Avoid Being Banned From Amazon Associates with Jesse Lakes From Geniuslink

On my last episode, I told you how I'd found this cool

tool called Geniuslink, and I was super excited about it. So

much so that I went and found the creator, Jesse Link, and we're gonna do

a deep dive on affiliate marketing using Geniuslink.

Hey. I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com.

And when I consult with clients, I always say,

never start your show with an apology, but I need to apologize

in this case. This was actually recorded back in

November of 2023. I

lost the file, and the good news is I found it. The only

reason I even bring this up is at the end, we're gonna talk about some

new features that he's hoping to add by the end of the year. Well, that

was 2023. But this tool, the more I use

it, the more I love it. And so I asked Jesse, like, what

even inspired him to create this? Let's go back.

16 years ago, I was running a series of websites that took the

soundtracks from extreme sports films, and I linked them up to songs

on iTunes and Amazon. And every time someone clicked to buy their new favorite song,

I'd earn a few pennies. And this website was kind of my first real web

project that that really kind of took off and I was really proud. I had

this nice key stick growth in traffic. My revenue was really flat,

Just could not figure out what was going on. So scratching my head, you know,

why why do I have this this delta that keeps getting bigger and bigger? My

moment came when I realized that people around the world love music.

They love skiing. They love snowboarding, and everyone around the

world was buying music from different stores. It was still maybe Itunes was the

Itunes US store, the Itunes Canada store, you know,

Amazon dotco.uk. So my oh, no moment was when I realized that

most of my links were essentially broken for that international audience. So that's why

the traffic was ramping up and my revenue was really flat is, yeah, lots and

lots of broken links. So call my best friend engineer at Microsoft and say, hey,

dude, can you build me a SmartLink? And classic engineer goes, yeah. I can build

you anything, but you have to write me the requirements doc. So I spent a

a good chunk of time kinda deep diving and learning how the Itunes affiliate program

really worked. And it was a great program, but there was really no documentation.

So poked and prodded and dug and made a lot of mistakes, but

ultimately was able to write him up a requirement stock. Another friend said, hey, keep

going. Write a book. We got nothing else going on. I was a white water

rafting guide in the summer. I'd go down to Costa Rica in the winter, essentially

just a bum with with some web projects. But so I decided to write a

book. So I took all my notes and and it kind of cleaned them up

and put some graphics together and sent off to, to an

editor and and came back and had this, you know, PDF, 160 pages, 60,000

words that was the ultimate guide to the iTunes affiliate program. So just as

about ready to publish, I sent a copy off to Apple and said, hey. You

know, I think you'll you'll appreciate this. And I think the response he got

was not what he expected. And got a cease and desist and a a

threat to sue me if I published the book. And when you get a cease

and desist from Apple, a company that large, that'll grab your

attention. So ended up popping on the the phone with this woman, first 30 seconds,

very civil and polite, next 45 minutes. She's kinda screaming at me, who who the

f was I to be writing all these lies? They'd never heard of me. There

was no way I can know anything about this. They weren't gonna let me publish

it because there's no way it could be accurate and so forth and so on.

So we made a deal. I'd let them review it before I published it. So

they they took a look at it. 3 weeks later, they came back. I had

3 pretty trivial mistakes, and they asked if I was over 18, a US

citizen. And, yeah. That might make you just a little bit nervous,

but hold on. Yeah. She said, well, come work for

me. So I trade in my flip flops for a cubicle on a commute in

Cupertino and spent the next couple of years working in Itunes and essentially made that

book obsolete except for one thing, and that one thing is what we now call

geofragmentation. It's that whole idea that as a global brand or as a

brand wants to expand, they often expand globally and then create different country and region

specific storefronts and then create affiliate programs that are specific to those

storefronts. So they paid me quite well to make the Itunes problem even

worse. I think we tripled the footprint in the the couple years I was there.

So after a couple years of, you know, the the good life at Apple, working

with some amazing people, realized that I'm more of an entrepreneur. Her life is

great, but I I was getting fat and lazy, and I I need the hustle.

So left in early 2012, and I have been building a

solution to to fix my website, also to help, you know, many,

many other creators and websites kind of around the world that not only deal with

the Itunes issue but with Amazon. And there's a number of different

global brands that kinda have the same geo fragmentation issue. But Amazon, obviously, is is

the one that brought us together. And my joy with Amazon, I've been

kicked out not once, but twice. The first time I accidentally used an iframe

and actually had somebody on the phone. And they're like, oh, yeah. I can see

where you cleared it up, and yet they still kicked me out. The second time

I put something like support the show, use this link, that

got me kicked out. It's kinda hard to stay up with this stuff.

And Jesse actually has a book and a blog post about

this. We've worked with some contacts to to write a very

detailed blog article. That blog article is now a chapter in in the book as

well, talking about the 10 easy ways to get kicked out of Amazon's affiliate program.

So, you know, one of those is incentivizing clicks, which is, you know, exactly what

you you did. There's, also the you know, one of the first ones is just

around, you know, not you know, cloaking links, not letting people know the destination.

