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.

I don’t care about/believe your reassurance the card isn’t going to be charged until I click confirm.

I don’t know you. And your site looks like a 4 year old made it.

Quality graphics build trust – this is a well-known finding in survey after survey and usability test after test, as to what consumers use to gauge a site’s trustworthiness.

Asking for card information before telling me what shipping is going to cost would never even occur to someone offline. Imagine you go into a used car dealership and the salesman says, “give me your credit card info, then I’ll tell you the price!” – No thanks!

2) Aggravating, close second: Delay presenting shipping rate information until I get to the page where I type my shipping info.

While this may be logical, it assumes two things, incorrectly:

a) First, that I’m going to add to cart and go through a step or two in the process without knowing the total price. That’s almost the same as above.
b) Second, that you can’t just include a simple shipping calculator on product detail pages. It just needs to ask the Zip code and return a price. Simple database job that doesn’t cost more than $100 to program.

3) Third worst idea: Making money off shipping.

Yes, lots of people do it online. No, most consumers won’t find out. Buuuuuuuut…

What happens when you get caught cheating customers on shipping?

I’m not the first affiliate to create a price comparison site. Heaven knows there’s lots of them around.
It doesn’t cost much to have a virtual assistant browse the web and do the legwork to find product prices and shipping rates.
And affiliates, including myself, are increasingly SEO savvy, as well as usability savvy.

What happens is that you end up with a reputation management problem that costs you sales of that product. How?
People click on the price comparison result in Google and find you’re more expensive.
Guess who gets the sale?

If it happens frequently enough or blatantly enough, you develop a bad reputation and word gets around. Then you don’t just lose sales on that one product, but across the board. Ouch.

So think long term, rather than trying to take in a few extra bucks at [what turns out to be] your own expense.

A) Excellent approach: For low-ticket items (e.g. below ~$200), offer flat rate shipping countrywide, or statewide/provincewide. Present shipping rates in a chart. If you need to adjust a few dimes/dollars upwards for states further away, you can do so.

This isn’t ‘making money on shipping’ – it’s increasing convenience to customers. You can explain it, and people will understand. Consumers aren’t against profit, they’re against abuse.

Takeaway tips on ecommerce shopping carts and shipping rate information:

1) Offer shipping information on the detail page.
2) If possible, offer flat-rate shipping nationwide. Otherwise, you can present state-by-state (or province-by-province, in Canada) shipping rates in a table. Figure out your average price to ship to that state and use it.
3) If the order is large enough and you can afford it, upgrade the shipping so it gets to customers faster than expected. Amazon is famous for this practice – which they preferred over TV ads – and look how well it’s helped them do.

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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 .

One of the justifications given was that  search engines ignore everything after the hash tag. As exemplified by Wikipedia and certain other sites, this is no longer the case. Google’s search results provide sitelinks on some Wikipedia articles. This has implications for affiliate links, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Sitelinks are those 4-8 deep links that go directly to a particular page on the site, or in Wikipedia’s case, subheadings within a long article.

The subheadings on Wikipedia are linked to using the corresponding hashtags. Ex.: wikipedia.org/article/#subissue1 . Therefore, it’s clear that search engines are considering hashtags. 

Anyone using an affiliate program that relies on hashtags to track  the source of the visitor should consider using 301 [permanent]redirects, rel=canonical or other equivalents to make sure they avoid duplicate content problems. Each of these solutions – permanent redirects, rel=canonical etc. – are designed to tell search engines what is the ‘official’ or ‘canonical’ page. I’m not saying this is absolutely necessary and that search engines won’t figure it out otherwise, but I prefer a proactive approach where possible.

If you liked this idea on affiliate tech geekery and analysis, add my rss feed to your reader.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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.

1) Affiliate networks.

Ever wonder what a competitor’s margins are like?

What countries they focus on? What KPIs they use?

What verticals they’re in?

Get the answers to all these questions and many others by joining multiple networks.

2) Email newsletters. I recently got a newsletter disclosing [indirectly] the profitability of certain market segments. For newbies struggling to find their affiliate niche, this is valuable info!

Consumer-facing email newsletter are also valuable, although I admit that I’m slack in monitoring these. Some things you can pick up:

- Benefits emphasized – to model your copy on

- Profitable or high volume products or otherwise desirable goals

- Tone of voice for branding purposes

3) Corporate HQ websites.

I subscribe to the RSS feed of a particular company that I highly respect, where they openly share corporate strategy. It’s pretty impressive seeing the massive, fast-turning gears turning in these people’s heads, but it’s also inspirational here and there.

If you’re a fast-food restaurant owner, you can probably pay attention to McDonald’s, Harvey’s, Wendy’s, KFC and other press releases to see where they’re going in a broad sense. The same is broadly true of many industries.

4) Alerts and keyword trackers.

Think these tools just serve to measure how much brand discussion is happening in social media? Guess again.

