176: Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers with Chris Guthrie

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Wonderful listener Alexa here. And you know that when we start an episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast with a cold open like this that it typically means something big is happening. And it's true. Food Blogger Pro enrollment is now open, but only for a few more days. We'll actually close enrollment for the entire year this Thursday, November 15th, and we would absolutely love for you to be a part of our last enrollment class of 2018. And if you're ready, you can sign up at food blogger pro.com signup right now. But I'm not sure if you know this. I was actually a Food Blogger Pro member long before I ever joined the team. I saw all of these amazing bloggers building and creating successful blogs and I heard their stories on the Food Blogger Pro podcast and I just wanted to be a part of it. So I joined. I completely devoured Lindsay's photography video tutorials, I attended live Q&As, I took advantage of the member only deals and I learned more about the top topics that mattered to me like SEO, plugins and WordPress. Two of my favorite things about the way that we have Food Blogger Pro structured are the facts that the courses are completely self paced and you get access to everything we have the second you sign up. So I was able to learn about the topics that were most important to me and I could save other topics for later. And while we already have a ton of content on Food Blogger Pro, we're always adding more. We're using feedback from our members, trends we're seeing in the industry, and the expertise of our team to add additional value to your membership every single month. New videos, new Q&As, new deals. We're always adding, never subtracting. So if you have any hesitations or holdups about joining, I invite you to email me. Seriously, I'd love to have that conversation with you so that we can help you decide whether or not Food Blogger Pro is right for you. My email is alexaoodbloggerpro.com and if you don't have time for an email, I get it. I just want you to know that we have a 60 day refund policy for everyone. So that means that you can try Food Blogger Pro out for two whole months before committing to the membership. Food Blogger Pro members are also just amazing and they inspire me every single day. One of our members recently quit her full time job to blog full time, which is just amazing. I actually have the forum conversation about it printed out in my room and office because it's just so inspiring and awesome. We hear success stories like this all the time, but they never, ever get old. We love our members and we love to see you become a member this year again. You can sign up right now@foodbloggerpro.com signup and if you have any questions or hesitations, my email address again is alexaoodbloggerpro.com all right, onto the episode. In this episode, Bjork talks to Chris Guthrie about rocking your affiliate income as a blogger. Hello again, friend. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast and we are so excited that you're here. I love this time of year so very much, and I'm sure I'm not alone with that. Quarter four is such a busy time for bloggers, food bloggers especially, because everyone is looking for recipes for their holiday meals. But alas, this time of year is magical. American Thanksgiving is coming up next week already, and then comes holiday gift guide season. You know all about gift guides, right? They're the posts that bloggers publish full of gift ideas, things like for the home cook, for the teenage girl, or for the boyfriend who's impossible to shop for. I love checking out bloggers gift guides. And as bloggers, gift guides are actually an incredible way to make some extra moolah. So I'm talking about affiliate income, and that's actually the topic of today's episode. Chris is. Chris is an affiliate marketing fiend and he's chatting about affiliate marketing strategies and affiliate marketing plugin, how the Amazon affiliate program works, and so much more. So if you're looking to up your affiliate marketing game, this episode is for you. Let's jump in.

Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, it's fun to have you on the podcast. We've connected a couple different times at a conference. Once we had a call way back in the day. It was maybe like four years ago, and then recently reconnected again. So it's good to be back, connected up and to be chatting with you here on the podcast.

Yeah, it's fun because I think that we're in this space long enough. If you can make those connections, it's important to try and continue to do that. And it's so great to see you randomly. I was like, oh, it's Roark.

Wait a minute. Yeah, in real life, it's such a strange thing.

Yeah.

So one of the things that we're going to be focusing in on here today is we're going to be talking about Amazon and affiliate links and you have a lot of experience with that not only in creating products around that, but also building sites around that. And I know just a little bit of your story, but for those that aren't as familiar, can you share a little bit? You can rewind the tape. We like to hear kind of the origin story of where people started. And then one of the things I would love to hear specifically with your story is the review site that you built. What was that? And kind of the outcome from building that review site. So kind of a SparkNotes version of who Chris Guthrie is and then talking about that tech site as well.

