Rui CarmoAlthough hosting costs are covered for the next two months, I recently decided to get rid of AdSense as part of the site redesign (which is turning out nicely, even though I’m only changing a few lines of code a week) and find other ways to offset the expense.
A few people have suggested (on and off) for a while that I set up an Amazon affiliate store, and this weekend I decided to spend 5 minutes looking into it.
As it turns out, I spent an hour or so diddling with the layout and CSS, and ended up building a fairly nice store based on their UK site. The bulk of it is, of course, books, but I tried to make things interesting.
It’s been up since Sunday, but I’ve yet to find a decent spot to link to it in the site’s sidebar, and, well, I’ve other things to do anyway.
But, you may ask, why in the UK, given that I’m Portuguese and over half of my readership hails from the US?
Well, I’ve been an Amazon UK affiliate for a few years now, since that’s where I shop for stuff. If you’re a frequent visitor, you probably noticed that all my book reviews are linked there automagically ever since I set up Yaki, and every now and then I get enough to get a gift certificate which I use buy more books, thereby completing the circle.
And even though they’ve just set up shop in Spain, the chances of my ever actually using a Spanish site are practically nil, given that I’m unlikely to buy books there and all Amazon stores in Europe ship from the same logistics center.
So it’s basically laziness on my part. But setting up a US-oriented variant should be a no-brainer (and in fact, Amazon could very well automate the process), and if enough people ping me regarding that, I’ll do it over the weekend.
Update: Given that the new Kindle is already orderable in the US and that I forgot I buy Kindle e-books on the US store, I decided to set up a US version of the store in a jiffy - new link, with automatic redirection.