If new, as-yet-unknown competitors are linkbaiting, you can’t subscribe to their RSS feed.

You can set up trackers to look for particular keywords linkbait might target, or roll your own solution to monitor Digg, StumbleUpon etc.

Similarly, if the approach is more traditional, why not monitor press-release sites for your industry keywords?

Find ‘em while they’re fresh to the industry and buy those sites out…securely.

5) Mainstream newspapers and newsmagazines.

This week’s edition of Maclean’s (a popular Canadian newsmagazine) has an excellent piece on the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch and paywalls.

There are some fantastic nuggets to pick up in there, which I haven’t seen on places like Search Engine Land (despite Danny Sullivan’s thorough coverage of the issue!).

During SMX Advanced, I picked up the local Seattle paper and saw a piece about Google taking on Amazon for ebooks. Now, Slightly Shady SEO imagined that almost 2 years ago! And I had similar feelings and predictions on Google’s move into ecommerce and the implications about 7 months before SMX Advanced.

Since I love saying I told you so, here’s a little gem from my now 1+ year old post.

“The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products.” If you haven’t seen Google base practically become the default spot 3 on commercial searches, you’re sleeping:

Oh, and have any of you read Aaron Wall’s interview with eBay’s head of SEO?

Here’s an excerpt:

“[Millions of listings] end up cradle to grave quickly. What are some of the keys to helping search engines understand the structure and importance of content in such a fast changing environment?

[...]

“We have invested a good amount of resources in our data-feed technology & analytics. The Sitemaps protocol plays an important role here. As eBay has so many new listings every day, over the course of the day, you can almost update the sitemaps on a continuous basis.

“However, the effort to source the items from the database, generate the sitemap files, submission and pick up, takes decent amount of time. We have made good headway tuning our feeds in way to get more efficiency out of the items we send. We started optimizing based on probability of conversion. We can make these assumptions based on predictive modeling and data. Predictive modeling on large datasets will become even more important when it comes to scaling the projects. As a company, we are putting lots of efforts in building out a competitive advantage based on analytics, predictive modeling and scaling the technology to handling even larger datasets.”

If that isn’t the integration of merchandising and SEO, what is?

Well, here’s one of 5 calls I’d made about Google shifting more and more into ecommerce:

<“Merchandising will need to integrate more closely with SEO in order to feature more cheap products and expensive products where G’bot can access it.

“As a result, the middle ground of average products at average prices will see its market share gradually lost to either end of the spectrum. Just like Seth Godin suggested would happen, in his book Meatball Sundae.

And if you go to eBay, you’ll see that cruises abundantly listed there, for example, are of the cheap and generic variety. Where something is advertised in abundance, you know the ads work…
[I know about the cruises in particular because my dad combines dental CE seminars with upscale cruises and travel. Our eBay test yielded folks looking for bargains...]

Bottom line? Read, read and read some more! Add my rss feed to your reader, then check out these 30 other advanced search blogs.

Oh, and you might also like some recent guest posts of mine at Search Engine Land, Wolf Howl and Search Engine Journal. (Links go to my author profiles.)

p.p.s. I’m booked on a flight to Israel for tomorrow night. If I’ve been blogging slowly lately (or in the next little bit), that’s why!

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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

1 – Ever heard of “PPV”? Aka pay-per-view? I wish I was talking about boxing matches on TV. No, the larger ROI-centric affiliates are tending to move into “PPV” or “CPV” traffic, which many of you might know under its non-euphemism name, pop-ups.

The funny thing to me is that the dirtier you’re willing to play, the dirtier others are willing to play back. I was watching a TV show I like, and the site hosting it sells PPV traffic. Here’s an indication on traffic quality: the new ad page opens when you click play the first time. Yeah, totally what the visitor intended.

Bottom line is that PPV is the talk of the town in ROI-driven affiliate circles, and that’s a sad thing.

2 – The blackhat SEOs are tending increasingly towards the hacking side of things. In an SEO-driven version of a common scam, interruption marketing is used to make you think your website has bugs and you need to buy the virus “anti-virus” these helpful ‘warning’ providers are offering.

I’m trying to find the right reference on Ben Edelman‘s site, but it’s not surfacing.

Coincidentally, what does show up the overlap in adware makers [which serve to generate popup "traffic"] and phony anti-virus scams. All of which dovetail with Zango‘s jolly products.

3 – Annoying people and slowing their computers with your crummy software, plus hacking their sites … don’t think it doesn’t get better! Indeed it does. Phishers are going for AdWords accounts. Probably for the credit card info, firstly (the fastest cash), but I’m sure the campaign data can’t be something they’re possibly ignoring.

4 – Facebook application providers drive useless incentivized traffic. A whole lot of scaffiliates were pissed when Dennis Yu outed them on TechCrunch, but I’ve yet to hear them complaining about Farmville sending junk traffic to advertisers who will lower their payouts accordingly.

