Today I'm delighted to have Nick Daws share a clever way to increase revenue from Amazon. After you read Nick's post, be sure to click the link at the end to learn more profiting from Amazon Associates.
Use This Simple Free Service to Boost Your Amazon Sales and Commissions
by Nick Daws
If you have books or e-books on Amazon, you will almost certainly have discovered one problem when promoting them to a worldwide audience.
This problem is that you can only link to one Amazon store at a time. If a visitor from the UK follows a link to your book on Amazon.com, they won’t be able to order, and a potential buyer may be lost.
If you’re an Amazon Associate, it’s even worse. Normally, if you send a visitor to Amazon via your affiliate link, you will get commission on any and all purchases they make. But if your link sends them to the “wrong” Amazon store, not only won’t you get a sale, you will have no chance of earning any affiliate commissions either.
One solution could be to provide multiple links to different Amazon stores, but this is cumbersome, and there will inevitably be some national stores you don’t have room to include.
There is a solution to this difficulty, however, and it is to use a link management platform such as GeoRiot. This free service automatically detects where a visitor to your site is based and forwards them to the appropriate national Amazon store, with your affiliate code for that store applied (if you have one).
To use GeoRiot, you first have to register on their website at www.georiot.com. This is free and only takes a few moments. If you want to redirect visitors using your affiliate link you will need to supply the relevant code for all Amazon stores of which you are an affiliate. There is no obligation to do this if you’re not bothered about affiliate commissions, however. In that case your links will simply forward visitors to the relevant page of their national store.
Once you have signed up, any time you want to create a link all you have to do is go to your GeoRiot homepage and enter the relevant page URL from Amazon in the “Create Link” box. GeoRiot will then create a universal “Genius” link you can use anywhere you wish to link to the book in question. Here is a sample link for one of my Kindle e-books: http://geni.us/1kW2. If you click on this, you should be taken to the relevant page of your own national Amazon store, wherever in the world you may live. And yes, my affiliate code will be applied as well!
You might ask how GeoRiot make money. The answer is that they apply their own affiliate code in any cases where you have not specified a code of your own, which for English-speaking authors may include non-English language stores such as Amazon.de. In addition, they offer a premium service, where they take a certain proportion of clicks on your links (up to 15%) and apply their own affiliate code instead. Premium members get some additional benefits, e.g. unlimited vanity links with customized URLs. For most authors and self-publishers, however, the free “Core” membership should be more than adequate.
One other benefit of using GeoRiot is that you get access to a lot of useful stats, including where your visitors are from. Through this I discovered that although I am UK-based, I was actually getting more clicks on my links from people in the US. I have therefore modified my book marketing strategy accordingly.
I have been using the GeoRiot link management platform for over a year now, and have seen a pleasing rise in both sales and affiliate commissions during that time. If you are an Amazon author yourself, therefore, I highly recommend checking out this excellent free service.
Savvy Tip for Authors
Read this article to learn more about boosting your profits on Amazon by using affiliate links to sell your books. GeoRiot can also be used to create affiliate links for Apple's iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore if you're promoting any products there.
About Nick Daws
Nick Daws is a professional freelance writer and editor based in Staffordshire, UK. You can visit his blog at www.mywritingblog.com.
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