Yeah, perfect. So I've started doing various things and I first found that you could make money online when I was looking at someone's Nintendo GameCube website. This is like several Nintendo consoles ago. And I saw this little message at the bottom, it said ads by Google. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. So I contacted the owner, I was like, hey, this is kind of forward of me, but how much do you make from these little ads? And he's like, oh, two bucks a day or something. And I thought, well, I mean, if it's, that's still money and if you just get a lot more people to look at your website, then you can probably make more money.

And I feel like it's money from something that seems so fun. Like you're Talking about the GameCube and getting $2 a day, like it's a win win.

Exactly. So that was like, I don't know, 12 or 13 years ago. And I thought, okay, I'm going to do this. And so I started building out. I started doing various forums. Some of them are related to video games and things like that. But even at the peak of these forums, I was getting maybe half a million page views a month. For my most popular one, it was still maybe $500 a month on AdSense. And I was thinking, man, this is just, I need so much more traffic to actually make a lot more money. Or the traffic that I'm getting is just not valuable enough. And that was kind of like the very early thing for me to think, okay, what can I do where I'm still making these websites? I'm having fun doing it, I'm making money. But it's something where the traffic is more valuable. And that's really what led me to doing product review websites. I thought, okay, I'm going to create websites that are review based because the keywords people are searching for are going to be more focused on buying something if it's just really any keyword you can think of right now with the word review or best or top or things like that, after that keyword, then people are more likely to buy something. And that was like the really rudimentary idea I went with. And then that was my kind of why I started doing Amazon affiliate sites and I started building various tech type review sites and things like that. Had one kind of primary site that was driving a larger portion of my affiliate commissions. But ultimately it was about it'll be. Nine years ago in October, I was fired from my day job because I think they knew that I was not really that committed to this company because I was doing a side business, whereas most of their employees would just kind of go out drinking in the evenings and never try to do anything else anyways. But fortunately at the time after I got fired, my Amazon affiliate income had already surpassed my day job income. So I thought, okay, well this is my thing now. So I just started doing that. And that was nine years ago.

Got it. And one of the things that's kind of fun about your story is one of those sites you had built and then somebody came and said, hey, we're actually interested in acquiring this. So you sold one of those sites early on. Can you talk about what that experience was like and what that felt like to go through that process?

Definitely. So one of the very first conferences I went to, it's not really around anymore, so it's not even worth mentioning it, but it was a much higher end conference. I paid like $5,000 to go to it. And then two weeks after I got back, that's when I got fired. So I was like, dang, I just used a large chunk of my income for the month from my websites to pay for this. But I met people that since then, looking back, it's always hard to connect the dots of how things will lay out as life happens to you. And it's really easier to see that when you look backwards even now. Some of those people I met back then, I just spoke with them one a few weeks ago and he actually introduced me to an investment bank that I can't remember where they're based out of now, but he introduced me to them and said, hey, this guy, he's got a site, it's a little bit smaller than what you usually sell because they were usually selling sites in the seven figure range, whereas my sale was going to be in six figures and said, hey, just go ahead and go forward with this sale. And then if you have him, I have something else in the future to work with. But I was able to use these investment makers, listed the site for sale, sold it. It was a nice exit for me. And because it's been so long now, it's like I forget where everything kind of fell together. But I used some of the proceeds from that to start getting into doing software things and Easy Azon and Other types of WordPress plugins and things like that way back then.

Yeah. One of the things that you had mentioned that I feel like is really important to point out and a really good perspective for people to have that listen to this podcast, is the way that you approach content as somebody who is thinking strategically about affiliate marketing and about using Amazon links. And you had mentioned that just kind of briefly, this idea of being strategic about the types of keywords that people are using. And for a lot of the people, myself included, that are part of our community, think about keywords like chocolate chip cookies or peach cobbler. Like, how do we rank high for a specific keyword related to recipe or diet or nutrition or something like that. But in your world, a lot of times people are thinking strategically not about, you know, just generic traffic, but generic traffic that has buyer intent and that being such an important thing. And it doesn't have to be everything that you do. But I feel like it's important for us to talk a little bit about what buyer intent is and how we can go about creating content that potentially has a keyword or ranks for people who are searching for things that have buyer intent. So can you talk about what that is and how you can be strategic about that from an affiliate marketing or Amazon affiliate perspective?