That’s what happened with cookie stuffing and other crap at eBay, until they dug into the data, booted the thieves and switched to CPC pricing based on quality. The good affiliates got paid more and the riff raff got the door.

We really, really need consumer advocacy organizations and Attorneys General to sue more of the big-time jokers for the benefit of the industry. Just a shame they can’t sue certain goons in the Kremlin who profit from this. Or, more optimistically, there are market solutions, as per Alex Rampel of TrialPay.

p.s. While I’ve almost never answered her [mostly unsolicited] emails, this interview with Emma Kupiak makes Neverblue sound like a good network to run traffic with. Almost – they still run the scammy junk like the rest of them… But at least Emma makes a good case about them being helpful to affiliates who want to be scammy! …

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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.I wanted to use Shareasale’s subid for tracking at the campaign level and Prosper 202 for tracking at the ad level (since Shareasale doesn’t let you use multiple subids/variables on a given link).

Well, in addition to redirecting to Shareasale’s link, Prosper 202 adds its own link ID on to the end of the URL, which causes a 404. Or at least, it did in my case because the end of the URL here was a Shareasale ‘custom link” – the name they give to deep links that affiliates can make to particular merchant pages.

So, for example, instead of executing my tracking script and redirecting to merchantsite.com/page.html , Prosper 202 caused the redirect to end up at merchantsite.com/page.html2341 or merchantsite.com/page.html9163 .

Now, in fairness to Prosper 202, this was my own fault.

The program specifies, when asking for your affiliate link at the campaign set-up stage, that you need to have the end of the URL allow for the subid to be added.

Because it’s late, and Facebook Ad Manager says the same thing (so that it can add its own subids to your ads when it mass-creates and split-tests them for you), I got Prosper 202 and Ad Manager confused. When Prosper outputs its own redirect link, it ends with ” t202kw= “. Somehow I confused that – which would allow Facebook Ad Manager to add its own subid numbers after the t202kw= parameter – with the input URL that you need to give Prosper.

The story has a happy ending though. I figured out a simple workaround to get the tracking and redirects to work!

You just move the ” afftrack= ” parameter (Shareasale’s subid) to the end of the URL that Shareasale gives you. Since that subid can be anything, Prosper’s adding a random number to it is no problem. Of course, it’ll make my Shareasale tracking a little messier, since now the same campaign subid will be duplicated multiple times by Prosper 202. Eg. afftrack=campaignA1234 afftrack=campaignA5678 etc.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

@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…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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

I was also interested in sharing certain other internet marketing products (like PPC Coach and Clayton Makepeace’s copywriting materials), but I’ve never used them myself so I’ll pass for now. There are others run by friends

Most of these are affiliate links, but a few are non-affiliate, too.

Competitive Intelligence SEO Tools

Compete – The Rolls Royce of competitive intelligence products, these guys get their data directly from the ISPs and their panel of millions. This is very valuable for impressing leads: bring a sample report to your meetings and say, “You can keep this sample report, and get more of them by working with me. This is also the kind of advanced intelligence and playing field I operate on.”

Compete used to be based on buying credits, but now you need a monthly membership. These start at $199/month.

I’ve personally got the Pro-Advanced Plan, which includes referral analytics. That goes for $499/month. These can be used for retargeting, which aims to make your advertising more effective.

.

Spyfu- Also formerly based on buying credits, Spyfu now offers monthly subscriptions that start at $59/month or $395/year (two months free).

They get their data by scraping search results, and were the first guys with ad copy data, so you could see competitors’ PPC ads. I’ve bought their reports and love em.

A tip on using this to its max potential: Since your reports are based on a domain, buy the reports for mega ad buyers like eBay and Amazon and category killers in your vertical.

.

SEOmoz Pro – As the title indicates, SEOmoz has some of the world’s biggest sites as clients, including eBay and the Marriott, and for good reason. Here are some of the things I like about their pro membership:

First, SEOmoz finally caught up to SEO Book and created their own Hub Finder, plus they went one better and organized the links by mozTrust (that’s jargon for the quality of the link). That’s very helpful in prioritizing link building targets.

Seomoz also have a boatload of useful tools like Linkscape, Trifecta (formerly Page Strength), Juicy Link Finder etc. The price is $79/month or $800/year (ie get 2 months free).

Besides that, I happen to be friends or friendly with most of SEOmoz’s staff, including Danny Dover, Scott Willoughby, Gillian Fishkin etc, and their associates at Distilled like Tom and Will Critchlow, Duncan Morris etc. Those personal interactions only reinforce for me the trust I accord these people.

Majestic SEO – Majestic offers a competing product to SEOmoz, but is different in certain key respects.

Their main service is free, and shows much greater link numbers than SEOmoz’s Linkscape.

The flip side is that they have no mozTrust metrics, so you can’t sort the links for quality. You can also buy ‘credits’ that are redeemable for advanced reports and data.

I’ve also interacted directly with Majestic SEO’s staff, lead by Alex Chudnovsky, and can speak to their extremely rapid and helpful support!

