Yesterday, as I finished up my email promoting Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind, I rubbed my hands together and started a reverie:
I imagined myself sitting in the shade, under a tiny palm tree, by a tiny beach, sipping a very tiny beer, and eating a very, very tiny steak.
After all, I was planning to put in an Amazon affiliate link at the end of yesterday’s email.
Depending on how many people actually took me up on my recommendation to get Brown’s quality, value-packed book, I might make $0.14 in affiliate commissions… or maybe $0.22… or who knows, if I was really persuasive… even $0.47!
That won’t buy a proper vacation even in a reverie, but a tiny vacation? Sure.
But then this tiny reverie was rudely popped. As I clicked to get the affiliate link, Amazon told me off:
“This product is one of the Amazon Associates Program Excluded Products. We do not support direct linking to this product. Please direct customers to another product or the category for this product instead.”
Excluded? Another Product? After I’d written the email???
I decided to invest a few minutes into threatening and cursing my laptop. That produced no result. So I looked around, made sure nobody had seen me, and pulled myself together.
I dug into why some products are excluded from the Amazon affiliate program. It turns out there are only three reasons why:
1. It’s alcohol
2. It’s an external promotional page linked to by an Amazon property
3. The third-party seller requested that the product be excluded
Brown’s book, by being a book, and by being on Amazon and not an external page, must fall into the third category.
In other words, like I wrote yesterday, maybe the information in this book really is too powerful.
Maybe Brown himself wants to keep it hush-hush. Maybe he only wants a select few, those who are cool enough, smart enough, mature enough, to read this book.
Maybe he wants to keep this book from appearing on a bunch of SEO-optimized top 10 lists and Medium filler articles and “most underrated” email newsletters.
So let’s see if that added information makes the book more attractive to you.
Whether you click the link below or don’t, I’m eating boiled chicken breast either way. I mean, I’m not getting paid anything by Amazon if you buy this book, and even if I were, it wouldn’t buy me steak tonight.
Before you go, if you want to hear more from me about excluded, possibly too powerful, insider information, then sign up for my email newsletter. And now, here’s the link to Brown’s book:
https://bejakovic.com/tricks