I got a quick business idea I want to share with you:
Thousands of authors, bands and product brands add an Amazon link to their product on their homepages and social media channels. They do so, because they want to sell THEIR product. What they don’t know is, that these links don’t only sell their product, but Amazon is cross-selling lots of other products and is also happy to pay a commission to people linking to their products. These authors, artists and brands nearly never use an affiliate link, so no one is earning the 2-10% commission, that Amazon is offering to it’s affiliate partners.
If anyone of you is supporting a well known charity organisation (ideally of national or even global appeal) there’s a simple way to develop a fundraising campaign with this idea in mind, where no supporter needs to donate, as Amazon is now paying this commission to your charity from the sales generated through these links. The charity only needs to use their reputation and ask the author/artist/brand to replace the existing affiliate-free links with their affiliated links. To support that you’d need to build a smart outreach program, researching and contacting the owners of these channels and creating awareness of the easy way for them to do good, when linking to their own products.
If successful your job is now to offer a great sounding pitch with a link generator on your site, educating webmasters and social media managers of the simplicity of adding the new links and reaching out to inform about this. Think along the line of: big web-scraping campaign of websites with amazon links without affiliate tags and messaging these product owners on their social media channels.
There’s many variations and extensions to this idea once you know if people respond and use your links. You could also build this as a for-profit business by building a platform, that allows authors to choose a charity of their liking (and you collecting a certain percentage of all generated commission) or offer another incentive (like “every month we raffle a prize”) and you can also start building widgets, that show the Amazon product link but even inform about the charity (and build some old-school backlinks for SEO). If successful you can obviously also extend this to other product platforms with Affiliate programs.
There’s some charities pleading their supporters to shop via their Amazon links on their own websites already, but very few people would ever come back there, before going to buy something later.
There’s also AmazonSmile program, but it works in a completely different way and each customer needs to opt-in by himself and Amazon is only donates a laughable 0.5%.
Please let me know your feedback below.
About ‘unfinished business’:
I got too many business ideas, that I’ll never have enough resources to realize and I decided to publish some of them from time to time instead of parking them forever. These ideas are often raw, unpolished and some of them might be outright bad or someone has realized them before, but my quick research didn’t pick them up. Feel free to comment, badmouth, share or realize them. If you manage to realize them successfully and bring them to some kind of success, I’d obviously like to get some kind of credit – whether that’s some form of credit, money or equity is absolutely up to you. At the very least, I’d like you to let me know by private message.
