iTunes Affiliate program – monetising the rising demand
With the two of the big must have gifts this year being the new iPad and updated iPod/iPhone, one thing that's sure to follow is a massive demand by these new owners for recommendations on what Apps to purchase.
There are so many Apps on the iTunes store that merely looking at the Top 25 or even the Featured sections really doesn't cut it for new owners, looking to get in on the 'App' revolution bandwagon.
To fill this void recommendation sites are becoming more and more popular, just doing a search for 'Top 10 apps for ...' will return a ridiculous number of results. Thus anyone savvy enough to create and SEO well enough sites that promise 'Top 10 apps for office productivity' or 'Top 10 apps for travelling' can easily gain a lot of traffic.
Converting all this traffic into real money is the next step, made easier by iTunes programme on the Linkshare platform. With it you can:
1.) Create tracked links to individual products (Apps, songs, books etc)
2.) Create a feed of updated links with preset rules - i.e. Top 25 paid apps in the Photography genre
3.) Use the iTunes search API, and then push the returned link back through the Linkshare or Tradedoubler to create a monetising tracking link.
Pros & Cons
The search functionality is the only awkward bit, having to utilise the functionality of two API's. Whilst you can use the Linkshare Merchandiser Query API to search for products and be returned tracking links immediately, you run the risk of the data being out of date. The iTunes search API is far superior, offering a plethora of search options . The only downside is then having to push the product links returned back through Linkshare to create a tracking link, adding more overhead.
Commission
The rates are quite low at between 4 and 5%, so it's all about numbers. Your site should be uncluttered, with a clear call to action to follow the iTunes link and buy the product.
What is certain is that with the arrival of the new iPad, and demand expected to rise further, sites linked to searches like 'Top 10 iPad apps for [insert niche here]' will only gain more popularity, so if you already write about products available on iTunes store or are planning getting into it, now would be the perfect time.
Groupon API Review & Example
Everyone must have heard of Groupon.com by now, the deal-of-the-day company that launched a couple of years ago, and due to an agressive expansion and pervasive online ad campaign is now worth over a billion dollars.
Joining the service and accessing their Deals via their API is straight forward enough.
1.) Signup to their API to get your API key ->http://www.groupon.com/pages/api
2.) Signup to commission junction who run their Affiliate program, and get your CJ account id -> http://www.cj.com
3.) Consult the Groupon API documentation, and make calls on it retrive the desired Deals (by location or Division as they refer to it). Prefix the returned Deal URLs with this:
http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-[CJ_ACCOUNT_ID]-10804307?url=
Replacing the [CJ_ACCOUNT_ID] with your own CJ account id. So a link to a deal using my CJ account id would be something like ->
The API is split into two main sections, one returning the availiable locations (or divisions) that offers are availiable in. And one that returns the deals themselves, passing to it a division from the former, a longditude/latitude or nothing and let the API try and work out your location for itself.
Pros & Cons:
My initial thought was that the responses from the API seem unnecessarily bloated, but after chatting with their technical team there is a partially documented feature with the deal API, adding a show parameter and then comma delimiting the nodes you wish returned will restrict the results to only return those nodes.
e.g. suffixing - show=title,dealUrl,largeImageUrl,pitchHtml - will return the basic information you need, in a much better size for Mobile usage where traffic size is a premium.
Divisions - AKA Locations - Only the North America is supported at the moment, with Deals in the U.K. being handled by AffiliateWindow and served through their own API.
On the whole though it is a nice and simple to use API, it's just a shame about lack of Inventory outside of the US.
Commission:
For referring existing Groupon users to Deals - between 2% and 5%.
For referring new users to Groupon, between 10% and 15%.
So there is quite an incentive to refer new members, meaning that while current areas (US & Canada, Brazil, western Europe, and Japan) may topout in terms of new signups in the near future, if you have any Apps or sites targeting areas not currently serviced by Groupon (China, India etc) it might be worth integrating Groupon as soon as they do. If past form is anything to go by then the rewards could be very lucrative.
Here's a little Flash AS3 demo of the Groupon API in action. The code for which can be downloaded for free below.
N.B. It's important to remember that when using a service like this some conditions may apply, in this case conforming with the Groupon Branding Guidelines. Whilst it may be easy to ignore them and assume no-one will notice, it is of course just as easy for them to switch off your API key, so save yourself the hassle.
Using Amazon Products API and Flash
EDIT:There was a bug with the demo when showing a product with no customer review as i'm using that as the flavour text in this demo. Fixed in demo and source code.
Continuing the theme of Affiliate marketing, here's a free source code demo of how to use Amazon products in flash. It uses similar process's I've demoed before, signing up for the API, creating a php page to receive the keywords then search the Amazon API, and then return the data in XML format to the Flash front end.
To get started yourself, register for Amazon associates account - http://aws.amazon.com/associates/, then download the example code, change my code for yours so you receive the percentage, and play away.
Here I've just parsed the response xml for the products into instances of my AmazonProductData.as Class. This makes it easy to code against, and be confident in the ability to retrieve basic data about each product without spelling or case mistakes. As long as you're using FlashDevelop, FDT or FlexBuilder that is.
I will make a full scale tutorial on how to use the API, parse the data and create a simple front end like this when i get a chance and finish creating LearnToFlash.com .
Let users pick their own theme with Kuler API
Kuler is a simple adobe web app that lets users create a pallete of 5 complementary colours, others can then view, download, rate and comment on these themes.
The Kuler API is a fantastic resource to gain access to these themes, so why not allow users to easily theme your flash application with a simple button click.
Here's a mini demo so you can give the gist.
And of course... the source code
The API Documentation for Kuler can be found here...