Money-Code » amazon

What I’ve Been Up To

admin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:25:07 +0000

I’ve had a few people ask me what I’ve been up to. Over the last year, I’ve been laying low in regards to Money-Code.com, but I’ve been pretty active in affiliate marketing in general. Granted this past year has been a busy one with my primary business, but every free moment has been devoted to tweaking.

For 2011 I decided to make some major changes in my strategy, and focus on tweaking vs. building. I really believe that a better user experience is the only way around Panda updates and the general ups and downs of traffic. To develop community and loyalty with your users is worth WAY more than the new tools, etc. Panda hit me hard, and I still feel the sting, but thickening sites, and creating loyalty, I’m starting to see some improvement, and I feel that these changes will really shine in 2012.

I have to say that in 2011, I did do some new site development, primarily in Amazon. I’ve had issues with Amazon for years as an affiliate. It’s definitely a hard egg to crack and to see consistent revenue can be challenging. I’ve been working on a few theories and so far they have been paying off nicely.. and more importantly, consistently. I believe in 2012, I’ll put a little more emphasis. Also, on the flip side, my Commission Junction earnings have been dipping. I ended up dropping PopShops, and I haven’t looked back.

It was interesting that Panda changes hurt, and developed a significantly lower amount of sites, yet 2011 will still be a record year for me. Again, keeping a foundation is very important to float you while you develop.

Plans for 2012 include much more Amazon sites, focus on direct advertising, and developing a web application for potential re-sale. I might be developing some mobile solutions for EPN sites as well, that is still in the brainstorming stages. Oh.. and to blog a little more on Money-Code.com!

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EPN Tracking Image

admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:19:07 +0000

A good friend of mine, just starting out in EPN, asked me if I add a tracking pixel as suggested by the link tool. Hmm? I haven’t ccreated any links using the tool in over a year, so I didn’t see mention of that. I do remember that one of the EPN webinars that someone mentioned that they wanted to see some more impression tracking for more publish transparency, but I didn’t hear more on the subject.

I quickly went to the tool and generated some links and saw the mention…

Tip: We recommend serving at least one impression pixel per Campaign on every page that has eBay links. For more info, click the help link to the left and contact us.

As some of you know I roll my own EPN sites (No BANS) so I needed to quickly add this tracking image on my sites. All of my sites have a ‘store’ section, so within that template I added the following PHP code at the bottom:

echo ‘.EPNID.‘&customid=&mpt=[CACHEBUSTER]" alt="" />’;

The EPNID variable is a PHP constant that contains my campid for every site. I’m not seeing increased impressions in my campaigns. I had ‘some’ impressions before, but those were from various pages that had Editor Kits, but now I’m seeing proper page impressions for my RSS and API pages.

I wanted to post this in case others like me, didn’t see the ‘suggestion’.

Side note, EPN’s QCP is still better than my daily commissions under the old system. I’ll be officially ramping up my EPN development again. I’ve been working on Amazon store fronts during the last month and half, and seeing some ‘okay’ earnings from there. Still nowhere near my EPN earnings, but I’ve been learning alot about what works.. and what doesn’t. I’m hoping that these Amazon sites will really pay off during the holiday shopping spree.

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Finding BrowseNodes for Amazon API search (AWS)

admin — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:56:44 +0000

So, I’ve been hitting the Amazon sites real hard over the last month. With a combination of ReviewAZON, WPReviewSite and my own amazon store script, I’ve been picking niches and working on traffic. Today, I was looking at one of my good performing EPN store fronts, and I wanted to include Amazon products in there as well. The problem I was having was getting it targeted to the sub category. I knew the SearchIndex, but couldn’t figure out how to get the proper BrowseNode of the sub category. The solution is to do a BrowseNodeLookup call.

To do this, you first need to determine the main BrowseNode, basically the number related to the main category where your product is located in. To get this number, you may be able to see it in the URL, or use this matrix to get the proper BrowseNode based off of country:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/index.html?BrowseNodeIDs.html

Next, you need to query Amazon’s AWS and send this BrowseNode. You will receive a XML file containing all children related to this parent including name and BrowseNode.