Webmaster Tools

Dreamhost Web Hosting – I use Dreamhost for literally all of my hosting, for 3 reasons: value for money, value for money, and value for money.

Dreamhost offer fantastic customer service, address downtime issues very quickly, reply to support emails within 24 hours and frequently within 2 hours … I can’t say enough good things about them.

I also love Dreamhost’s one-click installs. I don’t mess around with databases, PHP versions and other headache-inducing techie stuff when I setup a new WordPress site. I click, and I’m done.

Use promo code HESREALLYNUTS at Dreamhost for a cash discount, a free Unique IP for the first year (useful for sites you promote aggressively and don’t want tied back to your other sites) and a bonus free 2nd domain registration. Total value: $50! (Valid on full year registration or longer.)

Namecheap domains I switched to Namecheap from Godaddy because they give you both (i) a free SSL certificate for 1 year with a new domain registration and (ii) a free private Whois registration for the first year (they call it “WhoisGuard”). You also don’t need to use it with that domain in particular.

Sitemeter – I love these guys for getting into the nitty gritty of particular visitors and seeing what kinds of patterns emerge. Their premium product costs only $70 a year and is extremely valuable. Instead of only seeing your 100 most recent visitors, you get to see the last 4000, and it also saves the data on that. SO

Business Tools

Basecamp HQ for reporting progress in link buying. I like that it’s online, which makes life easy for everyone involved. Link sellers login to post the URLs on which they sold me links. Clients login to see the URLs and make sure that quality keeps up. And at the end of the month I login to see where we got links and to make payment.

BuzzStream for manual link building campaigns. You can add new prospects in there, add notes and other info to track progress on building the relationship, and finally update with info on links obtained. It helpfully scrapes the code of a site for any emails you can use to contact the webmaster, but doesn’t yet point you to contact forms.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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.

After reading his affiliate program management blog for several months, I finally got to meet Geno in person at last month’s Affiliate Summit East, where he gave me a copy of the book. I tore through it on the way home and finished it in about 2 days.

As you might guess, the book is an easy read, and not overly long. It’s substance is a presentation of a  107-question survey of consumers who have shopped online.

Geno begins by presenting the question asked, continues by sharing the results (usually in the form of a chart), and then he presents his own analysis of what the answers mean. Frequently, that analysis includes actionable tips for internet marketers.

The questions themselves cover topics that are extremely pertinent to current online marketing challenges.

Question #80 asks: “What would you consider a substantial one-purchase spending for the total of an online order?”

The top answers were $250 – $500 (27%), $120 – $250 (26%) and $500 – $1000 (20%).

Question #60 asks what would make consumers, while browsing for a specific product (eg people in buying mode), choose one store over another. Geno got a list of over 20 factors from the open ended answers!

Do you know how valuable that is for building a point of difference and lifting conversion rates?

Anyone doing online marketing for an ecommerce site, especially in a B2C context, will obviously derive interesting insights from the book. Personally, this gives me an idea on where to make the cutoff points for price-refinement navigation.

Question #60 helps marketers find a point of difference. Geno asked, “When browsing the internet for a specific product, what criteria ultimately dictate you choosing one store over another for your purchase ?” The answers he got came out to a list of over 20 factors!

At the same time, I found problems with how Geno conducted the survey.

- There were leading questions that suggested one answer over another.

-Sometimes the answers were improperly or poorly structured. For instance, 10% of people thought that a purchase of $100+ was a significant total for an online order (eg in response to question #80). If you combine that with the $120 – $250 segment, then really 36% of people think that order totals between $100 – $250 are significant, for an online purchase.

Despite these problems, there are a lot of valuable ideas to be found in the book. You should buy it, just make sure to keep your critical thinking hat on and not accept everything at face value.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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 .

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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:

Igal of PartyPop Wedding Planning

Jordan Glogau, 1800 Flowers

Jeremy Dearringer, Slingshot Indiana SEO

Amir Rabinowicz, Etoro Forex Affiliates

Eric Adamowsky, Armitage Marketing + Consulting

Scott Brinker, Ion Interactive Landing Paths

Rotem Amar, Eran Horowitz, Yossi Shalom of Investhead / 10PIPS Affiliates

Liat Fuchs, Affiliate Ply (Video Aff Network)

Chris Pearson, Thesis

The Bosers, 3 Dog SEO / Consulting

Jonathan Treiber, RevTrax offline affiliate marketing

Alex Schultz, Facebook

Emily Boss of CSN Stores

Michael Gross, AJ Madison

Carolyn Shelby , Chicago SEO

Negev Nosatzki – Ava Financial

Carolyn Tang, David Zelken of ShareASale Aff Network

Joe Stepnieweki, Skimlinks

Lucinda Worsfold of GlobalDirect / Unanimis affiliate + display network

Jennifer Moor and Byron Taylor and Paul (? didn’t get your card) of Linkshare

Michael Ouellete and Leigh Rogers of CJ

Susan Bridgers, Link Connector Aff Network

EJ Hilbert of Online Intelligence Affiliate Fraud Detection

Graham MacRobie, Alias Encore

David Naffziger, Brand Verity

Josh Sloan, IM Consultant

Jamie Birch, JEB Commerce

Bryan Cockerham, We-Care

Eli Toron, NogaMarketing

Chris Rossiter, Offerweb Network

Catherine Duffy, DMI Partners

Shanti Beaurline, AKMG affiliate network

Andrew Coleman, Lead Qual(ification)

