I got an email early this morning announcing the launch of Amazon’s Context Links Beta. I was hoping somebody would do a nice writeup that I could link to but I didn’t notice anything when I went through my feed reader.
Amazon Context Links Beta works by dropping a bit of code into your sites template. Then whenever a page is displayed, Amazon will read through the page and add some links to the text. The links will lead to Amazon products that match the context of the phrase in the link.
It is a cool concept that might even actually work pretty well.
From the description, it looks Google would not want it on pages with Google AdSens since it is a contextual program, but I might be wrong. Since the ads are embedded into text links rather than the common ad blocks server by Google maybe you could double dip. If anybody knows anything about whether they will be allowed to play on the same page, please let me know.
The only annoying thing about the ads is that when you mouseover the link, it pops up one of those little mini Amazon images that show the picture, name, price, etc. of the product that they are advertising. I’m not a fan of things popping up when you mouseover them.
One area that the Amazon Context Links Beta program might work for bloggers even if Google doesn’t allow it on pages with AdSense would be to put them on the Amazon Context Links on the front page of the blog. My front page AdSense ads are worthless. I might try to remove the Adsense ads on the front page of one of my blogs and try the Amazon Context Links instead and continue using the AdSense ads on the single post pages.
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Hi Mike. This sounds like an interesting way to further monetize a blog, but I’m concerned about the popups, too. It’s not nearly as bad as the popups and popunders we see on some sites, but still it can be annoying to readers.
As far as getting along with AdSense, from what I understand this should be okay according to Google’s latest TOS update. I wrote a post about Google’s change to allow competing contextual advertising. I hope you don’t mind me including the link!
Interesting. No problem about the link.
I’ll have to try the Amazon Context Links on one of my sites and write up how well it works.
I tried it out on my travelogue blog, and it links the canon s2is spot on! So I am going to try this out on my other blogs too!
Good to know that Amazon is coming up with such interesting products for content creators like us
Thanks,
Harry
Cool. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works out for other bloggers. I can see where it will be pretty useful on a product blog. Maybe I need to start one (or more) of those…