b.cognosco

This morning Matt Mower sent a link to Toronto-based programmer Scott Ambler's site, where Scott has created an Amazon Affiliate page with links for US, UK, CAN, AUS, and JP geographies. Matt has bought a few books from recommendations here, but has never purchased via my Amazon links becasuse they are US-based and he is in the UK. Matt thought Scott's setup was good and recommended I do something similar so he could purchase via here in the future. He went on to say:

It also occurs to me that, with one of those things that can look you up via your IP address, you could dynamically generate a link to the correct associates site (US/UK/etc...) without needing to provide a whole bunch o'links (but obviously providing fall-back to a page with all of them in case it goes wrong).

This seems like a good idea but I don't know anything about it - how difficult is it, are there existing tools, etc. An inquiry to AJAX and Remote Scripting guru Brent Ashley on the feasibility of Matt's suggestion led to hostip.info which has some interesting examples of what can be done with ip lookups. Below I've pasted in a snippet of code that should (if all goes well) display the national flag of an individual page viewer.

If there is a zooming map and a flag above this worked, if not it didn't. I can't see the HTML in Qumana so I don't know how this will be formatted. But it seems to me that using an ip lookup service such as hostip.info combined with a little server-side scripting one could do what Matt suggests. I don't know how useful it would be. Probably not very for any one individual - I've sold a whopping 10 books through Amazon since October 1, generating roughly $10 in affiliate fees. Can't imagine that would be much higher if I'd had CAN/UK affiliate links available. But then again...

Technorati Tags : marketing