Jeremy Shoemoney, Shoemoney Tools

Mike Guida, Get Ads

Betty Hakes, RevMedia Marketing

Brenda, Face Formers

Holly Elkins, Shop At Home

Kim Salvino, Buy.At

Jennifer Reppy, See Vast ads

Brett BumeterSoft Duit Media

Stuart Silverberg, Tech Trainer and Consultant

Darrin Washington, whose cards cleverly were labeled with the show he went to, to help people recall where they met him, and probably for his own direct response measurement. Smart! (But no website listed = no link :s)

Slaven MandicSlavTech Marketing

Jerry MarkIndependence Media Group

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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.

Brian Hawkins, of Pingo Calling Cards .

Paresh Vadavia, with online jewelers Ice.com and Diamond.com

Frank Watson, of Kangamurra Paid Search

Stephen Robinson (my mentor for Aff Summit – thanks for your time Steve!) of JEB Commerce affiliate program management

Scott Brinker of Ion Interactive Landing page management software

Geno Prussakov of AM Navigator affiliate program management

Wil Reynolds or Think SEER Search Engine Marketing

Brian Littleton, ShareASale, a fellow Montreal internet marketing company!

Tim Ash, SiteTuners

Chris Brogan

Chris Pearson, DIY WP Themes

Michael Gray, Wolf Howl SEO consulting

Rae Hoffman, Outspoken seo consulting

Michael Streko

Todd Friesen , PT search engine marketing

Dave Snyder, Search and Social Consulting

Hamlet Batista, Ranksense SEO software,

Todd Malicoat, Stuntdubl SEO consulting

Scott Willoughby, SEO moz

William Martin-Gill, ebay

Gabriel Malca (if he shows up)

Kate Morris, Search Marketing (un) agency Marketing demons

Dennis Yu, Blitz Local Marketing

Jeremy Shoemaker, Shoemoney

and anyone from AOL, Amazon, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, PlentyOfFish (Marcus Frind, are you attending personally?? Would love to meet you!) Prosper Inc (assuming you’re the same as Prosper.com), and any people who are into buying links .

If you’re one of these folks and/or are attending and would like to meet me, leave a comment and let me know when is good for you!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  

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.

FYI to affiliates promoting these things in Canada: You’re asking for jail time. Read the Competition Act.

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Shawn Collins and Missy Ward have been nice to enough to give me a speaking spot doing an “Advanced Search Marketing for Affiliates” roundtable. If any of you plan to attend, I always love to meet blog readers, Twitter friends or other internet marketing correspondents of mine in person! And I’ve got some neat ideas for people launching affiliate sites, some of which ideas I plan to use myself (or do already )!

You can use the following discount code to get in cheaper, too: ASE09SPEAKER10. FYI: It’s restricted in age to people 21+ only.

Here’s the Affiliate Summit East agenda, and registration.

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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:

“Why Google is likely to come into conflict with the mega-retailers like Amazon and eBay[...]“

“In turn, the margins for internet retailers will become thinner as Google progressively steals marketshare and people just use Google as their default product search. Call it Froogle 2.0.”

Actually, it appears from the Seattle Times story that I was wrong on the margins point, because Google will allow publishers to set their own retail price, while apparently Amazon is already selling e-books at a slight loss. Presumably, Google will take a commission on each sale. But Google is trying to steal market share…

This fits in with what I was saying about Google’s affiliate network and how they are going to become the biggest affiliate around in the next little while.

“The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products. [...] Once this happens, Google becomes the largest affiliate worldwide.”

Replace Google Base with Google Books – whose rapid rise to prominence I noted at SEO Book – and you get today’s announcement [Ed: It actually was in Monday's paper, but I didn't have time to edit this post].

This isn’t the first time I’ve been ahead of the mainstream seo community.

Longtime readers will recall how, I picked up on Google’s new submarine crawling, 4 months before the announcement that they were querying site search forms.

Others will remember my presentation of how to use trusts to buy sites at SMX Advanced last year – which also came months after I shared the technique on this blog…

And my SMX Advanced presentation was based partly on a year-old post! Yet people loved it…

So if you want to stay ahead of the pack and have a competitive advantage, you should add my rss feed to your reader.

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

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

Hope you enjoy!

