you can cash in on these forms of media. Provides expert’s secrets and tips to get top search engine rankings.

I just signed up for the DealDotCom affiliate program, to see if I can get a piece of this 35% pie. Heck, who knows, maybe I’ll actually even buy one of the advertised products at some point. I almost bit at WPAffiliatePro, based on some of the feedback that JohnChowDotCom had given the plug-in.

Like what I plan on doing with BlogRush, I will keep you posted with the results.

Have you heard of BlogRush? It’s a new service that’s designed to promote your blog posts on other blogs, and vice versa. They do this via a widget that some prominent probloggers like JohnChowdotCom are pimping on their websites. 

Essentially, this is how it works:

1. You earn credits each time the widget is viewed on your blog.
2. You also earn credits when the widget is viewed on blogs of those you refer to BlogRush.
3. You earn even more credits when the folks you’ve referred, refer others to the service.
4. The more credits you earn, the more times your blog headlines will be displayed on the BlogRush widget on other people’s blogs.

The idea is that the more people that see your blog headlines, the more people will visit your blog, and the more money you’ll generate from AdSense and other revenue-generating schemes you have going on.

While I’m not using the BlogRush widget on this blog, I’m experimenting it on a couple of my other, revenue-generating blogs, to see if it has any success in generating additional traffic. I’ll post my results at a later time.

If you’re interested in checking BlogRush out, please sign up through my referral link. I don’t make any money from you doing this, but you’ll help me gain more credits!

I’ve spent the last couple hours debugging an authentication issue with LinkShare‘s Link Locator Direct web service. My console app was throwing the following exception:

System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: org.apache.axis.AxisFault:Pass in username/password

The error message seems straight-forward enough– “Pass in username/password.” But what do you do if you know you are passing in the username and password?

This was the code I was using:

LinkShareTextPromotion.EJBTextPromotionServiceService tp =
     new LinkShareTextPromotion.EJBTextPromotionServiceService();
tp.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(username, password);
tp.PreAuthenticate = true;
LinkShareTextPromotion.Text[] results  = tp.GetAllLinks(sid);

Anyway, I finally lucked out and stumbled onto this link on the LinkShare forums, which lead me to Gordon Weakliem’s blog that had a working solution. Apparently this problem occurs due to how .NET authenticates.

If you’re experiencing the same error and got here via Google, then I hope this helps you get on your way.

Back in April, I wrote on this blog how, after just a couple months, I was making over $20/month using Text-Link-Ads.com. Even back then, I was happy with $20/month, as it required no work on my part at all. Text-Link-Ads.com customers would search the Text-Link-Ads.com directory, find my site, and then choose to advertise. To borrow a phrase my old math teacher used to say, “It’s like money for jam.”

Five months later, my monthly income has increased to $39.10/month, which is nearly 100% more than what I was making when I posted my initial review of the service. And at what cost? None! Have I invested hours of my time grooming my site for Text-Link-Ads? No. Essentially, the only time I even remember I am using their service is when I get emails from PayPal informing me that I’ve received a new $40 deposit into my account.

Anyway, I guess my point is, if you’re looking for an easy way of monetizing your site, take a look at Text-Link-Ads.com (Non-affiliate link here). For me, the income has proven to be steady and reliable, while still growing month-over-month.