Definitely. So I think that I'll give an example. So if you're typing in what is an HDMI cable, it's very, very likely that that person is probably not looking to buy one. Maybe they are looking to buy one, but they're just like looking for something from an informational perspective. Whereas if they're thinking review of Belkin model number cable or top five Belkin HDMI cables. Right. Something along those lines. Or best TVs. Best Samsung HGTV of 2018. Right. Those types of keywords are much more. It's much more likely that someone that's searching that term is likely to buy. So I think that if you're thinking about it in the context of people that are in your space, there are similar keywords that you would think of for what you're doing as well. So it could be like X number of tools that you might use to make. And this is funny because I don't know as much about food, of course, but whatever tools you use to make the nice things I see that are posted on Instagram.

Fill in those blanks.

Yeah, so anyways, I'm giving away. I don't really know that much about making nice food, but anyways, so that's kind of like the general idea of doing buyer intent and stuff like that. Right. So when we're doing Amazon affiliate type sites and what I've done in the past, it's much more like, okay, what's a niche that we can go into? And then what are the types of keywords and content ideas that we can build out? And then either creating it yourself if you're just getting started out and don't have as much cash available, or, you know, paying writers to do it for you.

Got it. So do you have an example of either somebody that you know or like a site that you know, a site that you've built, that you've gone through the process of thinking through that saying, okay, I know that there's going to be a lot of people that are searching for this specific thing. I'm going to build a site around that. And then what the result of that was.

Well, I don't know if I can say the sites like the site that I sold, specifically the URL, but what you can pretty much do is if you just think of a specific consumer electronic item or something like that.

Blenders. Blenders would be a good example.

Yeah. If you were to look for especially specific brand names and then search for reviews, you're eventually going to find sites that aren't related to. And maybe what we'll do after this is I can maybe find one so you can put it in the show notes or something.

Great.

But you'll find eventually that there are sites that are very clearly someone's creating this content and it's for affiliate purposes because it's not like just an Amazon.com listing and it's not some other major site. So I'll find one and then we can link it in the show notes.

Awesome. That's great. And the reason why I think it's important to point that out and to be aware of that is because again, I think for this niche, for the way that we think about content so often we think about content that is first and foremost traffic oriented and is ad income or maybe sponsorship type income. But for the listeners, as you're thinking about the type of content that you can build, it's important to think about the other types of ways that you can create content that creates an income for your site and for your business. And one of those ways is by creating kind of buyer intent affiliate related content. So a post or a page on your blog. But one of the questions that I would have, and I'm sure that other people have, is how do you know if it's going to be something that's worth pursuing? How do you know if there's enough people that are searching for it or you know, once they do search for it, how do you know if they'll actually click and convert? Are there tools that you can use or suggestions that you've. You'd have for people that where they can start to understand that a little better?

Yeah. So I'd like to look at pretty much anytime I'm looking at content sites, really anything online. It's a lot of what I'm thinking about is just how I can differentiate what I might try and create versus what has already been created. But first you need to see what actually has been created out there in the first place. If you have an idea for an article that you could create, I would search that idea to see what people are already saying about that. You could do this manually using just Google of course, but you could also use a tool like semrush or ahrefs.com those tools are good. I like to use those tools just to analyze what various pages my competitors might be ranking for. And then also you know, where they're getting most of their traffic from. And so that can give me then further ideas for content to create or just ways that I can look at how a topic has already been covered. Because you know, at this state of the Internet there's always something's always been covered.

Right.

But there's always ways to be to do it differently or to do it better. And so those are a couple of tools and ways that I would would look for that.

Awesome. And then how about on page? So once somebody is there are there ways that kind of the low hanging fruit that people can think about when it comes to optimizing a page for clicks or for conversions as it relates to affiliate income.