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On TechCrunch, Borgle CEO Eric Schmidt told Charlie Rose that

“Well, the most interesting thing to me is that transparency is how you keep societies honest. And we’ve now because of the internet and because of the digital revolution given people — we’ve essentially given them the ability to see everything.

So you can now take photographs, take videos of everything you see in your world and people discover it. And there are whole communities of people who are interested in these kinds of aspects. And they serve as a form of check and balance on the powerful, the rich, the people who might exploit others.

It doesn’t necessarily mean for a different outcome, but it means that everybody can’t hide. They have to actually tell the truth. To me, that’s a great step forward.”

Here’s the screen cap, so you know I’m not inventing stuff.

Have to tell the truth? Why did it take action by the Florida AG before Google started making ringtone advertisers list prices in their ads? Why are the prices on other mobile content crap landing pages still hidden in nearly invisible text only an SEO would notice?

When you get to this landing page on most people’s screens, the huge headline and graphics (and occasional animation, depending which version of the ad you see) naturally draw your eyes … not the “subscription sent to your cell $9.99 per month” bit.

And why do they let so many scams and snake oil products run on their network?

This next one took in my sister, as it happens, and she’s one of the brightest, most critical-thinking people I know. This shadier side of affiliate marketing has developed the art of lying and deception to a standard the KGB would be proud of. They don’t just take advantage of gullible people. They manage to trick highly rational people with serious IQs (I know, the IQ quiz thing makes this particularly ironic).

Google needs to come clean. From a business perspective … For their users to keep trusting their ads. For the sake of showing the government that they don’t need to be regulated (though the above obviously shows you can’t trust them to self-regulate). And from a simple moral perspective, because it’s the right thing to do. (P.s. Inspiration hattips: Diorex (on scammy aff) and Aaron Wall (spam if you don’t pay G) and Danny Sullivan (Sphinn).)

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I get into:

• widget ecommerce, where people can buy directly off an affiliate’s site through secure, embedded widgets,
• price match guarantees on shipping to avoid folks abandoning their cart at checkout to go see if other retailers ship for less,
• alternative payment methods such as cell phone minutes and how cell phones may become the credit cards of the future.

The audio’s not perfect because I had to re-record it due to a little lag between the video and audio in the original, where my lips moved a split second before the audio was heard. (I’m faster than the speed of sound! )

Would love to hear your reactions!

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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.

I was preparing a syllabus for a course I called “How To Learn Internet Law For Fun And Profit”. The above thought occurred to me as I was reading for the basic section on ethics I needed to design.

Some Greek philosophers’ argue that the “happy man being a self-realized person and one who thus necessarily does what is good.” That jives really well with how I see some of the awesome profs I’ve had, like Rod Macdonald, Jill Guedon, Morteza Danechrad, Michael Duckett and Yossef Attoun. All of them are the epitome of what I think of as self-realization.

I don’t think a single one of them knows the others, yet I’d say they’re all kindred spirits in that they

1. Are ethical
2. Give back to their communities (implicit in 1, but felt it should be mentioned anyways)
3. Are brilliant
4. Teach with rare skill – it’s truly their calling
5. Have a toughness/resilience that is remarkable (I know each of them personally, and can tell you that they’ve not led the easiest lives).

What particularly gets my goat is those macho affiliates who act tough and think they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread just because they generate profits online. When they say that “those who can’t, teach,” they’re dismissing people of the highest quality, in every sense of the word.

The simple truth is that those who cannot, write inflammatory pieces on blogs nobody reads . Seriously though, I think both my version of that line and the better known version express two extremes that are rarely seen in reality – most people fall in the middle of this [bell] curve. What say you, you who can think?

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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 them what they are rightly due while you handle the merchant.

To any and all affiliates reading this, I strongly encourage you to go direct, rather than rely on PJN.

Search Engine Watch (SEW) is a merchant with a number of products you can promote, such as their Search Engine Strategies conference series and their job boards, where you buy a job posting. I recently needed to hire an SEO for Ice.com, as I was preparing to return to school full time this fall and Ice.com needed someone to take over from the work I’d been doing for them.

I went to the SEW job boards to post an ad. As I was going through the checkout – but before I paid – I remembered that SEW was a merchant on PJN and that I was already accepted into their program. I figured that going through one of my affiliate links would be a way to get a discount off the price of a job posting.

So I opened up the affiliate interface on PJN, found a link to the job board and clicked it. Then I bought the ad, which you can see here: http://jobs.searchenginewatch.com/c/job.cfm?site_id=2660&jb=4683913

It reads “Posted: August 12, 2008.”

Shockingly, my PJN backend shows that there were clicks from… August 12! Imagine that!

Of course, there isn’t any revenue associated with that, nor did they show up subsequently as might happen with a delay in reporting. It’s a month later though.

Some of you might be thinking that the problem is with the terms and conditions of SEW’s offer, and that you can’t use affiliate links to purchase the products at a discount. They’d be pretty odd and unique terms, but stranger things have happened. Well, here are SEW’s terms, verbatim. In fairness, they’re the current terms and conditions, since I couldn’t go back in time to check what they were on August 12.

