Avoid Being Banned From Amazon Associates with Jesse Lakes From Geniuslink

Dave Jackson [00:00:00]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:00:26]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:01:01]:
And so I asked Jesse, like, what even inspired him to create this?

Jesse Lake [00:01:05]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:01:39]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:02:18]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:02:48]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:02:55]:
And I think the response he got was not what he expected.

Jesse Lake [00:02:58]:
And got a cease and desist and a a threat to sue me if I published the book.

Dave Jackson [00:03:02]:
And when you get a cease and desist from Apple, a company that large, that'll grab your attention.

Jesse Lake [00:03:07]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:03:26]:
I had 3 pretty trivial mistakes, and they asked if I was over 18, a US citizen. And,

Dave Jackson [00:03:32]:
yeah. That might make you just a little bit nervous, but hold on.

Jesse Lake [00:03:36]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:04:17]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:04:37]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:05:01]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:05:40]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:05:58]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:06:22]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:07:04]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:07:15]:
And when the visitor can do a little bit of shopping with just a few clicks, that leads to more revenue.

Jesse Lake [00:07:20]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:07:32]:
But is there a point where you can offer too many choices?

Jesse Lake [00:07:36]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:08:10]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:08:18]:
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

Jesse Lake [00:08:59]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:09:06]:
I'm I'm just too it's actually an email. Yeah. So I can't put affiliate link. No.

Jesse Lake [00:09:11]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:09:25]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:09:50]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:09:59]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:10:11]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:10:41]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:11:01]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:11:12]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:11:47]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:12:14]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:12:51]:
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.

Jesse Lake [00:13:31]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:14:01]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:14:31]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:15:02]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:15:33]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:16:04]:
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.