Two Creative Twists for Your Amazon Sites

Published: Thu, 03/03/16

My lab - otherwise known as my back patio (it's 87 degrees Fahrenheit here today!) - has been boiling over with ideas for new twists to add to my Amazon sites.

I'm using two tools that weren't designed for Amazon sites but I'm forcing them to work in different ways than they were intended. You may have these same tools (or something similar) and the descriptions of what I'm doing with them (below) may plant some interesting seeds that you could take and run with, too.

We'll call this "Amazon Associates Idea Crowdsourcing". I'm tossing these ideas out there, you build on them, share them, or use them to create your own twists. Who knows where these might take you!

Custom Amazon Comparison Tables

I have been looking for a tool to help create sign up, sales or lead capture pages for my ebook business forever! I hate creating these pages in WordPress by hand so anything that makes it faster is cool with me. I have Thrive Themes Content Builder but found it very complex (and I consider myself very comfortable with most technology). It was taking too long to come up with a result I liked.

So, when I saw something about a product called FunnelKit Go I had to check it out. It's a WordPress plugin that's meant to help create professional looking sign-up pages very quickly. The creators talk about how they've achieved higher opt-in rates by using it but that wasn't what caught my eye - it was the speed with which they could create the opt-in pages that was exactly what I was after.

There are big differences between it and Thrive but FunnelKit Go is, in my opinion, far easier to use. It's more intuitive and I don't have to switch back and forth from the tool and preview to see how my page looks.

For opt-in-pages there are definitely some cool features - like being able to put a Google map behind the opt-in form if you're doing any geo-targeting. You can choose colors, full page width, boxed width, add borders, insert images, work with text, add video, and use columns inside your content. I'm proud to say I finally created a sign up page I feel good about AND I was able to click the Copy button and create a second version for testing with the click of a button.

But I can never just stop with what a tool was first meant to do. I always have to push the boundaries and I wanted to see if I could use it for something on my Amazon sites.

I used it to create a comparison table. Here's an example: http://www.extremereviewer.com/funnelkit-go-test-for-comparison-page. It took me only a few minutes to put that together and I could customize the thing in SO many ways. Regardless of any theme limitations, I could make a full width page table, change the background, the buttons, the image sizes, add borders, pin a background image that showed some custom text to help consumers, etc.

You could do the same without ratings and just do a list of products for an ecommerce look. I also used it to create some post content (although that's not as easy).

There are some drawbacks to using it for Amazon site content and I figured out a couple of ways to overcome those problems.

First, the tool only creates PAGES. It doesn't create posts. However, I found that if I sized the created page to fit inside my posts, published the page, copied the source code (okay, I know I'm getting too technical for some) and put that source code in a post, it worked just fine. I then deleted the page created with FunnelKit Go so I only had the designed content inside a post.

Second, I couldn't assign a created page as a static home page. Maybe it was my theme. While I could choose the page by name from the drop down list in WordPress Settings/Reading, it would only format it as a post and wouldn't use the full width template. In my case, I wanted to use the page as a static home page for a site that captures email opt-ins. To get around this I used the free WordPress Quick Page/Post Redirect plugin and redirected my home page to the newly created opt-in page URL.

Third, the pages are created outside of your theme so they don't have the same settings. This means you don't have your header or footer, either. There is a tab in the page creator where you can add custom code. I was able to find the source code that creates the header or footer for my theme, put it in that custom code section of FunnelKit and it then included it on my page. If you want to use all the elements of your theme then you'd want to use my tip above for copying the source code for the page and just pasting the code into a post.

Fourth, the creator says that this works best on a WordPress site with the default theme and no plugins. It's really meant to create simple, compelling landing pages. I'm using it on the Flexsqueeze 2 theme WITH Thrive Content Builder AND with loads of other plugins and have not had an issue. In fact, I can see some of the Flexsqueeze 2 sales page features inside of FunnelKit Go and have been able to use some of them. There are just a few that don't stick.

The one thing I wish that FunnelKit Go had was the option to use different border styles like dotted or dashed but it only allows for a solid border. You can, though, choose rounded, the width, and color of the border.

FunnelKit is also cheaper than Thrive and other competing lead page generators so if you want a great opt-in page creator I really like this one. If you can also come up with some great ways to use it on your Amazon site (like custom comparison pages and product list pages) then you'll be twice as pleased.

See a video showing how easy it is to use:

FunnelKit Go

A Video Creation Tool and a What If....

I also purchased EasyVSL 2.0 - a tool used to quickly create video sales pages (see a theme here? I've been researching tools for opt-ins - it's just that Amazon is ALWAYS in mind). ; )

I don't know when version 1.0 came out but some of you may have this already or some other video tool and I'm still working with this one but it is far easier than using PowerPoint if you create lots of slide show kinds of videos.

Really, you'll want to watch the demo video for yourself to see if it's something you could use vs something you might already have: Watch the Demo Here.

I skipped all the upsells because...I'm cheap. There were two I would have loved to have (integration with WordPress and the large package of graphics, background audio, and backgrounds) but for the amount of video I do it didn't seem worth it and I wanted to test the software first. I can always add those on later.

BUT....here's the "what if" idea that came to mind for video use on Amazon sites.

Generally, Amazon Associates use video in one of two ways - to rank a video in search results to get more traffic to their post and affiliate links or to demo the product so they can show it in a post/get more traffic from the video.

I read an article that's a couple of years old but it said that 90% of consumers found videos on retail sites to be helpful.

Unless you own the product, your own demo video is out of the question. You can (and I do) embed a demo video belonging to someone else on YouTube in my product review posts but you always run the risk that your site visitor goes to YouTube to watch the video and ends up on the other person's site or link or that the visitor will see a link to another site in that video.

What if....we used videos in a completely different way? If you have an Amazon Review site, you know the visitor is reading your post because they're not sure if they want to buy that product or not. They're doing research. They want to see what others have to say, weigh all the info, and then they may be ready to buy.

Knowing that customers are in research mode what if our videos were tailored to help with the research of that product?

For example, suppose you have a vacuum review site and you know customers are constantly torn between vacuum #1 and vacuum #2 from the same manufacturer. You could create what I'll call a "helper video". The video could start out saying "Not sure whether to get vacuum #1 or vacuum #2? Here's how to choose". You've probably already written about how to choose between the two but some visitors only scan your post rather than read every word.

In the video, you use a slide show with audio (which you can do with EasyVSL) help the consumer understand how to pick between the two AND end with a suggestion that they ask any questions they might have in the post's comments section because you'd love to help them.

Or, maybe you create a slide show/audio video for every product where the video summarizes your overall rating. The first screen could say "Fast Facts - My Rating of the [product XYZ]". Then, you give your rating, why you're giving it that rating, the most significant pros and cons, and who should buy the product vs who would want something else.

You could put the videos on YouTube for hosting but turn off embedding so no one else can use them on your site. It could be a very interesting way to take your review site above and beyond the competition.

Just a thought!