Partner Manager:
Drew Eastmead

Partner Email:

Partner Website:
http://www.searchenginestrateg
ies.com/

Partner Address:

120 Broadway
6th Floor
New York, NY 10271
212-457-7784

Accept/Decline Method: Automatic

Category: Marketing

Suggested Keywords:

search marketing, search, search strategies, search conference, search expo, conference, expo, marketing strategies

I contacted Drew Eastmead, who runs the affiliate program for SES. He was very helpful and responded within 24 hours to my question as to whether there were any changes to the program’s terms and conditions. His response?

He said that no, they hadn’t changed the terms recently.

I followed up to let him know that I’d be blogging this, and his point was that they had outsourced this and were now working on fixing the tracking. Done. In 48 hours I had an answer. He also asked where I wanted the check sent and sent it where I asked.

And PJN?

Dated Aug 12:

Hi Jen,

I posted a job at SEW’s job board after clicking an affiliate banner of mine, and would like to see the commission in my account/reports. Any idea what the tracking problem is?

Thanks,
Gab

Dated Aug 14:

Hey Gab,

I’d be happy to help you look into this. I’m going to contact their account manager. However, before I do, I just want to make sure I have everything correct. You clicked on one of your own banners for SES. From there, you proceeded to post a job on the site. I see that you clicked on the banner on the 12th, or at least someone had clicked on the banner on the 12th. Is this the day you are referring to?

I have an email out to them right now inquiring about their commission payouts and tracking in terms to that particular site. I just want to make sure I have any additional information they may need to answer my question.

Thanks,

Jennifer

[Sounds reasonable, right? Keep reading.]

Hey Jen,

That’s exactly right – clicked on the 12th. Would love to hear what’s up. I’m also debating whether to promote SES SJ on my blog, which got 22,000 visitors last month and could plausibly drive conversions for them there.

Cheers
Gab

Aug 15:

Hello Gab,

Still working on a solution and have another question. When you posted the job, did you pay the 395 for the job posting?

Jen

Hey Jen,

The 395 was paid for on my boss’ credit card.

Gab

Aug 20:

Hi Jen,

I’m still in the dark what’s up with my SES commission.

Thanks,
Gab

Aug 20:

Hey Gab,

I was awaiting a response from our Supervisor Of Advertiser Relations. She is responsible for direct contact with the account manager for SES. As of this morning he has responded informing us that the individual who need to look into that issue are away for the week at Ad Tech.

I assure we are working on solving this problem.

I apologize for the wait and I appreciate your patience. I will be in touch as soon as more information is provided.

Thanks,

Jen

Hi Jen,

Ah ok then, thanks for the update. Look forward to hearing more!

Cheers
Gab

Soooooooooooooooooooooo?

I wrote Jen again during SES, when she was out of the office. No answer when she returned on the second either. And nothing since.

What’s the point of working with an affiliate network when they don’t deal with the merchant’s issues for you, and give you the runaround over a single measly commission? To any network people reading this, you need to understand the role of an affiliate network if you’re going to be taken seriously. Affiliates, don’t waste your time with these guys – go direct.

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PJN Leaves Affiliates Hanging: Go Direct

]]> http://seoroi.com/seo-roi-quality/pjn-leaves-affiliates-hanging-go-direct/feed/ 6 http://seoroi.com/seo-roi-quality/froogle-20-the-most-plausible-anti-google-conspiracy-theory-youll-read-this-month/ http://seoroi.com/seo-roi-quality/froogle-20-the-most-plausible-anti-google-conspiracy-theory-youll-read-this-month/#comments Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:43:58 +0000 Gabriel Goldenberg http://seoroi.com/?p=238 Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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Google’s Conspiracy To Monopolize Online Shopping

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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!

(Image courtesy of Little Odd Forest Boutique)

We’ll see how:

• How Google will eliminate search as an affiliate marketing channel
• How merchandising will need to adapt to the needs of SEO
• Why Google is likely to come into conflict with the mega-retailers like Amazon and eBay

  1) Google will offer sort-by-price options for popular products, eliminating many thin affiliate sites.

  Note also how the definition of “thin” changes over time, since price-comparison was once “thick” and “value-added” (and, officially, still is considered that way). The thing is that when everyone became a price-comparison site (or a dropshipper like Amazon/Overstock/Buy.com/Insert-General-Store-Here) then any given price comparison site wasn’t adding much value as compared to the others.

  In fact, Google already has this ability with Froogle Google Product Search.

  

  2) Merchandising will need to integrate more closely with SEO in order to feature more cheap products and expensive products where G’bot can access it.

  As a result, the middle ground of average products at average prices will see its market share gradually lost to either end of the spectrum. Just like Seth Godin suggested would happen, in his book Meatball Sundae.

