Will Amazon Affiliate Twitter posting tool increase spam?

Amazon has introduced a new feature for its Affiliate members, making it easy to post a link to any product on the site to Twitter.

It’s another step in making it easy to promote Amazon’s products, after the introduction of cut-and-paste widgets and “link to this page” for bloggers and website owners.

Yet Twitter is already flooded with spam and promotional messages, and Amazon has just made it a whole lot easier for casual spammers to flood the service with affiliate links.

Additionally, because the links are effectively cloaked (a side effect of having a limited character count on Twitter) it’s not easy to know what will directly benefit the Twitter account holder if the link is clicked and a purchase is made.

Of course, seasoned spammers will already have automated systems in place to create and publish tweets, but now anyone can do it with just a few clicks.

I don’t deny that the service is useful. If you have a loyal Twitter following and are genuinely recommending products, and providing disclosure, then the occasional link is fine. This new tool will save you time.

Unfortunately, I can also see it adding to the stream of rubbish flowing through Twitter, and an increase in the number of account blocks I’ll be having to do on a regular basis.

What do you think?

Making money with Amazon even if you miss the direct sale

Until recently, I’d almost given up on being an Amazon affiliate. It wasn’t necessarily hard to get people to click on links but they rarely seemed to buy what I was offering them.

However, times have changed. I can’t think of any of my family, friends or acquaintances that isn’t aware of the Amazon brand and hasn’t bought at least one item from them.

What I’m discovering more with Amazon is that, while the basic rules of affiliate success remain the same — including traffic, deep-linking, compelling and relevant enticement — Amazon is one of the few big names that rewards you even if your visitors’ first clicks don’t make a sale.

Granted, you only get 24 hours from a visitor landing at Amazon from your site in order to earn commission from items placed in their basket, but there’s also a 90 day window of opportunity if users add something to the basket on day one but don’t purchase it immediately.

I used to think that Amazon had less earning potential than pay-per-click advertising such as AdSense or Chitika, because someone not only has to click but also purchase before you earn any money.

Thing is, I’m finding that if I can get people to visit Amazon, I have a good chance of earning commission on everything they decide to buy, even if it’s not something I initially recommended.

Looking a what people order, a number of items are either the exact product I recommended, or something closely related. The other items are seemingly random.

So, with decent traffic and a positive push towards Amazon from a wide variety of your blog posts, you do have the potential to earn, letting Amazon do its usual great job of drawing people further into its site and towards the “Add to Basket” button.

I know some other affiliate programs also offer this kind of deal. It’s worth looking into. If you’re transparent about your links and recommend stuff that you own, or would buy yourself, then regardless of whether your visitors buy those items when they go to a merchant site, they’ll hopefully remember your site as a useful source for genuine product recommendations.

Income from Amazon is still far more unpredictable than from other forms of advertising I run on my blogs, but I now believe it has much greater earning potential too.

Now to drive the traffic in.

What’s your experience with Amazon or other affiliate programs and indirect conversions like this?