Anyone who owns a blog, a YouTube channel, or a Social Media Handle, that has an audience across all over the globe will know how tricky it is to earn money from Amazon Associate Program.
Don’t worry I am in the same boat, I have several blogs and I use Amazon associate program as one of the methods to monetize the blog. One of the reasons it never became my primary method to monetize is because of the geo limitations.
The struggle of using Amazon Associate Program
Unlike Google AdSense, or any other ads service, that fills up space with an ad that it up that is appropriate for the specific location where the page is being served, Amazon affiliate is static.
If you put an affiliate link into your blog post talking about a product, it could either be from amazon.com, or amazon.co.uk, or amazon.com.au, or amazon.in or any other local Amazon shop, once you put the link it will be the same for anyone visiting that particular page from anywhere in the world.
So if you use amazon.com, and you have 20% traffic from the US, you will be losing potentially 80% of the revenue, because it will be relevant for other people if they cannot order, or prefer their local Amazon shop.
My workaround of using the Amazon affiliate program
I have been using Amazon associates for the last 10 years, where I only signed up for the amazon.com associate program, and I used to put links from amazon.com even though the traffic from us on my website was something around 20%.
Later I figured out that the majority of the visitors are coming from India that is around 40%, I signed up for Amazon.in the associate program when they launched it somewhere around 2014, and then I used to put two lines of the same product one from amazon.com and one from amazon.in and gave to the user’s choice.
While it did improve my affiliate earnings I didn’t find it the best way to optimize my affiliate earnings from Amazon associate program.
My introduction to Genius Link
Although I have been seeing a lot of YouTubers and bloggers using a link shortener that looks something like this – geni.us/links#!
I even tested it out and came to Know It redirect the user to their local Amazon shop based on their location, but it didn’t really excite me because I assumed you had to manually put in the affiliate link of a product from different Amazon shops, and rest will be taken care of by GeniusLink.
It was still a cool service but, I assumed that putting direct links to the Amazon affiliate shops into my blog makes more sense in the long run since the GeniusLink is a paid program, and if I ever stop the paid program, I will have to go back and read those links, which will be a little tough.
But a couple of months ago I finally decided to try GeniusLink, and to my surprise, there is hardly any manual work involved in fact it has much more features to offer than to simply redirect users to their local Amazon shops to enhance your earnings.
Features of GeniusLink I love
The number one feature that I fell in love with is, it automatically searches for the affiliate link of a particular product from various Amazon shops, so you don’t have to do it manually.
All you have to do is give it your affiliate tag, which is unique to every Amazon shop.
This means you have to sign up with as many Amazon associate programs for the local Amazon shops and type in your Affiliate tag into the dashboard of GeniusLnk.
Now, you will have only to pick the direct link of a particular product (not even the affiliate link) and paste it into the dashboard of GeniusLink. It will automatically add the affiliate code for all the Amazon sites.
The second feature I love the most about GeniusLink is its ability to notify you whenever a product in one of the stores is out of stock, this is actually pretty helpful because if you keep sending your visitors to the product that is out of stock, you are visiting the opportunity.
By using GeniusLink, you get notified and have the option to change it to the link of a product, that is in stock, which also increases your chances of making an affiliate commission.
Apart from these two features I also love that every link gives you information about how many times it has been clicked which is helpful in knowing which products are working well so that you can create your content plan accordingly and promote that particular product.
There are other features also offered by genius link but I am not using it since a flat morning is still my Secondary way of making money from my blogs.
What are the features a genius link promotes is its choice pages, which is simply e a landing page given by GeniusLink itself where your visitor has an option to choose the shop from where they want to buy.
So when a user clicks on a product link they land on a page where they have the option to either buy the product from Amazon or any other local online site where the product is available.
For example in India if a product is available on Amazon and Flipkart as well you can give uses the choice to buy from either of the websites. The best thing is you have the ability to manually put the affiliate link for Flipkart. The same goes for or E-Commerce stores from different countries.
Comparing Affiliate earnings before and after using the genius link
I have been using GeniusLink for the last 2 months (since March 2021) although not actively, because of this global pandemic.
I have definitely seen improvement in my affiliate earnings. I have signed up for three other athletes’ stores as well such as amazon.co.uk, amazon.com.au, amazon.ae, since these are the three top countries my websites visitor are from apart from India and the US which, affiliate programs for Amazon I was already using.
February 2021 Amazon.com Screenshot
March 2021 Amazon.com Screenshot
My amazon.com affiliate earning is not great, but seeing the improvement in the revenue by simply replacing the links and not doing anything extra has motivated me enough.
And this is not a usual bump in revenue in the month of March. My affiliate income is usually between $15 to $30 or sometimes it goes to $40. Here is a screenshot of revenue from January 2021.
I have seen the same bump for amazon.in affiliate as well, where I am made around Rs 1266 in January, Rs 1601 in February, it was Rs 3123 in March.
Genius link is not only used by bloggers but YouTubers as well because YouTube is becoming a preferred destination for anyone who is looking to buy a product, since they are able to see a product looks and works, and they are more likely to get convinced to buy a product. The only limitation would be geographical, and GeniusLink takes care of that problem.
Thank you for reading this article, if you have stumbled upon this why are doing a Google search looking for reviews for GeniusLink. Most likely you are a Blogger, or a YouTuber, or an Influencer, who is looking to grow their online business.
I have been blogging myself since 2007 and have been sharing a lot of things that I have learned during the process. Asiogroup.Net contains many helpful articles which you can read. I highly recommend you bookmark this blog, and sign up for the newsletter.