Yeah. So one of the most common errors I see, especially people that are first starting out with Amazon's affiliate program, is when they are, you know, they'll write this huge long 2000 or 3000 word post about whatever the topic might be and they might be talking about a specific product throughout that post, but they only really mention hey, buy this on Amazon with a link at the very end or maybe a Couple links throughout there, really, if you can find more ways to include links. One of the things I used to do is if I'm talking about something that's a consumer electronic product, then I'd say, here are some of the specs, but click this link to see all the specs. And it would take them to Amazon because the goal is to just provide as much information as possible, but then to get them over to Amazon because then they can convert pretty well. But that's one example, right. If there are images of the product that you might be talking about in your content, you can convert that into an affiliate link. If there are comparisons you want to link to and you want to say, hey, here's this product versus this product. That's something you could do. Anything like that, where you're finding more ways to include links and then creative ways to kind of get people to go to Amazon can be really effective.

Yeah. And it's interesting because it's a little bit of a mindset shift where usually you're thinking about, how do I keep people on my page and my website as long as possible? And in the example of monetizing through affiliate links, it's how do I get them to leave? Like, not how do I get them to stay, but what does it look like to get them to the place where they would make the final purchase of whatever that product is? So it makes sense that you're thinking, okay, what does it look like to provide that link to make that clear and to make sure people know that they're able to click over and get there. So you had mentioned Amazon as kind of being the affiliate program. Can you talk about why the Amazon affiliate program is such a popular and attractive affiliate program versus other affiliate networks or other ways that you can do affiliate advertising?

I think the biggest reason is that it's just been around for so long. I mean, I think they've had their affiliate program around since the late 90s or maybe early 2000s. But, you know, and then of course, everyone is using Amazon. So it's just if you're using another affiliate program for, say, a different retailer, then there's a high probability that unless that product's only available, that retailer, people will just look at it there and then just go buy it on Amazon anyways. So rather than trying to fight it, you just kind of give in.

Yeah, it's like everybody's using it. So everybody's using it.

Yeah.

So the power is in the reach.

Yeah, it's kind of a basic reason. I mean, in the past, back in like 2017, they used to provide you a variable referral rate based on how much you referred. So one of the reasons would be, you know, always use Amazon because the more people you send there and the more sales you get, then you get a higher commission. Right now they have like a fixed rate per category. You will find though that in some niches it's better to use other affiliate programs. Like I have some content sites that don't use Amazon at all because there's not really. It doesn't really make that much sense to use them. So I wouldn't say ignore the other affiliate programs, but if it's something that is a typical consumer good that can be purchased, then just use Amazon.

Got it. One of the things that you had mentioned was the tiers for different categories and the price percentage. Can you talk about. Obviously these aren't going to be numbers that you have off your top of your head and we can link to that in the Show Notes where it kind of gives an overview of that, but just the different parts of an affiliate program that you should be aware of in terms of the different terms and the different numbers as a publisher that you need to be aware of and what those are kind of in general terms for Amazon. Yeah.

So you want to know the mechanism with which you're paged through any affiliate program. Some affiliate programs might be just, you know, you're paid when they sign up and put their email address in. That'd be like a CPA type offer and maybe be a dollar or two or something. It would depend on the niche. CPA standing for cost per acquisition. Got it now. But in the context of Amazon's affiliate program, it would be, you know, when someone buys something, that's when you get paid. And so I actually do happen to have the percentages up in front of me, so I can give some examples specifically.

Great.

Like if you're saying something that's in. Let me see if I can find something specific to. Well, I'll just pick something else. If it's Amazon fashion, women or men's and kids, private label luxury beauty, Amazon coins, that's 10%. If it's video games and video game consoles, it's 1%. Amazon gift cards and wine, it's 0%. So that's something that I believe they used to pay for, but they don't anymore. And then so there's all different categories. And again, we can link to this later. And then it says all of the categories 4%. So there's just kind of A range between that low single digit percentage on up to that 10% range, which is.

Interesting because it used to go up to like 6, 7, 8, just kind of generically. Is that right? What was the top tier before?

