All right, all right – guess I’ll have to do this one on my own.
Many bloggers today are using Amazon affiliate links to monetize their blogs. When MyBlogLog releases their API in the upcoming months, this will be a unique opportunity to provide incremental benefit to the hundreds of thousands of bloggers who are already using the standard affiliate link widget. The pitch to bloggers is “keep the exact same widget interface and account information that you are using today, but take advantage of newly-available demographic information to maximize your potential profits.”
My idea is a blog widget that allows you to monetize traffic by selling Amazon products targeted directly to your blog’s demographics. The widget would be a mashup of two web services. The first is Amazon’s affiliate program that allows you to list specific items on your web site. If a user clicks through your link and purchases an item, you earn a percentage of that sale. The second web service is the MyBlogLog API that provides demographic information about your blog readers (age, location, gender, etc..).
The mashup service would track the sales of items across all blogs that have the widget installed and compile a list of the top-selling books, movies, products, etc.. for various demographics. The service could then automatically update your blog’s widget to provide products that are most likely to appeal to the readers of your blog.
So how would this make money? There are a few options – the obvious one is to take a percentage of all the affiliate sales, but there’s also a lot of value in providing reporting and data mining across all of this information. The bloggers are actually doing the marketing and providing the data that could potentially feed a very valuable database of retail purchasing trends that is very accurately targeted to specific demographics.
Any designers out there want a free trip to Vegas, including 3 nights at the Venetian? I was there last year – it was pretty frickin’ sweet.