Here is a basic function I wrote that will do a signed request for BrowseNodeLookup operation:

function find_browse_node_aws_signed_request($region, $params, $public_key, $private_key){
$method = "GET";
$host = "ecs.amazonaws.".$region;
$uri    = "/onca/xml";
$params["Service"]    = "AWSECommerceService";
$params["AWSAccessKeyId"] = $public_key;
$params["Timestamp"]    = gmdate("Y-m-d\TH:i:s\Z");
$params["Version"]    = "2009-03-31";
ksort($params);
$canonicalized_query = array();
foreach ($params as $param=>$value){
$param = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($param));
$value = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($value));
if($param == ‘ItemPage’ && $value == ‘x’){
$canonicalized_query[] = $param."=".$i;
}else{
$canonicalized_query[] = $param."=".$value;
}
}
$canonicalized_query = implode("&", $canonicalized_query);
$string_to_sign = $method."\n".$host."\n".$uri."\n".$canonicalized_query;
$signature = base64_encode(hash_hmac(‘sha256′, $string_to_sign, $private_key, true));
$signature = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($signature));
$request = "http://".$host.$uri."?".$canonicalized_query."&Signature=".$signature;
$ch    = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $request);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $response;
}

To call the function you would do something like this:

$resp = find_browse_node_aws_signed_request($country,
array("Operation"=>"BrowseNodeLookup",
"Service"=>"AWSECommerceService",
"BrowseNodeId"=>"111111111"
),
$pubKey,
$privKey);

$pubKey is your Associate Key ID (not your tracking ID) and the $privKey is your Secret AWS Key ID. You can do a var_dump($resp) to see the values of the returned array of values. After retrieving the BrowseNodeID, you can search within that category by passing ‘BrowseNode’ to your ItemSearch API call. Hope this helps!

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Twitter Alliances

admin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:08:27 +0000

Over the last few months, I’ve been creating new hub blogs as well as new store fronts using (ReviewAzon and WPReviewSite). Along with these sites, I’ve been creating support Twitter accounts and building followers using BirdFeeder. The benefit of this to promote offers, posts to potential customers very quickly. It’s hard to beat Twitter for getting quick quality traffic to your sites.

The other important thing that I’ve been realizing, is the importance of networking with others. So many of us are all trying to do the same thing, generate traffic and to hopefully make a few bucks off of our sites. Twitter is a great platform to make those connections. Many of us are just starting out with our support Twitter accounts, so when I meet someone that seems cool, I’ll offer to ally with that person. What does this mean? Basically, we agree to RT and to mention each other on #FF of FollowFriday announcements. Hopefully, by doing this we can help generate more traffic and followers by combining our current followers. I also try to comment on their sites as well as RT (ReTweeting) their posts. Some of you that follow my blog here already know what I’m talking about.

On a few of my sites, I’ve seen fantastic results by allying with a few similar Tweeters. You should give it a try. Working with others is a great way to increase your traffic.. which in turn, raises your earnings.

If you’re interested, follow me on Twitter and look me up!

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Understanding the Amazon Product Advertising API

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:57:29 +0000

I’ve been working on some Amazon store fronts. With the recent chatter about the EPN Quality Click Pricing, I thought it would be good to focus on a few other sites while the dust settles. I have confidence that everything with EPN will work out, but this is a good reminder that one should stay diversified.

I’m basically working on a few things. The first priority was to get my existing sites working after the signed authentication change which happened on August 15th. The next priority was to find a new blog plugin that would handle Amazon products nicely. I found ReviewAzon, which fits my needs perfectly for posting products, but I needed a good ‘store front’ script or way to include this with my ReviewAzon sites.

I found Amazon Niche Store, which is free, and it looks similar to my various store fronts, but I wasn’t happy about the results being returned from the author’s server. So I figured I need to modify the plugin and do the lookup and presentation on my own. The author also displayed his tracking code 10% of the time (which he states). This was a fun project, since I’ve never worked on a plugin and it seems lately I’ve been doing a lot of WordPress stuff.

I wanted to state that finding good documentation about the Amazon AWS or Product Advertising API is somewhat difficult (not sure why), but since I found the proper docs, I wanted to post them here. The Product Advertising API Developer Guide is must have link if you’re going to be doing any work with the API, it gives you a complete run down of the Operations needed to ask the appropriate questions to Amazon and return products.

