I\’m a big fan of Amazon.com. I spend far too much money there but they also give me a fair bit of money too through book sales and affiliate links. I think they\’ve done a fantastic job of selling products online and helping website publishers earn from their content.
They might be the Walmart of Internet retailing, but they\’re definitely not the Apple of whiz-bang gadgetry.
Their new Kindle book-reading machine is a great idea.
But it looks the offspring of a pocket calculator and a toy etch-a-sketch.
Reviews have been mixed and I\’m really not sure if it is going to take off.
That\’s a shame because it does have a few interesting features for online publishers.
The first is the affiliate cut. Put an affiliate link to Kindle on your website and you can earn $40 per sale. Unfortunately, I don\’t think you\’re going to make many sales so you might be better off using that space for something more valuable.
The other feature is the ability to sell subscriptions to blogs. The fees aren\’t high — usually 99 cents per month, with the publisher receiving 30 percent of the subscription price — but that\’s still more than you\’re likely to get by charging online.
It\’s a significant jump, I think. This is the first time that bloggers have an opportunity to actually sell subscriptions instead of relying on advertising.
But like the design of Kindle, it comes with a couple of problems.
There\’s currently no way to add your own blog to the sales list (although surely that\’s going to change in the future). And how many people are going to pay even a dollar a month to read something on their Kindle that they can access on their computer for free?
Not many, I think.
But there is an opportunity. You might not be able to offer subscriptions to your blog just yet, but you can collect your best posts together and publish them on Kindle using Amazon\’s Digital Text platform.
You\’d still need to market it. And you\’d have to find enough people with a Kindle to market to. But if electronic book-reading does work out, it could be another way to make money from your articles.
Have you purchased a Kindle? I\’d love to hear your opinion!