Hey All, I'm writing from a cool little Web 2.0 company called Dapper (dapper.net); we've developed a tool for Associates with topic-specific websites to link the semantics of their site to generate targeted Amazon ads, instantly. Say you're a music site -- mentioning the name of a band in a post will beget an Amazon ad for that band's CD automatically. More targeted = more $$ Basically, the tool learns about your site, you match it with Amazon categories, and spits out JavaScript to embed and automatically generate new ads when the content on your site changes. We're looking for feedback from Associates, both on the idea and a few that would be interested in joining our private beta. Here's a link to a pdf with more info: www.dapper.net/press/DapperAds.pdf Thanks guys, Paul Knegten Dapper.net
Interesting concept and good luck with it... Though I don't generate nearly enough traffic to participate right now. You should setup up a beta testing forum on Tangler.com (the community there love trying out new betas)
Interesting idea - similar to Amazon's context links. When I ran my blog at blogger, I had an iframe pointing fo my host which picked up the referer and based on that (the url of the post) showed amazon banners with different search terms. This obviously only had the URL whereas you're looking at content. I wrote something similar to handle UK/US visitors since I'm an affiliate with both Amazon sites. I wrote something that worked like Kontera ContentLink, but you placed spans around the text you wanted to become an ad so you have complete control but don't have to keep generating urls. Full details here: http://blogsformoney.com/post/Build...stem-in-Javascript-and-ASPNET-Conclusion.aspx
Interesting, dannytuppeny, cool stuff!! I think the main difference between what you're doing and DapperAds is that DapperAds doesn't work by predefined keywords -- it actually generates them through semantics you "unlock" from your site. Essentially, in a one-time process, you mark up your page and give recurring (template-driven) elements descriptive titles (such as "Product Name" or "Artist Name"). Then you match these titles to Amazon categories, and it'll feed whatever is in these elements into Amazon's API and spit out an ad. So if you're writing a review on a Canon XJ-204 camera and you put that product name in the same place you usually put product names, it'll automatically feed that into Amazon and generate your ad for that camera. We're going live with a few affiliates for our private beta, but we'd love to talk to some more of you guys to get feedback P
Sounds very interesting - I guess this is aimed at sites that display a lot of different data in the same sort of format (eg. a site containing information on artists/songs/albums) rather than something like a blog. If I ran a Song Lyrics site it'd be perfect =D
Yep, some "structured" content is necessary -- but that's more sites than you think. Beyond music, think books (www.shvoong.com will be going live with DapperAds shortly...), movies, product reviews... And beyond Amazon, we'll be able to integrate with advertisers you may not have even thought of -- what if you could write a travel log and have the place you visit trigger an ad for a ticket to that same place...or TripAdvisor article about that place...etc. We'll certainly keep you posted Paul Knegten
Hey All, Thanks for all the feedback a while back..I have some updates First of all, we're about to roll out support not only for Amazon.com, but also for LinkShare and Shopping.com. Soon we'll have functionality for any merchant, regardless of their affiliation. We also have some numbers on CTR increases from using DapperAds vs. a static, non-targeted ad. They're of the order of 500%-600% higher CTR...we're super excited and motivated by these results, and are still open to taking new beta affiliates to work with one-on-one to "optimize" their ads. I'd be willing to take a bunch more on, and we're now looking at less "structured" sites as well. Shoot me an email at paul@dapper.net and we'll set ya up. Best, Paul