I used to have an Amazon Affiliates account. I opened it when I started my original blog a decade or so ago. (I think that blog is finally offline.) I never made “real” money off of it. I got some affiliate earnings (small commissions that never change the purchasers price paid) and I had them deposited as credits to the associated amazon account a long time ago. It wasn’t enough to notice.
A little over a year ago the account was cancelled. It wasn’t because I was hardly using it, though that would’ve been understandable. It was an attempt to collect sales tax from retailers such as Amazon by the state legislature. Here’s a Star Tribune story on the event from then. Here’s an opinion piece from earlier this year that somewhat mirrors my own thoughts on the mess when it happened.
Around the time I started Our Agile Journey I sought out a way to have occasional affiliate links on that site.I learned of Amazon affiliate aggregation. Basically, a company creates an affiliate account and then has multiple people creating links for that affiliate account. Each individual persons contributions contribute to a volume goal that ups the affiliate percentage for pay outs. The company organizing it skims a touch off the top. The result is a higher pay-out for smaller blogs that couldn’t get that kind of throughput on their own and a bit of pay for the organizer. While this was initially something I thought I could do, it turns out that members of these affiliate groups need to be qualified individually to participate in the Amazon program.
With Amazon completely out of the picture I looked for more general aggregators and found VigLink. With them I was able to link to Barnes and Noble. Not as good, but still a good think.
Recently, at the beginning of this month actually, Amazon re-opened it’s affiliate program to Minnesota. Likely they are opening a distribution or data center somewhere in the state. Not that important to me honestly. What it does mean is I can start using Amazon Affiliate links again.I am curious as to how affiliate links work with the Amazon Smile program. I always assumed that the Smile program shunted what would otherwise be affiliate earnings to the charity chosen by the purchaser.
Instead of reactivating my Amazon Affiliate account I have decided to have VigLink activate my account for Amazon. I have also decided to start using it here. After all, I make a weekly post with up to 14 book titles and 7 show/movie titles. Each of those could be a link that pays a small percentage back to our family if someone thinks their kids might like the story and click-through to buy it as well. VigLink responds to support inquires pretty fast. I expect that this site will be Amazon approved by the time the next post goes up. Maybe this will help me do a better job of identifying exactly what book the kids are reading?