While working on some ecommerce affiliate sites, I tried to find the ecommerce merchant’s shipping prices. Unfortunately, it’s a remarkable pain in the neck to find shipping info at most mom-n-pop ecommerce stores.

I think it’s because they place a blind reliance in their ecommerce store’s shopping cart. The problem is that the cart was usually created by a programmer – not a customer service rep. So the priorities in design were easy coding, not easy buying. As a result, lots of shopping carts cause SMBs to lose sales.

Photo credit: Dan Chace, aka Lacrymosa

Here are some examples of what not to do, and why they’re bad ideas. If the ecommerce cart you want acts this way, switch!

1) Worst idea EVER: Ask for my credit card info before telling me the shipping price. (more…)

I’ve just been reading some of SEOmoz’s Pro member tips and seeing their suggestions to use affiliate URLs that use hashtags, also referred to as the pound sign, number sign or hash mark.* For example, site.com/#aff123 . (more…)

Competitive intelligence provides entertainment, an inside-track on industry trend-spotting, and the potential to develop tangential business opportunities before others, or at least catch up quickly. I gluttonously consume information, and thought I’d share some parts of my diet with other competitive intelligence collectors with hearty appetites. (more…)

It’s a weird thing that some of the smartest affiliate marketers are also the dirtiest. (more…)

I just spent a few hours creating and editing an affiliate PPC campaign with Facebook Ad Manager, a Firefox extension that lets you mass-create, upload and split test ads (including split-testing images) on Facebook.

Now, while Facebook Ad Manager saved me a bunch of time, I screwed up with my Prosper 202 tracking setup and so the whole campaign needs to be rebuilt from the start.

Here’s what happened, and how to avoid it happening to you. (more…)

@Search Engine Land: How predictive heatmap tools work and how they can lift your conversion rates. I write for SEL’s Just Behave (Usability/Conversion Optimization) column once a month.

@Wolf-Howl: Why Google HQ Really LOVES Thin Affiliates . I write at Mike Gray’s site periodically, when I have something that will fit with his audience.

@Wildfire Marketing’s Marketing Tips: An Interview on Link Building With Yours Truly

If you liked those, you should add my rss feed to your reader because some of the best stuff I write gets published here before it gets cited or repurposed in other contexts elsewhere…

I’ve used each of the SEO and webmaster services and tools below in the past, and can vouch for them. (more…)

My friend Geno Prussakov wrote a fascinating book entitled, Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes. This is my review of Geno’s book, for those who might like to buy it.

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I wrote a guest post at Wolf Howl on how to find niches and pick wisely amongst them, for affiliate marketing newbies. Gurus who give you a list and tell you to select randomly amongst them without explaining their reasoning inevitably cause dissapointment, so hopefully this will help you guys discover affiliate marketing opportunities and choose wisely amongst them.

If the topic is of interest, have a look also at how to protect your keywords from a loose-lipped affiliate manager.

And all that said, you should add my rss feed to your reader to keep up to date with my latest posts. You can also subscribe by email. Both are free .

In June I spoke at SMX Advanced. Earlier this week I spoke at Affiliate Summit East. Time to show some love to the folks I met! Here they are,  in no particular order: (more…)

In no particular order, here are the folks I’m looking forward to seeing at Affiliate Summit East, where I’m on the agenda to speak. (more…)

The scams described in the video below have a lot in common with the Google cash, Google Money and other similar scams prominently found all around the internet. (more…)

Shawn Collins and Missy Ward have been nice to enough to give me a speaking spot doing an “Advanced Search Marketing (more…)

by One Good Bumblebee
From the Seattle Times today (read in print version) comes a story headlined: “Google Says It Will Challenge Amazon On Electronic Books.” Loyal readers of mine would have known this was coming 7 months ago. Here are a few choice excerpts from my old post: (more…)

Affiliate-management-for-beginners-attributing-credit-for-the-sale/

Attributing-credit-when-email-and-affiliates-overlap

Hope you enjoy!

On TechCrunch, Borgle CEO Eric Schmidt told Charlie Rose that (more…)

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That’s a pretty inflammatory statement, isn’t it? But why is it any less inflammatory than “Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach.” You hear that all the time in internet marketing circles (especially affiliate ones) and it’s pretty silly. (more…)

Pepperjam Network, you’re really, really useless. I have proof that you’re stealing commissions from affiliates and not paying them for all the sales they generate. I have proof that when a merchant’s tracking screws up, you do nothing to solve the issue for affiliates, let alone pay (more…)

What do Google’s search-within-search, the Google Affiliate Network, and Google Suggest have to do with each other? It’s all about Google’s transformation from being a bridge and toll-gate on the information superhighway to being bridge, toll-gate and destination! (more…)

While I’m usually not the one to swear on a professional blog, there are exceptional occasions where it’s appropriate, and this is one of them. I’m waaaaaay overdue for a links post, and there are so many quality ones here, that I had to use my affiliate friend‘s expression. (more…)

Regular readers will recall I covered the joys of using AffSpy to save hours and hours of research trying to answer the eternal “What offers should I run” question. Well, the service founded by Stephen Gill and my friend Gab Malca (in the striped shirt) is now in public beta so anyone can get in! The press release is after the jump. (more…)

Every affiliate network claims to pay its affiliates the highest rates. The truth of the matter, however, is that some have higher CPAs for the same campaigns than others do. So I’ve created a post comparing the CPAs between networks on the same offers to determine the trend and see which networks really do pay the best. (more…)

The answer came to me while reading up on advertising. Studies show it takes a certain frequency – most people place it around 7 times – for an ad and its message to be remembered. It would obviously be silly to just credit the last impression for finally getting the target consumer to get the advertiser’s point when the other 6 clearly were part of the process. Yet that’s a question many pro marketers have! (more…)

Big ideas and food for thought:
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Google killed former SEOmoz CTO Matt Inman’s widgetbait because some Guardian reporter didn’t like it and wrote his negative opinion up. Then Aaron Wall was unlucky enough to trust a jerk who asked Matt Cutts about Aaron’s affiliate program based linkbuilding.

The question is: Will Amazon get a beat-down too? For their (more…)

Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl SEO Consulting and Clientside SEM), Michael Gray (Graywolf’s SEO blog) and Rae Hoffman (Sugarrae Website Audits & SEO) were lucky enough to kick back with me at SMX West, so in my infinite generosity I decided to let them school me on some of the finer points of being an independent webmaster. This is intermediate level stuff mostly (my fault for not having better questions; see the end of this post for your chance to followup with your own questions), but there are a few nuggets in here for those of you who pay attention. (more…)

First, I present to you this amusing little email: (more…)