  There, he discusses the case of two ice cream shops. One’s your average neighbourhood shop that will sell you a good sized scoop in a nice cone for a fair price. The other’s this extremely indulgent, totally extravagant place that makes your ice cream be a whole five-star meal and, as the brand gurus would say, sells the “experience.” The former gets by. The latter has a line around the block.

  3) After price, Google can offer other modifiers in dropdown menus.

  Things such as color, size, material, brand etc. Again, SEOs will react by going after the most profitable or highest volume colors, sizes etc. To an extent this is happening already, but modifiers means getting into the longtail, an area still largely ignored by ecommerce SEOs.

  This will also reinforce the trend towards keyword consolidation, eliminating much of the medium-tail to the detriment of advertisers established on those terms.

  4) The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products.

  For example, anything with a call-to-action verb like buy, purchase, get, request, compare, shop, find, hire, pay … Google Base itself will be transformed from free traffic to an affiliate feed. This is obviously much easier with Google’s acquisition of Performics, now known as Google Affiliate Network. (CJ is surely hoping it does indeed become a big Gaff…)

  

  Once this happens, Google becomes the largest affiliate worldwide. For existing affiliates, that means that SEO will become much less viable as a channel while for merchants, this means that writing quality copy for your descriptions becomes more important than ever, since that will be the big differentiating factor against the other merchants. You’ll be competing on CTR, like AdWords.

  Bundling strategies and especially those integrating related services will also be a source of competitive advantage… at least until the competition bundles those too. I recommend Meatball Sundae for finding out what you can bundle to create value, and especially Seth Godin’s bit on what is scarce vs what is abundant.

  5) In turn, the margins for internet retailers will become thinner as Google progressively steals marketshare and people just use Google as their default product search. Call it Froogle 2.0.

  eBay, Amazon and others will use their weight and initial ecommerce marketshare advantage over Google to encourage manufacturers to exclusive deals with them. These ecommerce “general stores” will block Googlebot from indexing their exclusive products to ensure that potential purchasers visit their sites to find these products. Cross-selling and upselling will dramatically gain in urgency.

  Is this all just crazytalk? Well, consider the factors required for this to become a reality, current events, and the incentives for Google to push Froogle 2.0 .

  
  A. Google is aggressively pushing its payment processor, Google Checkout.

  Advertisers can use Google Checkout badges to boost CTR. Merchants can offer customers a $5 discount on items processed using Google Checkout. Plus advertisers’ AdWords click charges cover a corresponding volume of “free” payment processing. (For extra fun, see this post on SEL where, reading between the lines, it seems that Google is cloaking Google Checkout and other URLs to Googlebot .)

  

  “Free”? That’s a reference to the costs down the line when Google Checkout has gone so mainstream that Google is self-contained as far as ecommerce goes. This is the whole moral of the story.
  
  B. Google has shown, by rolling out Google Suggest, that it wants to direct searcher behaviour to a more limited set of keywords.

  Not necessarily short phrases, but just less variety in the phrases that people use. Having more people search for ‘red soccer jersey’ instead of ‘maroon’ or ‘burgundy’ jerseys flows along in that direction. (Photo Alun Machin)

  
  
  C. The move makes sense relatively to Google’s brand, which is largely centred on user experience.
  The homepage is simple and uncluttered. They are constantly testing. And the horse opened its mouth recently to tell everyone “what Google wants.”

  Rather than risk a poor user experience by sending visitors to ecommerce merchants who can’t be trusted to test and iterate as fast as Google, Google can and will host the whole shopping experience on their own site. And since everyone will already be using their payment processor, that’s one less component of the experience to have to worry about being suboptimal.

  Of course, if you think that this is limited to ecommerce, you’re kidding yourself. How about the news vertical, for instance? Surely Google won’t hire armies of content producers?

  Nah, the wire services do that just fine. All Google has to do is get the meat of the story from the wire services, then glue on those paragraphs that are original to individual publishers as “snippets”.

  E.g.

  AP paragraph

  AP para

  WSJ unique commentary/angle para

  AP

  AP

  And of course, once you own an affiliate network and a PPC network, plus multivariate testing software… monetization gets automated and optimized at breakneck speed.

  D. Wikipedia ranks for 970/1000 most popular queries online.

  Knols are ripping off Wikipedia content, and monetizing it. Knols are ranking. Well, perhaps they will recruit that army of content creators after all.

  So where does that leave you, fellow webmasters?

  Well, first, build up cash reserves for the lean years ahead as you prepare to change your business model.
  Second, figure out how you can become independent of Google, and drive traffic from alternative streams.
  Third, get ready for the lobbying fight of a lifetime: the Google anti-trust wars are just beginning.
  Fourth, come back later this week as I share four business plans that don’t depend on ecommerce or affiliate marketing or Google, which plans I will not be pursuing for lack of time.
  Fifth, read XMCP’s excellent piece on Google making their own web. Also, the guy’s back and blogging again .

  If you liked this post on Google and ecommerce, get my RSS feed for more posts like this one!

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