BloggerKit, an easy to use tag-based interface for the Amazon affiliate program, is officially launching today. The company founders say their service allows greater control over what is advertised than other systems and is easier to use. Unlike MyPickList, a similar service Mike profiled here earlier, BloggerKit requires very little interaction with other sites and has a great revenue model. BloggerKit users will have their Amazon affiliate ID used in 85% of the links that appear on their site, with the remaining 15% using BloggerKit’s affiliate ID.
The company was founded by Boston area Li Li, who has a Computer Science and Business PHD from Carnegie Mellon and Xi Zhang, who has a masters from the Harvard School of Design. Both founders also collaborate on Shenguonet, a popular portal for the Chinese community in the Boston area.
BloggerKit asks for your Amazon affiliate ID and provides a few lines of javascript code to paste into your template. Each post can then be ended with keywords that will determine which Amazon products appear beside it. Keywords are inserted using something like the following: “bk_keywords:canon camera, apple ipod.” Couldn’t be much simpler. While MyPicklist has partnered with far more affiliate programs, it appears to rely on users tagging particular items of interest to them on other affiliate sites.
Most important may be the revenue sharing model. While MyPicklist is reported to give users “approximately” 40% of affiliate revenue generated and does not offer this detail prominently on its website, BloggerKit proudly says it’s using your affiliate ID 85% of the time. BloggerKit is not as flashy looking as MyPicklist, but if it is targeting an increasingly sophisticated group of young users then I think that will be ok.
Looks like a less complicated way of displaying Chitika like contextual ads. Instead of having to change the javascript code in the page, it can now be done using tags. Nice.
Nag .B @
StartupHubs.com
looks interesting. i like that they say i still can use adsense. i dont like that they give the advice to color those keywords white. that will look like spam for google and can hit back on you. would be better to tell people how o use css to hide stuff. and that brings me to the part i really do not like: having to hide something … if they can write some ads in the DOM , couldnt the also delete my bk_keywords part?
From the site:
This just sounds bad to me. Wouldn’t Google see this as hidden text? or worse.. spam? I like the model, but they need to address users having to “hide” content to display their ads.
Kosmar and Christopher, thanks for bringing this up. It does seem like an important concern.
I checked out bloggerkits blog to see this service in action..
http://blog.bloggerkit.com/
If you have multiple posts on the main page as bloggerkits blog does..the previous posts keywords get lost to the new ones..and if you click through to the individual posts page..there is no right sidebar and therefore no related products showing up..
hmm…
One way to account for this would be to perhaps include the amazon product info in the body of each post rather than in the sidebar?
just a thought…
thanks.
Stealbelow, that’s funny. The company’s own blog isn’t a good example of the service in action just because they don’t include the sidebar on the item pages of word press.
Marshall, thank you for the great writeup. You described bloggerkit much better than we did
kosmar and Christopher, I just wanna clarify that you don’t need to hide anything for BloggerKit to show Amazon products based on keywords.
Just in case some bloggers may not want something like “bk_keywords:canon camera, apple ipod.” to appear in their blog posts, in the FAQ we suggested that maybe they want to make the keyword part white. Thank kosmar for pointing out the concern. We didn’t realize it. To avoid that, those bloggers who are concerned about look and feel can put “bk_keywords:canon camera, apple ipod.” to the comment instead, it will work as well.
stealbelow, that’s so funny. Just fixed it.
hi li, sure i wouldnt strange strings like these in my documents
i understand that it works without hiding. well, maybe you could get it a bit on th emore sematnic side if you tell people how to get the keywords into a div or span that is hidden by display none css or some off-left technique, depending on how your script works. even if that element had an unique id you could omit your prefix and also remove the whole thing … i see that all this would make your product a bit more complicated, but also i bit more … lets say sustainable. anyway i love the concept and i hope you can improve the service and bring it to more countries in europe.
Only one problem with putting the keywords in a Comment- anyone can now control what my Amazon ad has in it!
