At first I wasn’t sure what The Big River was all about. Why would someone need a service to help then search for an artist, author or product on Amazon. Any why would you create a service that requires you to “..take the name of what you want to link to, change the spaces to hyphens and add “.atthebigriver.com”
The easy answer? Money..
Here’s how it works:
AtTheBigRiver.com also works with Amazon.com referrer codes. Put your referrer code at the end of the URL and 90 percent of the time when that link is clicked on we’ll pass your affiliate code along to Amazon. The other 10 percent of the time we’ll substitute our code to help cover the costs of providing this service. If you don’t include a referrer code, we’ll use our affiliate code 100 percent of the time.
Hmmm. Helpful service, curious implementation , and a revenue stream that does not depend on advertising. cha-ching.
So how much would it cost to put up this service?
Not as much as you would think. This service is 100% cloud.
- Accept a URL inbound from request
- Chew on URL, serve from cache or send to Amazon
- Not in cache, send a URL back to Amazon
- Send another URL back to request, store in cache
Lots and lots of upside potential.
Why didn’t I think of that?