I was able to rewrite that plugin and include it within my ReviewAzon sites by creating a category ‘stores’ within the blogs. One immediate challenge I had with that plugin re-write was the ability of returning more than 10 products, which appears to be a very common problem. My solution, and not sure if it’s the best, is to loop through the requests to get multiple pages and adding them to a array. To save on additional calls I serialized the array and stored it in the WP options table based on keyword searched with a timestamp. If the timestamp is expired, it will do another lookup, etc.

If any of you have dealt with this in the past and has a better solution, please let me know!

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Review of ReviewAZON

admin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:19:36 +0000

If you’ve been following this blog for some time, you would know I sort of have a love-hate relationship with Amazon’s affiliate program (Amazon Associates).

First of all, I love their site. I buy many things from Amazon, and it’s hard to beat the name trust you get with Amazon. I love that you can buy SO much stuff from there. Basically if you can think of it, it’s on Amazon. I love their affiliate management interface (except it updates every 24 hours), but getting reports, and tools is a snap. I love their API for pulling products (even though I was having trouble after their recent change for signed authentication). So that’s a lot of love….

The bad? Well, their cookie life is brutal. They only offer a one day cookie for earnings. That potential customer can’t “sleep on it”, and if they do, you get nadda. So it’s strictly related to impulse purchases only or you’re relying on them doing the research and are ready to buy when they go to your blog or store front. Tough. Their commission percentage is pretty low as well, and especially compared to other networks. You’ll hear arguments that you’ll make it up on the name trust, and that will convert to more sales, etc.

Bottom line is that I’ve tried promoting Amazon multiple times and have not had good luck. Is this Amazon’s fault? Is their network that bad? No. I’m definitely the weak link on this one. For whatever reason, I have not tapped into the proper targeted crowd for Amazon. I feel like I have a good feeling about EPN, but Amazon, I’m still reaching out in the dark.

Clearly, there are many individuals making excellent earnings with Amazon, so where did I gone wrong? I believe it was my approach. First of all, I’ve always intermixed Amazon with EPN sites, heavily promoting EPN, while loosely promoting Amazon. Also, I was working in niches that worked good with EPN. These niches may be producing naturally poorly with Amazon. I’ve also pursued store front style sites using Amazon’s API pulling ‘related’ products. Talking with few people that do well with Amazon (People, it’s important to talk to others and learn), and they seem to be having excellent results with blog / review type sites. Working the SEO organic long tail, etc. This was never my strategy with Amazon or EPN for that matter.

Today, I created two new WordPress blogs focusing on product review/blog angle related to products. This time, my focus in on Amazon with a small focus on EPN (only showing 2-3 auctions), etc.

To do this, I discovered a fantastic WordPress plugin called ReviewAZON. I cannot believe how cool this plugin is. First off, it’s already up-to-date with new Amazon authentication structure, so it’s good to go there. Below is a listing of product features advertised on their site.

Get Lifetime updates – Pay once and get lifetime updates and product enhancements for the life of the product.
Use ReviewAZON on UNLIMITED Domains! Buy it and use it on some or all of your domains.
Access to the ReviewAZON Support Forum: Join our community of ReviewAZON users and get the latest product updates, support information as well as user tips and tricks to make your blog a success!
ReviewAZON allows you to display over 25 different pieces of product content such as average customer rating, product description, customer reviews, pricing, brand, manufacturer, product details and more!
Detailed product user guide helps you every step of the way when it comes to installing, configuring and using the ReviewAZON WordPress plug-in. Also learn how to make your own custom templates quickly and easily.
Build complete blogs in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks allowing you to focus on other things such as promotion and creating additional blogs.
Easy to use and intuitive administrative tools make configuring ReviewAZON a snap!
Ajax driven product search dialog screen allows you to search by product category, custom sort parameter and product keywords to find just the products you are looking for quickly to add quality content to your blog in just minutes.
Support for all the Amazon Affiliate programs including Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan.
Flexible HTML templates let you control the output of Amazon data to your users with virtually unlimited ways to display pertinent and meaningful content to your blog readers.
Custom YouTube video search screen allows you to search for YouTube product reviews and add them to your blog to enhance the reader experience.
Display Product Accessories and Similar Product listings along side your product post pages by showing them in-line or by using the custom sidebar widgets that come out of the box with ReviewAZON.
Use the built in Custom Template Manager interface to make custom template changes on the fly and update all your blog posts with a single save!
Custom Template Token Reference tool allows you to see exactly what tokens are available for use with that particular template without having to reference the manual each time you make a change.
eBay integration with PhpBayLite or PhpBayPro enables you to display eBay listings along side the products you are promoting to help increase your ROI and affiliate commissions.
Built in custom Sidebar Widgets helps you to display information such as product Brands, Price Ranges and Featured Products to your customers to better help them find the information they need on your blog.
Use the built in Tabbed product listing interface to display product information to your users in a tab layout instead of the normal vertical layout.
SEO friendly image and product URLs can be configured to display human readable links that not only help your readers but also boost on page SEO for your blog.
Output Caching allows you to speed up the rendering of product content to your blog readers by reducing the load time and the number of calls to the Amazon web service.
Make your blog product content stand out by providing your readers with timely and informative customer reviews on the products you are promoting.
Continuously add product posts to your blog by “Drip Feeding” them over a defined set of time by using the Bulk Product Post feature of ReviewAZON. You can have products automatically post to your blog over the course of days, weeks and even months allowing you to focus on promotion rather than content creation.

