"This is high-quality information..."Amazon’s New Context Links
Have you heard of Amazon’s latest secret weapon? Some says it might be the end of Google Adsense in contextual advertising, or maybe another strong rival to Vibrant Media’s slick IntelliTXT and also Kontera.
Well, although this new Context Links System could prove to be another legacy invention, still it’s one of the coolest things Amazon’s done in years.
According to Amazon, Context Links are a quick and convenient way to add links to your website and monetize your content, where it will automatically identify and link relevant phrases within your page content to Amazon’s products, unlocking new ad inventory and saving you the time to manually create links.
You can add the links to your pages in minutes, and they will provide a wealth of options to customize how they are displayed.
Context Links is basically just a single line of JavaScript you include at the end of your web pages (exactly the same way how Kontera is implemented too).
There are a variety of tweaks you can make, however, which can make your links more effective and useful, notably “Match exact product names”, which should increase the accuracy of its links unless you accidentally use product names in sentences.
As you can see, you can choose to use a dashed underline link style.
Next thing worth customizing is what information is included in the actual pop-up window when your visitor moves the mouse cursor over an Amazon Context Link hotspot:
For this I’m sure that you’ll get better results by choosing “match exact product names” 
Finally, you can choose which categories of products you would like to associate with your site. I suggest that you pick the categories that best match the kind of content you produce, personally. For testing purposes, I’ve left everything selected
When everything is done, you would end up with something like this…
For your information, unlike the Cost-per-click (CPC) ads offered by Kontera, you can only earn from Context Links when someone clicked on your ads and buys something on the other side. It is best to implement this type of ads when you want to personally and honestly recommend a product.
I’m sure context links can prove to be another powerful source of income if manage and implement properly. To my thought, this is actually much better than the existing Amazon’s associate program.
One good tips that I can recommend is to use program like Kontera on the link within your content while putting the static amazon’s affiliate ads on the side. We should expect a revision in the Google Adsense policies though it should be fine since COntext Links works just about the same with Kontera which complies to Google Adsense.
Here are links to a couple of the closed Beta users:
- MuppetCentral.com (single underline links are Context Links)
- Thought Garage (double underline links are Context Links)
More details can be found here.
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From my own experience, many publishers will prefer kontera to this, has kontera is CPA. Amazon products unfortunally for many publishers are the worst kind of income that you can choose.
couldn’t agree more on you there, Jonix..
regards
Kontera sucked for us. Their CPMs were running about $0.18 on average and their best day the CPM worked out to a whopping (drumroll please) $0.71. I run several mental health websites and they had nothing but spam links. It was pretty offensive to some of my users when they saw they could “Buy Schizophrenia at Ridiculous Prices”. Kontera never bothered to try and fix it.