As you may have seen in our last update, we’ve got some big stuff in the works for Kit. New features and benefits are incoming that should help you and your fellow creators benefit more from the products you recommend!
We are still wrapping up some of the engineering work and putting the final touches on this update, so we aren’t quite ready to share the big news yet, but we are excited to share that a major supporting piece of the project has been completed and pushed live!
Better Affiliate Management
Starting today you can now leverage your Geniuslink account (what’s Geniuslink?) to manage the affiliation of the links on your Kit account. This gives you best-in-class Amazon Associates support from Geniuslink on the top platform for sharing products (Kit of course).
But what does this really mean? Well, it means:
- Geniuslink supports 19 Amazon Associates programs (whereas Kit currently supports 12), including the affiliate programs for Poland, Sweden, Netherlands, Singapore, China, United Arab Emirates, and Saudia Arabia. This means you can earn commissions in even more countries.
- The Amazon Link Health reporting, via the Geniuslink dashboard, will now include reports of what products and links in your Kit account are for products that are out of stock or no longer carried by Amazon. This means you know what links need to be updated to ensure your fans can buy the products you are recommending and you can earn commissions.
- The significantly more detailed reporting around the demographics of your audience clicking your links is also now at your fingertips via your Geniuslink dashboard (note with this current integration, reporting for Kit clicks in Geniuslink is at the group level, not the link level). This means you have more details and insights into your audience than ever before.
Please note that clicks going through your Geniuslink account from Kit are billed at the same rate and you should continue to see a minimum of a 2.5X ROI from using the premium link management service. This also helps provide the team with a stable revenue stream for the long-term support of Kit.
Set up
Leveraging affiliate management via your Geniuslink account is super simple with Kit.
1/ Hop over to the Monetization page of your Kit profile.
2/ Toggle on the “Connect your Geniuslink account.”
3/ Jump over to your Geniuslink account, go to the Groups page and copy a group ID (in light grey after the group name). Or create a new group specifically for Kit!
3.5/ You likely did this when you set up your Geniuslink account but you might also want to quickly jump to the Affiliate tab of your Geniuslink account and make sure that you have added your various Amazon Associates Tracking ID’s. We’ve got a Pro Tip on this below.
4/ Jump back to the Monetization page of your Kit profile and paste that group ID in the text box in the “Connect your Geniuslink account” section.
Boom, you got it! Within the next few minutes, the Amazon links in your Kit profile should start routing through your Geniuslink account.
You can confirm everything is working as it should be by clicking on an Amazon buy button on your Kit. Once the Amazon page loads in your browser, go to the URL bar and ensure that the tracking ID (starts with “tag=” and ends in “-20”, “-21”, or “-22”) you have in your Geniuslink account is now included.
Pro Tip
To get better insights and granularity into how your Kit account performs, especially compared to your other efforts, we encourage you to take advantage of the Groups and Overrides feature with Geniuslink.
The gist is that you can create a “group” for each of your channels, digital properties, and/or marketing campaigns. These groups are a bucket of affiliate tracking IDs, links, and reports.
Unique affiliate tracking IDs? Yeah! Turns out that Amazon allows you to create up to 100 unique tracking IDs with each of your Associates accounts and then allows you to filter reports by these track IDs. This allows you to compare and contrast the efficacy and value from the links / clicks using the various tracking IDs.
This means you can compare how effective your various marketing and monetization efforts are. You may find that one channel has a higher earnings per click than another or that sending traffic to Kit is the most efficient way to convert a click into money in your bank account.
Learn more about using groups and unique tracking IDs in the Geniuslink knowledge base article, Managing Groups & Overrides, or watch this video.
Details on how to create unique tracking IDs inside your Amazon Associates account is covered in the first half of this blog post: Tracking IDs on Amazon Associates.
So what is next?
If adding Geniuslink affiliation support to Kit is is a stepping stone to something bigger, then what is coming?
Great question! We’ll be sharing more about the upcoming update in the coming weeks and rolling it out in May 2021. If you are eager to figure it out, check out our Terms of Service! Just know that if our testing is any indication of success, then Kit should be an even more valuable piece of your revenue model in the very near future!
WTF is Geniuslink?
Geniuslink is a link management and monetization platform with deep roots in the affiliate world and offers some pretty cool tools for getting the most out of the Amazon Associates program. It’s also the company that bought Kit from Patreon (who acquired Kit about a year before that).
We (Geniuslink) are a small team focused on helping creators earn more with every link they share.
If you use Amazon’s affiliate program outside of Kit, then we’d encourage you to take a look at Geniuslink. Mention this blog to the support team after signing up and we’ll hook you up with an extended trial!
Author
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Austin Tuwiner is a growth marketer and a main contributor to the Booklinker blog. He is dedicated to helping authors increase their book sales.