Yeah, 8 1/2% was the peak that you get to. And then so I would. So one of the things I used to do is try and buy other smaller Amazon sites just to get more sales so that it would. Because then it would retroactively approve that higher percentage to all the products you done throughout the month. But yeah, it's not applicable anymore. Another thing that I should mention too is that each affiliate program is going to have a different beyond just how you get paid, but they're going to have a different way that they track it. And so Amazon's affiliate program is a 24 hour cookie. And so once someone clicks something from that moment in time, 24 hours after that, anything that they buy, it doesn't even matter if it's a thing that you link to that you'll get a commission on it. And so I've never had any watch related websites, but I've referred some watch sales thousands of dollars for a watch and then got a couple hundred dollars on the commission because just something that they happen to buy. So this is another thing to keep in mind too, if you're gonna think about your content calendar, how you're trying to schedule out your content, making sure you really hit on like Prime Day, doing things for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, even if you're not really, and you won't be that focused on just specific products. If you're listening to this podcast, maybe you are outside the niche, but if you just focus even on those days, you can do pretty well. And so that's something to keep in mind. And then one other thing I'll mention is that if you get someone to click the item and add to their shopping cart and there's some ways that you can create links to do that, then it's 30 days cookie length. So if someone comes back and buys it later, then you can still get a longer time for that sale to convert.

Oh, interesting. So point being, if somebody has put something in their cart but they didn't buy it, then that cookie life extends to 30 days. So essentially it was saying like okay, you get credit for this if they check out within the next 30 days.

Exactly. For that specific item.

Yeah, got it. And that makes sense too when you were saying it's a great, great little tip. And takeaway is for those days where people will be buying a lot from Amazon. It makes sense if you are talking about Amazon because. And linking to Amazon because if they click that link, there's a really good chance that people are just going to be buying more in general. And if you can get credit for that, it doesn't have to be the thing that you recommended, because it can be anything. So during those periods of time would be kind of peak time to talk about and share Amazon links.

Yeah. I mean, if you take nothing else away from this podcast and you have reasonable amount of traffic on your site right now, and you just create some content around Black Friday and Cyber Monday this holiday season, then you're going to make some extra money that you were probably not going to make before.

That's interesting. Yeah. And it's interesting even to pull up the. When I'm looking at Pinch of Yum's referrals here, this is a great example where one of the products that we have referred is a buccaneer pirate costume. And I don't know for certain, but I'm guessing that there's nowhere on the blog that we talk about that. But apparently somebody clicked on an Amazon link and then went over and bought that buccaneer costume, which if you were listening to this podcast and you bought that, I hope that it's a great, great buy. It sounds like it is. So in terms of promoting the content, let's say that, let's use an example. Let's say that you started a food blog, somehow you got inspired and your food and recipe development knowledge went through the roof. You have a hundred thousand pages a month, but it's primarily people that are coming for a singular piece of content without necessarily being in like a buying mindset. They're more in a I want to make this recipe mindset. What are some ways that people can strategically and authentically start to think about including and mentioning Amazon affiliate links within their content?

Yeah. So I think that if, especially if you had something, say it's just a standard blog post, or not standard, but maybe it's a blog post about some recipe that you've made, I think that you can just kind of say, especially if you have pictures of what you're doing or pictures of some of the tools you're using, then you could say, here's if it's the bowl and then a mixing spatula or something along those lines, you could say this is that item. Right?

Yeah.

So that's some of the easiest ways you could do. One actually thing I just thought of is that Amazon starting to add more and more food items on there. So if you happen to be using items that, that are sold on Amazon, you could say, here's how you can buy that specific recipe and you could bundle together all those different items and then they could click a single link and then add that to your shopping cart. So that's something that you can do as well with other software and stuff.

Can you talk about that, what that looks like and how that would work? Because it's different than just linking to a specific ingredient item. You talked about bundling it all together and then adding to cart. So how does that work and how would you go about doing that?

So there might be a manual method to do it. I'm not as aware of it. That's something that we have in our WordPress plugin that we built so that if you want to make a shopping list of things and you can add a bunch of different items and then they click a link and then it gives you a prompt on Amazon to add, say seven items to your shopping cart, click continue, and then they can do that. So that's something you can do that would help. I see that a lot with, especially in the fashion space, people will do that. They'll have, here's all these different pieces that people are wearing. And then you can, if you like this outfit, click it and then buy the whole thing.

Got it.

So something like that.

