In Create Intelligent Blog Ads Part 1 and Part 2 we used a little bit of PHP magic to make our ads work a little bit harder and become just a bit more relevant to our audience. We used cookies, search engine referrals and even the visitors geographical location. In this post I will show you an experiment I have been testing using Amazon Associates.
Amazon is one of my favourite affiliate schemes. Because most people have an Amazon account and they pay out if the customer buys something from your referral even if it isn’t the thing you pointed them to, there is often an opportunity to earn just by getting random people to click .. anything. A lot of your visitors will buy something eventually, it’s just a matter of time. So the trick is to get them to take a look using your associates cookie.
The problem is Google does not like you using contextual ads alongside Adsense, they want to be the only contextual advertising in town. Amazon has a contextual product which would be ideal otherwise, and if it worked I guess.
How can we make Amazon banners relevant without manually pointing to a bunch of products? That problem is exactly why I developed this cunning plan.
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