What I particularily like is the buld search and post of Amazon products. Here you can create many blog entries (inserted in random times) to your blog (this is what they refer to as “Drip Feeding”). They also provide a YouTube review feature where you can search YouTube for related videos and include them with your post. Very cool. Also the ability to include actual Amazon reviews fills content quite nicely. You can edit content surrounding your Amazon fed posts as well to create a more personal review.

The eBay integration is great. I went with PHPBay Lite version for now, which provides more than enough control for what I”m trying to. Remember, I’m trying to focus on Amazon vs. EPN on these particular blogs.

If you’re looking for some quality Amazon integration for your WordPress blog, this could be the plugin for you! How effective has it been for me? Too soon to tell, but I’m very optimistic. I’ve changed my niches to more ‘commercial’ products and plan on working the long tail. The content definitely supplies a lot of keywords. My big concern is duplicate content penalties. My goal is to break up the content and insert as much as I can to help avoid this.

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Amazon Product API: SignatureDoesNotMatch error response

admin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 04:18:21 +0000

On August 15, 2009, all Product Advertising API developers were required to authenticate ALL calls using a hmac/sha256 signing token. For some reason, this was a major pain in the ass for me, but I finally got things to work.

If you’re having trouble, and you’re using PHP5, this may help you.

The first item you’ll need is the ‘secret’. You need to log into the Amazon Web Services area (https://developer.amazonwebservices.com). After logging in (assuming you already have a account if you’re using their API), you need to hover over ‘Your Account’, and click ‘Access Identifiers’. Here you will see ‘Access Key ID’ and ‘Secret Access Key’. We’ll be referring Access Key ID as the public key and Secret Access Key as the private key in a function provided below. Copy these two values and add them to your code somewhere.

You will need to ensure that PHP is built with hash support. You can verify this with by view info (). If hash support is there we can use the built in hash_hmac() function. The concept is pretty straight forward (eventhough, I’ve been fighting it all night prior to this post). You create a string, and ‘hash’ it with our private key, then we pass the string to Amazon’s API, and they hash the same string with our private key. The value should be the same, and if so, we’re good. If something is off any where in that sequence you’ll be getting the dreaded ‘SignatureDoesNotMatch‘ message in your XML return.

I came across Ulrich Mierendorff’s function for sending a signed AWS request on the developer forum, and it was the only PHP code snippet that worked for me, so I need to pass it on. Below is the function:

function aws_signed_request($region, $params, $public_key, $private_key)
{
/*
Copyright (c) 2009 Ulrich Mierendorff

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL
THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
*/

/*
Parameters:
$region – the Amazon(r) region (ca,com,co.uk,de,fr,jp)
$params – an array of parameters, eg. array("Operation"=>"ItemLookup",
"ItemId"=>"B000X9FLKM", "ResponseGroup"=>"Small")
$public_key – your "Access Key ID"
$private_key – your "Secret Access Key"
*/

// some paramters
$method = "GET";
$host = "ecs.amazonaws.".$region;
$uri = "/onca/xml";