And you'll see that whether it's somebody wearing a certain outfit or if they kind of lay everything out and they do a photo of like, here's a combination of different, you know, clothes that you could be wearing, assembling a different outfit, and then saying essentially with one single click, you can go and you can check out and get everything that I've highlighted here. Exactly. And you had mentioned your plugin. Do you want to talk about that a little bit, what it is and maybe kind of where that came from, why you created that, and what are some of the things that it does?

Yeah, so it's Easy Azon. And so it's just easyaison.com and I'm sure you probably have a link after in the show notes or whatever. But I created that plugin because when I was way back when I was first building these Amazon affiliate sites, I was really frustrated with the process of going to Amazon's website and then clicking that little site stripe link to this page, then copying the code and then going back into the WordPress editor and then pasting it in there. And so I thought, let's just build that all into the plugin or the WordPress editor itself. So just now you click a button and then you can search for various products, create links for a link to the. Just a text link, an image link. You can do a link that's like an add to cart button. So all those different types of things and then just put that into the plugin and make it simpler to create that.

Got it.

Yeah, yeah.

And it removes the step from kind of having to bounce back and forth between Amazon and your WordPress site. So everything is there tied into your WordPress account, but it still is linking when you want it to. Using your Amazon link.

Yeah. And the other thing too is that we built on some. And obviously if you have any, again, if you using your example, if it's 100,000 pages a month, you're likely to have some of that traffic coming from international. So one of the things we'll do too is we can redirect that international traffic to the correct location. And it's not always 100% matching the exact product that they're looking for because it might not be available in the store or it's more like a search for that product in the other location anyway. So when you redirect that traffic, then you can make money from Amazon's other affiliate programs outside of the, you know, maybe the main demographic or main country that you're targeting.

Got it.

And so that's really one of the main things that people use the plugin for. And like I've had people come up to me at conferences and be like, hey, I'm making like this much like an extra couple thousand dollars a month from international traffic that would have just, you know, went to Amazon.com and then you wouldn't have been credited on it. Yeah.

And so the idea with that is obviously Internet global. So people are coming from all over the place. You can see that in Google Analytics. And if you are using just a plain vanilla, let's say you're in the US and using just a plain vanilla Amazon link, or in the, let's say you're in the UK and trying to figure out which type of link do I use? Do I use one for like the generic Amazon.com or would I do a.co.uk link and you're having to make that decision. Essentially what you're saying is you can have it all, you can have your cake and eat it too. You can use that one, a single link, and then the software will redirect people to the appropriate landing page or one that's close to the product that you had recommended.

Yeah. And the way in which and the actual mechanism for that may be changing in terms of how we implement it. Amazon's done some things on their side as well to make. To kind of do this as well with their own one link program, which is kind of somewhat similar, but anyway, so that might be changing in the future, but that's something to keep in mind. If you're linking to any Amazon products, then you can make more money by taking advantage of the international traffic as well.

Got it. Yeah. Great tip. And a great thing to think about, especially if you are somebody who's leaned heavily into or interested in doing Amazon links. Knowing that and remembering the globalness of your website and also the audience that you can serve. And there's been a couple people that have reached out and we have it set up to do that and have said, hey, it's been. It's so nice when I click on something that it goes to the appropriate landing page for that. Which is awesome.

Yeah.

So if somebody's. They've never gone about doing affiliate marketing, they've never gone about using Amazon links. They're just looking to get started. What would you recommend for somebody as the first steps to make sure that they're kind of capturing this important part of having an online business? How would they go about taking those first steps to implement the most important things?

Let me think here. I think that. Are you thinking more about just getting set up to actually start creating the first affiliate links type of thing?

Yeah. What would that look like and how would you know? What would your advice be for the first piece of content that you focus on optimizing? Let's say somebody has some posts that have some traffic. Should they focus on those first and try to find creative ways to start folding in Amazon links into that? What would your recommendation be for getting started?