So, you know, back to back to your question. On a technical basis, if you're

using our JavaScript or WordPress plugin, what we can do is that we can show

the Amazon destination until actual click. And that's a little bit of a loophole

that allows you not to have to put a, you know, Amazon disclaimer right next

to it. If you have a YouTube channel, we've got a tool that'll run through

and add a disclaimer when we convert the link. But in general, it's really about

the education side of just really strongly encouraging people to to spend a minute

reading our blog at a bare minimum but also to go through the operating agreement.

Operating agreement is is the rules of the game. Right? If you don't play the

rules or you don't play the game with Amazon's rules, you're gonna lose. They're gonna

kick you out, and they're probably gonna take the last 3 months' commissions that they

owe you with them. And I'll have a link to that blog post

and the book out at profit from your podcast.com/68.

And one of my favorite features of Geniuslink is what

are called choice pages. This is where you could have a link

to Amazon, B and H. There are a bunch of different places you can link

to. So I was asking, Jesse, about choice pages and how they

work. Most products are sold by multiple retailers, and Amazon

is a amazing retailer. They've got a great affiliate program. But at the

end of the day, they're only, and I put only in air quotes here, right,

40% US ecommerce market share, which is massive. It's 5 times larger than the

next largest retailer, which is Walmart. But at 40%, that also means that

3 out of 5 sales happen outside of Amazon. So the idea with a choice

page is that you as as the podcaster, as the creator,

as the influencer, you know who to recommend or sorry, the product to

recommend. But you make a bit of an assumption saying that everyone should go to

Amazon or everyone should go to Sweetwater because different retailers are gonna wanna buy from

different consumers wanna buy from different retailers. So by giving them a choice,

you allow them to do a little bit due diligence. And if it's a higher

priced item, we believe that that's actually building momentum

towards a conversion. So they can check Sweetwater. Oh, the price is lower than Amazon.

Let me check Amazon anyway. Okay. Now I'm more comfortable moving forward. And when the

visitor can do a little bit of shopping with just a few clicks, that

leads to more revenue. And we found that, in general, we see about

a 2.2 to 2.4 times lift in both conversion rates and

earnings by including the multiple retailers. So if you give consumers a choice,

they'll reward you with typically more money. But is there a point where you

can offer too many choices? It seems that there's some analysis by paralysis.

I wouldn't recommend any more than, say, 6 or 8,

choices, but it seems that Amazon makes a good option.

The specific manufacturer brand going direct to them is another good

option. Again, you know, because of, you know, being an influencer,

a creator yourself, a podcast yourself, you're probably only looking for places that have a

affiliate program to reward you for your efforts. And then maybe 1 or 2

other retailers as well. So if it's Amazon and, you

know, the the microphone manufacturer and Sweetwater, perfect. Or maybe B

and H is another good one. Right. Or maybe Best Buy is is

another good one. But, yeah, it's one of those things where we'd like to give

you the information where you can experiment and and test, yourself as well.

One of the things I love about Choice Pages is there are some that you

can just like Amazon. I can just put in a regular link, and Geniuslink

will automatically make that an affiliate link. But

But I love Sweetwater. And so what I can do is get my premade affiliate

link and add it to the choice page. So you have

your favorite stores there, especially if they have affiliate programs. But

I mentioned the book from Jesse about the different ways you can

kinda get kicked out of Amazon. And as we were doing this

interview, I found out that I might be almost ready for getting kicked

out a 3rd time Because I had mentioned how I was using

Amazon links in my email newsletter and well

Hopefully, when you said newsletter, that wasn't an email newsletter because offline

links is the second most common reason people get kicked out of the affiliate. Well,

there you go. I'm I'm just too it's actually an email. Yeah. So

I can't put affiliate link. No. You can't put Amazon links directly

into affiliate or sorry. Amazon affiliate links directly into email.

That's a certain offline source. You can't put them in a PDF. You can't bump

the art a QR code. You can, again yeah. This is one of the reasons

we built them. Put a choice page there. Our choice page, again, is a a

mobile optimized landing page that's, again, very, very specific to

promoting a product across mobile retailers. It can be a single destination retailer. It can

be just Amazon. But by going from newsletter to landing

page, a landing page has the Amazon affiliate link then to Amazon.

That is okay. But direct affiliate links inside of newsletters is not okay.

Yes. Some people, Tim Ferriss, get away with it, etcetera.

But, unless you have a written okay from Amazon, that is

another unfortunate way. You could be going for, what, number 3 here. Hopefully, you won't

get there, But number 3, you get kicked out. And if you're a person that

doesn't wanna work with individual retailers, there are

affiliate aggregators such as Skimlinks and Sovereign

Commerce. And, yep, you guessed it. They work with Geniuslink. I I will

tell you that, you know, adding individual affiliate programs, we're hoping to build

momentum and and add more of those on a regular basis. However, you can also

add in both VigLink, sorry, it's now called Sovereign Commerce, and SkimLinks, which are

these affiliate aggregators, right? These sub affiliate networks that support

tens of thousands of different programs. So if you add one of those in, then,

you know, drop in your raw links. It'll also affiliate them that way as well.

