• Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

Contents

Books-A-Million Affiliate Program + Geniuslink

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

Contents

BAM! We’re thrilled to announce Geniuslink auto-affiliation support for the Books-A-Million affiliates program! With quite literally millions of books spanning every genre, Books-A-Million is a fantastic alternative for authors and book reviewers looking to diversify their affiliate portfolio and get away from using only the Amazon Associates program to recommend titles.

Now with the addition of the Books-A-Million + Geniuslink integration, you can build links and earn commissions through the Books-A-Million affiliate program easier than ever!

Overview

Originally founded in 1917 as a street corner news-stand in Florence, Alabama, Books-A-Million has grown to become one of the premier book retail chains in the Southeastern United States, and the second largest book retailer in the nation, operating more than 260 physical stores in 32 states.

However, in this update, we’ll be focusing purely on Books-A-Million’s online storefront – booksamillion.com. Since the site’s launch in 1998, booksamillion.com has continued to expand and improve its product catalog, storefront design, and customer service; growing to become one of the most popular online book retailers for consumers, rivalling the likes of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Book Depository.

Books-A-Million Affiliate Program

With a huge selection of books, The booksamillion.com Affiliate Program is a well established affiliate program run through CJ Affilliate, and offers great benefits for affiliates looking to grow their revenue and expand their affiliate portfolio.

Commission Rates and Cookie Windows

The booksamillion.com Affiliate Program offers a base 3% commission rate, (up to 5% based on individual affiliate performance) as well as a 30-day cookie window.

While the base 3% commission rate is lower than Amazon’s 4.5% commission rate for physical books, (at time of writing) their 30-day cookie window far exceeds the 24-hour window Amazon offers, giving affiliates a much greater window of opportunity to collect fees from qualifying purchases.

Books-A-Million + Geniuslink

While the CJ Affiliate network dashboard is one of the more streamlined platforms available for assembling affiliate links, depending on your workflow it’s still a bit of a process to create an affiliated product link for Books-A-Million.

With our newly added support, any raw product link direct from booksamillion.com can be affiliated easily using our Geniuslink dashboard or Chrome Extension. You can rest easy, knowing that a simple link from Books-A-Million is all you need to pass clicks along to their destination with your affiliate parameters included.

We call this process “Auto-affiliation” and it’s very quick to set up. All you need to do is grab your Publisher Website ID and Affiliate ID from the CJ Affiliate Dashboard and drop it into the Affiliate page of the Geniuslink dashboard under ‘Books-A-Million US (CJ Affiliate)’. Once we have those ID’s, any geni.us links you build for Books-A-Million.com products will have your affiliate parameters appended automatically!

Alternatively, our rollout of Sovrn Commerce (formerly Viglink) support a year ago makes it possible to monetize Books-A-Million links without applying to the CJ Affiliate managed program directly. There are many reasons for using Sovrn, but signing up for the Books-A-Million affiliate program directly and adding your Website ID into Geniuslink is our recommendation, as it allows you to keep 100% of the commissions earned from the program (vs. the ~ 75% that is paid out when using an affiliate aggregator like Sovrn).

Excited to dig in and get started using Geniuslink with the Books-A-Million affiliate program? Great! We have a few suggestions to help you diversify your affiliate revenues through augmenting your Amazon affiliate links.

Choice Pages

We’ve been doubling down on Choice Pages and maintaining our stance that curation and choice are good for the consumer (and ultimately, you). If you’re not familiar, they enable you to promote a single product across multiple storefronts and thanks to our new Suggestions feature, it’s easier than ever to build them! Providing options to your visitors will improve their shopping experience and you’ll monetize the sale no matter which storefront they end up picking. More info on how to set up a Choice Page can be found in our Knowledge Base.

You can see an example here — geni.us/attack-of-the-toilets

With a Choice Page, you can promote Amazon and Books-A-Million affiliate links side by side in a clean, intuitive way, and help diversify your affiliate revenue – which from our research this actually helps increase your affiliate earnings

A/B Split Links

The Amazon.com Associates program is often a mainstay way to earn commissions from US-based clicks, though we’d encourage you to run an experiment if it’s the best option for your audience and recommended products. The A/B Split Test links provide a platform to closely track between two or more affiliate programs.

Using an A/B Split Test link allows you to compare the performance of Amazon’s affiliate program to the Books-A-Million affiliate program in case you wanted to evaluate replacing your Amazon affiliate links with another affiliate program.

Conclusion

With the addition of the Books-A-Million Affiliate program, we continue to expand our ever-growing list of supported affiliate programs! Additionally, with the recent launch of our Suggestions feature (which will automatically offer you suggested links to Books-A-Million products), we’re more fired up than ever to add additional affiliate programs to our roster, so stay tuned in the coming months as even more great programs are added in! 

As always, we look forward to hearing from you!

Author

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

Author

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

Related posts