A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how affiliated links can help you earn some additional income from your book sales. Hopefully by now, you’ve explored the wonderful world of the affiliate programs and have taken full advantage. If not, do it now. I’ll wait.
All set up now? Good. Now we can discuss the next step in your books taking over the world – one click at a time. If you have any sort of international following, you’ll want to make sure your audience can buy your book in their native storefront. For example, readers in the United Kingdom should get sent to amazon.co.uk, US readers should get sent to amazon.com, etc. You’re probably wondering “Why? As long as they buy my book, what do I care?” Good question. Let’s dig into it.
Let’s pretend that you walk into a physical store to buy a book you want, and all you have is a couple of US Dollars, no credit card, and only speak English. If that store’s signs were all in Japanese, the salesperson only spoke Japanese, and the prices were in Japanese Yen, what’s the probability of you going through with that purchase? Pretty low, right?
This is the same experience for your international users when you send them to purchase items outside their base country, which means you’re potentially losing out on any sales – including the additional affiliate money you could have made from anything else they purchased in the same session. Not good.
Now that I have you sufficiently worried, let’s talk about how to prevent those unhappy readers and failed purchases. The easiest and (in my biased opinion) best option is to use a link management platform, such as GeoRiot.
What these platforms do is automatically determine the country your readers are from, then direct them to their local storefront and add your affiliate ID so that you can earn that cash we previously talked about. The good ones even give you additional benefits like creating “vanity links” such as http://domain/MyBookRocks, which not only looks much better than the long Amazon links, but also gives the reader insight into exactly what it is they’re purchasing. Depending on the platform, there’s also some really solid reporting like showing you which links are leading to sales. For example – you can create a link for Facebook and a link for Twitter, then compare to see which one has more clicks, and where those clicks are coming from.
So there you have it. Signing up for the affiliate programs for both iTunes and Amazon is definitely a no-brainer. Using globalized links to make sure all of your readers are getting the best experience possible when purchasing your books should be as well. Of course, if you have any questions at all about how this process works, let us know. We are always here to help.
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