Buy Generously II

by John Holbo on December 30, 2004

My buy generously post below was unclear. (I was assuming folks understand how Amazon Associates works. Silly assumption.) You don’t have to buy the very items I linked. You can click any link and then search around and buy anything. I just tossed out a basket of big ticket bestsellers because direct link %’s are a little higher. Buy anything from Amazon through me and at least 5.75% of what you pay goes to me, which I (informally, not in any legally problematic way) pledge to give to disaster relief. My point wasn’t that the time is perfect to buy glitzy DVD’s – sorry if that seemed crass. I meant: buy something. I’ve stuck a convenient Amazon searchbox under the fold. Go ahead and use it.

Once again, I encourage other bloggers with Amazon Associates to follow suit. (I see Henry has already done so. Good!) The quarter is ending. Shake that little jar of change you were planning to spend on silly stuff. Give for something serious. Henry has pledged to keep up the giving through next quarter. I am happy to do the same. The logic of this is very sound. By doing this we are in effect giving immediately and agreeing to carry a little bit of debt for a short time, since the money is needed now. It would be very nice if many bloggers did this, announced it, then folks made a point of buying the stuff they were going to buy from Amazon anyway through them. (Of course this is informal, so the bloggers could just pocket the money. But if the blogger is someone you personally trust not to be such a bastard as to steal petty cash from disaster victims, the level of broken pledges should be low.)

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{ 3 comments }

1

Dan Hardie 12.30.04 at 11:25 pm

Forgive my asking a stupid, technically ignorant question, but if someone leaves a comment on this thread with an HTML tag linked to Amazon, and someone clicks on that link and buys a book, does that put money in your Amazon Associates account? Because if so, all the CT commenters could leave lots and lots of comments-with-tags, and the number of resultant Amazon hits wd probably go up a fair bit.

2

jholbo 12.31.04 at 12:05 am

No, you need to have some extra Associate-identifying code embedded in the link. But thanks for asking

3

jholbo 01.01.05 at 3:12 am

Belle and I are in Bin Tan, Indonesia for New Years. I just thought I would drop a comment to the effect that we are on target to make a couple hundred bucks with this little Amazon thingy. That’s quite good! Thanks, everyone! (The person who bought the expensive camera lens really helped out the total. Especial thanks!)

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