Amazon lets you put a little code snippet on your web page that sets up context links. Keywords that Amazon recognizes are formatted as links and if someone clicks on it and buys stuff, you get a few percent back in their affiliate program. This sounds simple and painless.

I just did a link-type report for July 1-30 and this is the result of having Amazon links on my main web sites:

Imps.	Click Thr. Rate	Clicks	Items Ordered	Referral Fees
232055	1.16%	2691	33	$18.58

As you see this is 232,055 impressions.

The unanswered question here is the Earnings per page impression. That number is just about 8 cents per thousand links. Comparing this to the competition, I get over $2 per thousand clicks from my context sensitive text ads (a mix of YPN, MSN, Google and a few others). I get 5700 clicks on these ads, which is about twice as many as the Amazon clicks, but they pay 0ver 30 times better.

So the question is this: is the $18 worth it? By placing these context links did I loose a click to the more lucrative text ads on my site? Is Amazon diverting clicks that could have gone to the text ads?

The Amazon context links are getting better. I think that the system is learning about my web pages and highlighting better keywords as the preferences of my readers are analyzed. They are about twice as good this month as they were last month. I will try another month and see if they produce over $30 next month. If this is a trend it might be worth it.

I wonder why Yahoo, Google or Microsoft don’t create the same kind of link strategy? I would like to put pay-per-click keyword context links on my pages, I think that it would pay well. I wonder why they don’t have a product that will scan my pages for keywords the way Amazon does?

Here’s a link that hit Del.icio.us a few days ago.
Make Money Online: 100+ Tools and Resources

This has an interesting section on sites that will pay you to review products and websites. You get about $6 per review, but you can do a couple a day, every day and have to have a blog that you reserve for this. It has to have a good Google Page Rank, but you can usually get a good rank if you have interesting content and a you link to it from your other pages and a few dozen other people link to it. I am thinking that you could make $400 a month reviewing stuff. Your regular readers will forgive you if each good blog post is separated by a couple of evil capitalistic blog posts.

I have signed up with a few of these sites. They have to approve you and so far no have contacted me back. You have to have an established blog with at least two entries a week for over a year. I hope that they will want reviews of musical gear. I don’t have my hopes up that they will want reviews of SF novels, but they may want movie reviews. I can knock off a 500 word review of a movie that I’ve never seen in about 5 minutes. That comes to $180 an hour!

I will review the review process as soon as I can get an assignment from one of these sites.