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Social Media: Amazon Affiliate Program Changes and A Fresh Crop of Social Media Links

Picture of a tortoiseshell cat.
The Amazon Affiliate Program: What’s Changed Recently

You may have heard that Amazon has changed its terms for its affiliate program. Here is the change.

“In addition, notwithstanding the advertising fee rates described on this page or anything to the contrary contained in this Operating Agreement, if we determine you are primarily promoting free Kindle eBooks (i.e., eBooks for which the customer purchase price is $0.00), YOU WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE TO EARN ANY ADVERTISING FEES DURING ANY MONTH IN WHICH YOU MEET THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS:
(a) 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links; and
(b) At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks.”

This affects people who rely on posting free books as part of their business model. The reason you’d drive traffic to free books is because Amazon’s rates change depending on the total number of books sold.

For example, let’s say I sell some books for Amazon by blogging about a book and pointing to Amazon with an affiliate link, a specially constructed URL that points to the book on Amazon. I get a very small percentage of each sale. That percentage can differ according to what merchandise it is, but it also differs according to how many items I’ve sold that month if it falls in the “General Product” category.

So let’s say I do that. Perhaps I mention that I often use Samuel R. Delany’s wonderful About Writing in teaching. Over the course of a month, three people buy the book (in my experience this is an optimistic estimate. Let’s say that’s all the traffic I drive this month. Because I’ve only sold 3, my percentage is 4%.

But let’s say I also blogged about a bunch of free stuff and people bought books through the same sort of affiliate link. Let’s say I am incredibly diligent about this and sell 628 free books. That 628+3 moves me into the 8% tier – double that original 4%.

Which can start to add up if you’re making some secondary sales, where folks are ordering not the book you linked to, but still poking around on Amazon and buying other things.

So that, in a nutshell, is the Amazon change. If it’s all goobledygook to you, you probably are not one of the people that need to worry about it. And what does that have to do with social media? The answer is that social media shares are how some affiliates drive traffic.

The best of links recently saved to use in my Building an Online Presence for Writers and Blogging and Social Networking 101 classes:
You can follow all my social media links on Delicious.

Pinterest is a social network I’m still find a lot of reasons to like. I use it to provide a regularly changing source of visual interest for this blog as well as to organize some of my blog posts like posts on writing or posts on social networking.

A study on what increases Twitter followers. No surprise here: positivity and informational content.

How to use a press release to increase your online visibility.

Online book discovery is something market-minded writers need to pay attention to. Here’s why it’s currently not working well.

Obscurity: A Better Way to Think About Your Data than “Privacy.” An interesting piece by Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger about online life and privacy concerns.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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Teaser: Someday My Prince

Picture of Cat Rambo with the Wicked Stepmother from Disney's Cinderella dinner
I will admit, my sympathy is often more with the wicked stepmother than Cinderella. The stepmother is by far the more interesting character.
Here’s a modern piece I’m working on right now, “Someday My Prince.” I believe it’s fantasy; I’m about 2000 words in so far, and really not sure whether it’ll stretch another 500 or 5000 words.

When Betty answered the apartment door, the man standing there was one of the most beautiful she’d ever seen. Tall, muscular, aquiline nose, dark hair”¦ he looked like he should be riding a white stallion on the beach in a cologne ad.

“Miss Vincent?” he said.

She faltered in the doorway, looking at him. You never know what to expect in New York, and surely this man wasn’t that out of the ordinary, except for the utterly expensive lines of his suit.

“Miss Vincent?” he repeated.

“I really need to get to work,” she said. “I don’t have time to buy anything.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m Aidan, your Prince.”

She didn’t understand.

He smiled at her. “I’m your Prince. I’ve come.”

She really did need to get to work.

***

Veronica said, “You say he’s a Prince?”

“I think that’s what he said. He wouldn’t go away until I promised to have dinner with him tonight.”

Veronica’s eyebrow lifted. “You could have called the police.”

“He was just so”¦nice,” Betty said.

Veronica’s other eyebrow lifted. “So are you going to tell him?”

“Of course,” Betty said. “Then he’ll know this is some kind of mix-up.”

***

On her daily phone call, her mother said, “You lucky, lucky girl!”

Betty tried to interject something but her mother went on. “I mean, we’re all promised that our prince will come some day, but most of them seem to get lost in transit. I don’t know anyone who’s actually gotten one.”

“Mom,” Betty said. “What do you mean, we’re all promised one? Who does the promising?”

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. “Well,” her mother finally said, “I guess I don’t really know. The world? God? Yes, that’s probably it. God promises if we’re good, someday our prince will come.”

“I think you’re confusing God and fairy tales,” Betty told her.

...

Links from the Blogging 101 Class - Stumbleupon and Other Bookmarking Sites

As I noted in class, I don’t agree with the methods talked about in that first link, but I do think bloggers shouldn’t overlook the power of Stumbleupon and other bookmarking sites to drive traffic to their site. I’ve seen a significant amount of traffic come from such sites, particularly Stumbleupon and Delicious.

STUMBLEUPON RESOURCES

How I Got 26000 Followers from Stumbleupon: http://www.dumblittleblogger.com/2011/01/15/how-i-got-26000-visitors-from-stumbleupon/
Stumbleupon Android App Discovery Feature: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/17/stumbleupon-android-app-discovery/
Stumbleupon Sent 700 Million Pageviews to Other Websites in December: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/04/stumbleupon-sent-700m-pageviews-to-other-websites-in-dec-is-growing-20-monthly/

7 Things You Should Know about Social Bookmarking: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf
10 Most Popular Fifteen Social Bookmarking Sites: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-bookmarking-websites

Good overall list of bookmarking sites: http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php

Delicious: http:www.delicious.com
Digg: http://www.digg.com
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com

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