I have been playing Tumblr games with rss feeds.
It occured to me that I could list the free books on amazon by getting an rss feed and then using that as a way of feeding Tumblr. Along the way, I could use my affiliate ID to get some cash whenever someone clicked a link and bought something at Amazon.
I am a little concerned because amazon will cancel your account it you list on an porn site and tumblr has some porn on it.
Tumblr does not support importing rss as posts. I had to put together Rube Goldberg setup in order to get to Tumbler.
I created a Tumblr blog called https://kindlemysteries.tumblr.com
First I had to install a WordPress cross posting plugin on a new wordpress blog. I have an MU site so I just added a new networked blog called https://www.gthread.com/kindlemysteries. This is easy for me. I have dozens of blogs at Gthread.com. I use it for testing plugins and other wild schemes.
The cross posting plugin did not work in WordPress MU, so I had to hack it. I changed one line and now it works happily with all versions of WordPress without asking me to upgrade to the PRO version.
I configured the cross post plugin to send stuff to Tumblr.com
I then used my Rss2Post plugin to set up an automatic rss feed into the blog.
I tested the setup by forcing rss2post to go immediately and insert posts into the gthread blog. I checked the Tumblr blog, but nothing happened. I checked everything and about 5 minutes later I checked Tumblr and it had all of the same posts that the gthread blog had imported. Tumblr takes a few minutes to do the insertion.
Rss2Post is on a timer so a couple of times a day it goes out and gets more posts for the blog. The tumble blog is now on automatic pilot and will happily add new posts for the next 20 years.
I am hoping that someone will “follow” my blogs on Tumblr (I also have one for free Science Fiction). This could grow exponentially through Tumblr and I could make a few dollars with Amazon click-throughs. I am going to make another one for free romance novels.
Quick Update:
Less then 24 hours later, Amazon Affiliate stats show 115 click-throughs for these books. I use a separate affiliate ID and I am seeing multiple clicks on the free books recorded under that ID. This means that if any of these people who clicked through buy anything that I will get a little but of the sale. My evil plan is working!
48 Hours Later:
534 click-throughs. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this will result in sales. Amazon keeps its cookie for 24 hours only, so if anyone clicks an amazon link on my sites then buys something in the next 24 hours then I get a commission (4%) on the sale. The exception is if the person “adds to cart” and then does not buy right away, the cookie stays alive until the purchase is made. Since these are freebies, I might get a few of these type transactions, extending the cookie. The number of clicks per day should grow a little so I anticipate that I might peak around 500 a day. I don’t know how long this will last before the novelty wears off. Experience tells me that I get about $5 per 1,000 clicks so I might make $75 a month, but if this grows, I could make more. I will update this when and if I get any sales commissions.