Using Reddit and Digg to Score Some Holiday Affiliate Cash

30 November
13 Comments
by nickycakes

Well, it’s “Cyber Monday” which is a great time to learn how to earn some cash from the hordes of morons scrambling to prove to their families that it is, in fact, the amount of presents they order online, and not how much of a douchebag they were all year, that really matters!

Ever hear someone tell you that it is impossible to market anything to people on Digg and Reddit?  It’s true.  People on those sites aren’t stupid.  Well, actually, these days, digg is full of morons, but still unlikely to buy anything you advertise on there.  Anything commercial you submit will never make the front page.  People spot affiliate sites and sales pitches from a mile away.  But, while browsing Reddit the other day, Nicky saw a sneaky trick that seems to have slipped by and possibly made a few people a little cash.

As you may or may not know, most affiliate programs track sales with cookies.  When someone uses your affiliate link, a cookie is set in their browser for a certain amount of time, usually like 30 days or so, and if the user buys a product from that website within that time limit, credit is given to you for having made the sale, and you get paid.  Pretty basic.

The two biggest affiliate programs on the web (for a while now) are Amazon.com and Ebay.  Since so many people shop on these sites, if you send a user to one of them through an affiliate link, there is a significant chance that they will return and buy something on the website (or someone else using their computer will) before the cookie expires.  Unfortunately for people trying to exploit this, both Amazon and Ebay have recently reduced their cookie expiry time from 30 days to 24 hours, presumably in an effort to combat this behavior.   But this still leaves it very possible to game the system, especially during the holiday season.. just not quite as well.

So, that’s all fine and dandy, but like Nickycakes said, people on sites like Reddit and Digg can easily spot a scam right?  Well, in this case, no.. not really.  Of course, if you were to just find some random product on amazon, make an affiliate link for it, and submit it to digg, there’s absolutely no chance it would see the front page, but in this case, you are only trying to get people to go to amazon to see something, not necessarily to want to buy something.

After doing a quick search of reddit and digg for popular submissions from amazon.com, a few things are clear:

  • A lot of amazon.com links do actually hit the frontpage
    The second most popular link on reddit from amazon.com is from less than 2 weeks ago.  That link probably saw between 50k and 100k views.
  • Most of these links are affiliate links
    And nobody notices!  Digg’s moderators seem to remove the affiliate links, but some are still there in the archive.  Reddit on the other hand…plenty of affiliate links in there, unnoticed.  To be fair, though, it’s difficult to tell an amazon affiliate link unless you know how they are structured.
  • Links must be funny, controversial, or a good deal on a video game.
    If you’re familiar with the famous 3 Wolf Moon t-shirt (read the customer feedback comments), you’ll know.  So yeah, find a product, make some funny user comments on there, add your affiliate tag, and submit.  ORRRRR, drum up some controversy about amazon.com removing negative reviews from Sarah Palin’s book, submit.  ORRRR, find cyber monday deal on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, submit (although anyone without this game by now should really be ashamed of themselves).  Use your imagination.
  • People are already doing this
    Looks like some people have reddit accounts that do nothing but resubmit other peoples content and then mix in amazon affiliate links.  Get on board!

In order for your submissions to see the front page, especially on Digg, less so on Reddit, you will need to get some buddies to vote for your submission.

Good luck!

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