So there's a couple different ways to ensure you're monetizing. You're absolutely right. Now for

a yeah. I think we've almost got 3 dozen different programs. You add

your affiliate information directly into the dashboard. We see one of those links.

We'll take it from a raw product link into an affiliate link. You can drop

in the raw link yourself. That's option 2. Or option 3, you drop in the

raw product link, and then you add in 1 of the sub affiliate networks information.

And we can run it through them, and they can monetize it for you. So

3 different ways to ensure you're getting paid. And when I interviewed him, he

mentioned what was then a beta feature, and I've now seen it

in action. And that is Geniuslink with Amazon

reports when something is out of stock. To do that localization

piece to ensure you have someone clicking from Canada goes to Amazon dotca,

we have to understand that that link, what that product is. As

part of understanding what that product is, it's really easy for us to peek at

the stock and inventory levels as well. So and part of that

localization process where we're checking with Amazon, If they tell us that it's out of

stock or that link, they don't recognize the, ASIN, which is Amazon's unique

identifier, then we can surface it up to you and say, hey. You know, this

product may not be available or, you know, we don't recognize this product. You may

wanna think, you know, think again about, you know, sending traffic there because a dead

end destination, a product that's out of stock, is really hard to sell. And so

in my case, I had an on air sign that I had an affiliate

link for. And it let me know that for whatever reason, the person that was

selling this, they're out of stock. And I was very easy to go

in, find another on air sign, and just update

my link. It was really, really cool. Now, again, back in

November, when I asked him what's coming down the pike, these are probably in

the system now. But, nonetheless, it shows you the versatility of

Geniuslink. Yeah. We've got 2 big products where or 2 big features we're working on

right now. The first is we we've released it kinda quietly, and you've your

account already has some of this functionality, but we're we're looking into a big cleanup

of it. And that's around mobile deep linking and the whole idea that when someone

is on their device on their mobile device and they click on Amazon link,

the odds are pretty high they actually have the Amazon app installed. And sending

them directly into the Amazon app ensures they're most likely logged in,

which reduces that kind of friction, which improves your conversion rate. So we've actually seen

anywhere from a 4x to an 8x improvement in earnings by

ensuring people get into the mobile app. So we've got some good cleanup stuff on

that. Again, the the core functionality is there. With iOS, we we ran to a

couple little nuances that we're we're cleaning up. And the other one that's that's kind

of brand new that I'm super fired up about is this whole concept called Amazon

seller networks. So when we talk about Amazon Affiliate, we're talking about

Amazon's in house affiliate program, Amazon Associates. Amazon Associates

has been around for, what, 26 years or something. It's kind

of the incumbent affiliate marketing. These Amazon seller

networks is this whole new model around affiliate marketing on Amazon. And the idea is

that instead of being paid out directly from Amazon, you're paid out from the

brand for recommending their products on sales inside of Amazon.

And this is all made possible by this brand new technology that Amazon rolled out

called the attribution API. So I could I could take you deep, deep down to

the weeds, but the gist is not only can you use associates to recommend

specific products, but if this product is supported on one of these Amazon seller

networks and you use an attribution link on top of your associates

link, you can earn commissions not only from associates but from the seller network as

well, essentially doubling the revenue you can make. So there's 3 major ones right

now. We've, just finished integration with 2 of them. The third one, we hopefully

can complete in this next week or so. So in the real relatively near future,

we've got an additional way for you to monetize those Amazon product links. It is

an amazing tool. And if you're listening to this on your phone or on the

website again, profit from your podcast.com/68.

I'll have links to Geniuslink, the book, the blog post.

In fact, I'm gonna name off those 9 things. It'll get you kicked out of

Amazon right after this. And, again, I will

have a link to this out in the show notes at profit from your podcast

dot com slash 68. But here are

some things that'll get you kicked out. Number 1, cloaking links.

That's where I got into trouble, I think, with the

switchy. Io. People didn't know they were going to Amazon. Number

2, links and ebooks. 3, mentioning prices or

availability, Using their star ratings and reviews,

asking for a click or bookmark is directly against the

affiliate program. Linking to not products. And what they

mean here is, let's say, you take your affiliate little code

there and link to, like, how to get a refund. Yeah.

That'll get you kicked out. Too many ebooks is another

one, not including your disclaimer. And per the

FTC, the FTC is cutting down on

this. You have to do those disclaimers at the beginning.

You can't, at the end of the article, go, oh, by the way, you know,

parenthesis, a f f. You have to do that upfront. If you

go to ftc.gov/influencer,

they even made a video about this. So the government's kind of you you we

have the government's attention. And then number 9, old products.

I'll have a link to this again out at the website, profit from your

podcast.com slash 68. Couple other things

I was like, well, of course. He is Jesse is the

CEO of kit.co. That's a great website. And the

other one I found is if you've ever used the Whisperlink

plugin for WordPress, it helps you find internal links and how that can really help

your SEO. I'll be talking about SEO in a future episode,

but, just more reason to go. Yeah. Of course. This guy makes

great stuff. Thanks so much for listening. You can find everything we mentioned

today out at profit from your podcast.com/68.

I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting. I help podcasters.

It's what I do.