// additional parameters
$params["Service"] = "AWSECommerceService";
$params["AWSAccessKeyId"] = $public_key;
// GMT timestamp
$params["Timestamp"] = gmdate("Y-m-d\TH:i:s\Z");
// API version
$params["Version"] = "2009-03-31";

// sort the parameters
ksort($params);

// create the canonicalized query
$canonicalized_query = array();
foreach ($params as $param=>$value)
{
$param = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($param));
$value = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($value));
$canonicalized_query[] = $param."=".$value;
}
$canonicalized_query = implode("&", $canonicalized_query);

// create the string to sign
$string_to_sign = $method."\n".$host."\n".$uri."\n".$canonicalized_query;

// calculate HMAC with SHA256 and base64-encoding
$signature = base64_encode(hash_hmac(‘sha256′, $string_to_sign, $private_key, True));

// encode the signature for the request
$signature = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($signature));

// create request
$request = "http://".$host.$uri."?".$canonicalized_query."&Signature=".$signature;

// do request
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $request);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

if ($response === False)
{
return False;
}
else
{
// parse XML
$pxml = simplexml_load_string($response);
if ($pxml === False)
{
return False; // no xml
}
else
{
return $pxml;
}
}
}

To call the function you create a array of arguments and pass it to the function along with the keys values.

$amazontag = ‘asdfasfd-20′;
$public_key = "asfdasdfasdfasfdasfda";
$private_key = "SECRETKEYasfdasdfasdfasfdasfda";
$param = array("Operation"=>"ItemSearch",
"IdType"=>"ASIN",
"MerchantId"=>"All",
"ResponseGroup"=>"Large",
"SearchIndex"=>$searchindex,
"BrowseNode"=>$BrowseNode,
"Keywords"=>$safeQuery,
"AWSAccessKeyId"=>$amazontag);
$xml = aws_signed_request("com",$param, $public_key, $private_key);

This worked perfectly for me, and got my Amazon sites back on line. Hope this helps!!

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Overstock follows Amazon in tax revolt!

admin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:50:51 +0000

I just read at InternetNews.com that Overstock is following Amazon in regards to the tax revolt. Overstock has terminated it’s affiliate programs in California, Hawaii, North Carolina and Rhode Island.

You can read more about it here.

I understand the reasoning with these business, but I’m hoping that the revolt is reconsidered at some point. Either the states will need to change their policies, or these merchants will need to change their angle in regards with affiliates. It’s my personal opinion that that these businesses will drastically hurt their bottom line by terminating their relationships as more and more states seem to be following.

What does the future of affiliate marketing hold for us?

Amazon Tax – Hawaii is the latest to get hit

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:44:07 +0000

Hawaii is the latest state to be hit with the Amazon Tax. Since Hawaii’s economy has been suffering (as many others) their lawmakers have passed legislation that will require companies to collect sales tax if they have affiliates in the state.

This is forcing Amazon to terminate their affiliate program in Hawaii

North Carolina, Rhode Island and New York have already applied this legislation, and Amazon was forced to terminate those relationships as well.

Here is a email excerpt from Amazon to it’s Hawaiian affiliates:

We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of the uncertainty and timing of a veto, and the possibility that a veto could be overridden,

This is definitely continued bad news in the world of affiliate marketing. There is a possibility that Hawaii could veto this legislation, they have until July 15th. Amazon did not want to stick around though.

Amazon Associates Web Service Changes

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:27:08 +0000

Looks like Amazon is making some changes to their API. First they’re changing the name to ‘Product Advertising API’, which is fine with me. But it looks like they’re changing how you make calls. Based on the email sent they’re requiring authentication with each API call. Not sure what kind of impact, if any, this will cause. They are implementing this change on May 11 and will finish up by August 15th.

I personally will want to wait until the last minute to ensure the bugs were worked out. Unfortunately, my earnings with Amazon are always low, so it’ll be hard to gauge if something is wrong after the roll out.

Here is a portion of the letter sent out to associates related to the API:

“In addition to the new name, signatures will be necessary to authenticate each call to the Product Advertising API. This requirement will be phased in starting May 11, 2009, and by August 15, 2009, all calls to the Product Advertising API must be authenticated or they will not be processed. For pointers on how you can easily authenticate requests to the Product Advertising API, please refer to the developer guide, available here (http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/).”