Yeah, so I definitely would say that if you already have established traffic, one of the easiest ways to make more money from the traffic that you're getting is to look at where you're getting that traffic and then finding ways to improve the monetization for those specific pages. So that could be as simple as if there's a page that gets a lot of traffic and you're talking about some products, but you're not really linking to them, then just simply adding affiliate links into those pages. If you're really new and just starting out, then just signing up for Amazon's affiliate program is really straightforward. You just have to have an existing website already set up before you apply. And then also too, because again, every space and niche is different. There are other affiliate programs. You could sign up for other affiliate networks and you might find other affiliate offers. Like, I think probably, I've probably used dozens of affiliate networks over the years for various niches, because some niches, certain networks are going to have more offers and more things available. That'd be another part, another thing to keep in mind too. If you're using Amazon's affiliate program, you've got to put a little disclaimer that says you're a participant in the Amazon Associates program on your website to comply. So that's another thing is just keeping track of, making sure you look at the rules they have so you don't break those because you don't want to get banned or anything. So that's kind of some of the basis, I guess I'd say.

Yeah, that's great. And as we're coming to the end here, one of the things that you had mentioned is, and we can share about this in a little bit, is, number one, a giveaway. So doing Easy Azon. And I want you to talk a little bit more about Easy Azon kind of at the end here, what that is, how people can check it out, how they can learn more about that, potentially use it on their site. But we're going to do a giveaway. So if there's one takeaway that you had from this episode, one thing that you felt like was like, oh, that's something that I can implement and start using on my site or on my blog to experiment with and potentially create some income from Amazon's associate program. You can go and leave a comment on the show notes, the blog post for this. And you can get there by going to foodbloggerpro.com 1, 7, 6. Those are the numbers. You don't want to write it out. Actually typing in the numbers foodbloggerpro.com176 that will redirect you to the page for the show notes for this episode. Leave a comment with your number one takeaway. And then what we're going to do is we're going to go in after that, pick one of those people. And Chris, you said that you could meet up with that person, maybe do a little screen share and talk them through some of the things that they can implement on their blog and some improvements that they can make and potentially how Easy Azon could also help with that. So kind of an optimization conversation, is that right?

Definitely, yeah. I mean, I love talking about website Monetization and just in general right beyond just Amazon's affiliate program, but that way I can happy to help out someone. So awesome.

That's great. Thanks for doing that. Super awesome. So that'll be for anybody listening in real time to this podcast. You can go and we'll set a date on that. Make sure to get those comments in by the 23rd of November. But before we wrap up, would love to hear from you, Chris, a little bit more about EasyAison, what that is, how people can check that out and how they can start using that for their site if they want to up their Amazon game a little bit.

Yeah, so it's just Easyazon.com is a site and again there'll probably be a link in the show Notes, but it's pretty much the very first software product that I ever created. Since then I've done a lot of others. I think that our very first version was way back in 2011 or 2012 to give some timing. And we have over 10,000 websites that use it. And basically it's just anything that is related to Amazon's affiliate program. It helps you with saving time and then also just helping you make more money from the clicks that you do get through the link localization stuff that we have built into the plugin. And also too just the time that you saved through creating those links as opposed to going and doing it manually through Amazon's website or doing some other strategy. So that's kind of the main high level overview of how it works. You can check out. We have a video that kind of shows how it does and all the different features. But overall it's just if there's a way to make it better and more user friendly, that's where we kind of aim with the plugin. And certainly if there's feedback that people have, then we're looking for that as well. We've probably done hundreds of different updates now over the years to the plugin.

Cool, that's great. And then how about you personally, Chris? Where can people follow along with you online?

Yeah, so best way probably is just my blog, which I don't as of this recording. I don't publish that frequently, but it's just upfuel.com and I'm on Twitter hrisgethri.

Awesome. Great. Chris, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Really fun to chat.

Yeah, thanks so much for the invite.

And that's that. Thanks for tuning in this week, friends, instead of a traditional reviewer of the week. Right now I'm actually going to read you one of the testimonials that one of our members left about Food Blogger Pro. This testimonial comes from Teagan from the amazingly gorgeous blog Half Baked Harvest, and it says Food Blogger Pro is a great tool for any blogger. Whether you're in the development stages or are looking to step things up, FoodBlogger Pro will help you avoid timely and potentially costly mistakes by providing tips that have already been tested. I wish Foodblogger Pro had been around when I started my site. It would have made things so much easier. We'd love to have you as a member friend, and you can head to foodbloggerpro.com to sign up and learn more. And that does it for us this week. Thanks for listening and from all of us here at fbphq, make it a great week.

Sam.