I came across an image on Jason Calacanis’ Flickr account where he displayed the 2009 affiliate referrals from Mahalo to Amazon.com as an affiliate.
According to his photo title, Mahalo generated over $250,000 in sales to Amazon with over one million clicks. The conversion was 1.17%.
I was going to laugh at his conversion rate, but then I checked my 2009 numbers with Amazon, and while I converted at 1.99%, I didn’t refer nearly the volume of traffic as Mahalo.
Anyhow, within the title of the photo, Jason says they hit the quarter of a million plus figure in referrals without trying and asks if anybody has “Any ideas to grow this 10x?”
Just a little less than two years ago, Jason was experimenting with affiliate links and we had him on to chat about it on the GeekCast Podcast.
It will be interesting to see where this goes.
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Hi Steve – one of the strengths of Amazon is that they offer lots of good options for promoting them as an affiliate – I wouldn’t pay for any third party tool.
As far as promoting your affiliate site, check out the ShoeMoney System for help learning the ropes: http://blog.affiliatetip.com/archives/the-shoemoney-system/
Hi: I am buying an Amazon Store. I’m not sure whether the regular Affiliate Store is as good as the Easy Store Builder by Amazon? Any opinion? Also, when set up, wheredo you think I should advertise and how, in order to get best results?? Thanks alot for listening!! Steve
Jason was joking when he said affiliate marketing is bullshit in his Affiliate Summit keynote – is that what you’re talking about?
Are you sure about the conversions being like that? I’ve never noticed, but that doesn’t make sense.
But I recently found this post on SEOBook.com (http://www.seobook.com/black-hat-seo-case-study) where it states, “What Mahalo does is take snippets, and publish them as content on their site. So they use your page titles and your content snippet to rank their site using your content, without your permission.” If this is true, then Mahalo shouldn’t brag.
I remember when Jason was slamming affiliate marketing awhile back. Amazon numbers are distorted. If one customer buys 2 items it counts that as 2 conversions when it’s actually just one. My conversion rates are around 7% and at 10% during christmas. But i really qualify the clicks with the ‘Buy From Amazon’ button.
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