New Monetization Tool From Amazon

Amazon has a new tool that places ads on your blog based on a keyword that an affiliate inputs, per ad, rather than contextually, like Adsense. BloggerKits.com helps to integrate this into your blog, but it comes at the cost of them inserting their Amazon affiliate ID into 15% of the ads that are served up. That's really not a lot and it is better than you receiving no money at all.

To use, it's supposed to be as easy as plugging a keyword into the bottom of a post and letting Amazon do their magic. The setup is fairly simple.

A few things that I noticed when looking at an example at BloggerKit.com is that the keyword is visible at the bottom of the blog. You are allowed, they say, to make this text the same color as the background it's on. That got me thinking about the way the search engine's react to such a thing. Don't they tend to get a tad upset when someone "hides" their text by making it the same color as the page? The jury is still out on that one, as far as I'm concerned.

One of the nice things is that the ads are served up with photos next to them. Photos tend to draw people's attention to any text beside it, thus increasing your chance of getting the click thru.

Although you get paid directly from Amazon, any ad you get paid for will be based on a sale, rather than a click. I would definitely not make Amazon ads my only source of revenue on your blogs. Keep your Adsense running strong.

I probably will stay in a "hide-and-watch" mode for a while and see if this takes off. What say you?