These Things Matter To Me

A bit of a break from sysadmin work, have been learning some affiliate stuff for some volunteering I’m doing.

Notes to self:

• Once you sign up for Amazon Associates, you get access to refferal links, astore creation, widgets, and developer tools.
• The management interface is a little ‘web 1.0′ (calendar days have giant drop down for every day of the month), but clear and well organized.
• Reports (not just earnings, but mere clicks) are delayed 24 hours, so if you’ve made a mistake/sent the wrong link, you may not notice for a bit. 
• Amazon’s kickback is not dynamic, but it is variable. If you only refer one item, it’s 4%, 9, 6%.
• Because reporting is so delayed, this link checker is pretty handy. It tells you the page your link goes to, and what ID is associated with it. A nice sanity check when you start getting paranoid.

Further thoughts about Amazon’s delayed reporting:

I don’t want to complain too much about this, because in general, Amazon’s setup was friendly enough for me to pick up pretty quickly. But it definitely sticks out in this era of near-realtime reporting.  We can watch our bit.ly click’s update in as they come in.  Even the blackbox Google Adsense reporting/Analytics, though delayed, is less than a full day behind.  I’m only a few days into this, so I may find an alternative way to get these results.