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Making your affiliate products (ie: Amazon) a part of your content or story….

In some Squid circles they have two boxes in which to categorize a lens (they’ve already chucked out the spam ones, so no need to find a box for them). One is labeled Content and the other is Commerce.

Content lenses are those which have plenty of written content. Preferably original, otherwise well organized. It could be information, a tutorial, a story or one of any other number of types of things that a person can write about. Or collected and collated. Some may complement it with a few well chosen products. Or they may have none at all.

Commerce on the other hand is heavy on the affiliate modules. The better ones handpick a specific niche or product line, and find a selection of products that suit the category. They may just be a series of Amazon (or even Ebay) modules or even Amazon Plexo modules. The person may go the extra mile and write a review for the product, if they have first hand experience with the product.

What interests me most though is when products become an integral part of the content. It’s a blurring of the lines between these two otherwise well thought out piles. When your visitor doesn’t discern the difference between the text and the product link.

I’d like to think I have one such lens: www.squidoo.com/2seconds

It’s short, it’s sweet, it integrates the products with the theme.

I’d like to see more mentioned, so if anyone wants to post examples here then go right ahead.

I picked a few items, five in fact, that I thought would complement the content. Contextual product placement. Wow, that sounds so good that I think it’ll make for a great heading for this blog post.

I picked out a t-shirt, iron, ironing board, washing powder and a washing machine.

I wrote text to accompany each of them, making it a seamless part of the story.

I find humor the best way to blend in the product with the content. Making it conversational keeps the beat.

So next time you’re adding some products to your content, think about how you can make it a part of the content. Or if it’s predominantly just a product listing, think of ways to make your visitor stick around and actually enjoy their visit and entertain (or in the very least educate) them while they’re there. I think most of us are aware and practice contextual product placement but lets try and make it outstanding contextual product placement.

Be sure to credit your sources.

It’s important.

Copyright issues aside, I thought I’d share a nifty way to do it.

I often just write “Source” and make it into a hyperlink. If I’ve used an extract and I feel the it would benefit my audience to click through and read the entire article I’ll write “Read more…”.

The new Squidwho template uses the Wikipedia Module and it says “read the rest of the Wikipedia article”.

A clear invitation.

Don’t be afraid to give links to authoritative sites. You’re not going to lose your reader. I believe it’s quite the opposite. They’ll trust you more.

But that’s not the focus of this blog post, I may share more on that later.

In the HTML code Squidoo is using CSS to format that link. Which makes it a real nice shade of blue. But also a wee bit smaller than the rest of the text, and also it’s on the right hand side.

I like all that formatting and you can use it too in other modules. Lets say you want the same effect on a “Source” or “Read more…” or “Read the rest of the [insert website name here] article” you can get it quite easily and quickly by sneaking in
class=”poweredby” in your normal hyperlinks.

Where you’d use say <a href=”http://www.lensroll.com”>Source</a>> make it <a href=”http://www.lensroll.com” class=”poweredby”>Source</a>.

And there you have it, a wee bit smaller, a nice blue colour and ALSO aligned to the right.