Oooh, MartinE – that does seem like it could be an issue. Li, any thoughts?
MartinE and Marshall, that should be fine.
Even if a blogger decides to put the keyword in the comment instead of the post, since the blogger is the first one to comment, only his keywords will be picked up.
Moreover, he always have the option to edit the blog post to add the keyword there and make all keywords in the comments irrelevant.
Finally, it’s the blogger’s Amazon ID in the javascript code and anyone else can’t change it.
Hi Li,
Great idea! Quick question, how did you handle this with Amazon Associates for this to work, I know their referral/affiliate structure is very rigid. Did you have to make any arrangements with Amazon for this to work or was it simple to implement?
Is the syntax for affiliate ID easy to change?
Thanks, and great job!
I like this. On my site, ‘tags’ are automatically generated via a Yahoo! service. I suppose it pulls out the most important terms from the text. I can then insert those terms into bk_keywords: and show relevant product advertisements automatically. I like the way it works.
I need to figure out if I should leave my AdSense in there and have both, or remove one or the other. Ah, decisions.
And to hide the text, i just used CSS and set left: -2000px. I dont know if thats the best way to do it, but for now thats what I have. Any other suggestions would be great.
“Is the syntax for affiliate ID easy to change?”
The affiliate ID is in the code itself so they wouldn’t have had to make any special arrangements with Amazon. 85% of the time they show the users affiliate ID and for the other 15% they plug their affiliate ID into the link.
“The affiliate ID is in the code itself so they wouldn’t have had to make any special arrangements with Amazon. 85% of the time they show the users affiliate ID and for the other 15% they plug their affiliate ID into the link.”
Right, but I realize that you have to “Build Links” in the Amazon Associates affiliate link builder. How do they come up with products, parse the associate ID in the URL, and display them with just a keyword without consulting Amazon’s associate control panel?
Kevin, probably through their API.
There are already a few varieties out there. One Amazon system that comes to me is TicTap. TicTap can leverage user-defined strings or search your html title, meta descriptions, meta keywords to serve up Amazon products.
Here’s a plus.. it also gives a pretty popup with product details when your mouse hovers over the Amazon links, and you keep 100% of your clickthrough earnings! It can be considered contextual.. so not necessarily for people who use Adsense
http://www.tictap.com/free
Where can I learn more about their API?
kevin: http://www.amazon.com/aws
I have created a simliar site months ago, the site found ufortunately no reputation. Here is a short descirption
If you want to comment, tag or review you favorite books on your blog, place a link on that post like this ( “>some tags ) and send us a ping. A summary of you post would be listed http://www.livebm.com/isbn/ and a link to your blog.
If you have and Amazon.com PartnerID, place the link like this
?partnerID=”>some tags If someone follow your link, and buys this book, you would receive the referral fees.
(I know, I have some spelling mistakes on the site)
you should have a look at http://rightcart.com/ , it’s a quite impressive piece of software about AWS services.
Their screencast is http://rightcar...nup/screencasts
I tried bloggerkit. Looks good, except it hoses the back button function in Netscape which I find a major annoyance. Seems ok in IE. Don’t know about Firefox.
thx li, for extending the faq on your site, after this. if putting the keywords within a html comment works, that would be one great solution.
this is excellent news Michael!
very interesting & exciting indeedydeed!!
Cheers!!
)
manual trackback:
http://webmaste...selbst-basteln/
announcing three new features:
1. supporting Amazon.de
http://blog.blo...erkit.com/?p=16
2. product list won’t show up if no keyword assigned
http://blog.blo...erkit.com/?p=19
3. tool for refining keywords
http://blog.blo...erkit.com/?p=20
Thanks again for all your suggestions! We are working hard to make bloggerkit better.
hi!
i have a good audio systems on my website http://car-audio.org.md
Affiliate Promotion Strategies
Affiliate promotion basically works on the principle of paying commission for the referred business. This model was introduced when the e-commerce concept gained prominence in the 1990s.