Thursday, March 4, 2010

The 5 Commandments of E-Commerce

The 5 Commandments of E-Commerce

Divine inspiration because you never get a second chance to make a first impression…

It is one thing building a website and quite another getting it to work for you. The children of the earth, you and your customers, see countless websites everyday and regardless of what you show and tell them, they already have a fully formed idea of how a website should be. You MUST, therefore, make the best first impression you possibly can.

The following, transcribed from mysterious stone carvings, is a simple guide to make sure that you get the best possible Genesis for your e-commerce website, from its design and layout to your sales and continued marketing, to give you the best possible chance of e-commerce success, to make sure you do not find yourself wandering in the wilderness. As Moses guided his children out of Egypt, we too shall guide you… Go forth and be prosperous!

1. Thou shalt ALWAYS think like your consumers. You are a consumer as well, so you know just how important it is to be able to easily locate the product you are looking for when shopping online. Organize your site into relevant categories and put your products in more than just one category, so that there is more than only one way for a consumer to find what they are looking for.

2. Thou shalt use really good photos to illustrate your products and keep the photo headlines brief. A photo can tell a consumer a lot about a product instantly and it has been proven that most consumers only scan the descriptions, so keep each sentence short and the detailed summaries to no more than 25 words.

3.Thou shalt resist the temptation to overload your website with media and fancy transitional effects. Flashy is not always better. These, actually become distractions, and your website will be less effective at keeping the consumers attention. Most snazzy website effects add to upload time and delay the consumer’s product search, commonly causing them to abandon a website altogether…which would be bad.

4. Thou shalt not complicate the process with unnecessary steps or pages. Purchasing should be easy. Make sure your check out procedure is simple and all pricing and shipping information are displayed clearly. You should always include a phone number and a return policy. This will help reinforce the consumer’s confidence in their purchase and in you.

5.Thou shalt continually promote your online business as you would any other. A website DOES NOT market itself. Make the effort to stay in touch with your customers, perhaps via newsletters or special offers. Always keep an open mind. There may be many types of markets available to you that you are not reaching, or have not considered. Think outside the box. Try targeting new markets and optimizing your content as you grow… and grow… and grow!

…and then there was your e-commerce website … and it was good.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

What Custom Content Can Do For You



In an increasingly crowded web marketplace, it can be difficult to separate from the pack. Sometimes even having a good page rank is not enough. You could have a number one ranking, but if your site is uninformative or poorly designed, web surfers are going to click and run. With the number of affiliate sites now entering the field, there is even more competition for web surfers' time. To succeed on the web, your site needs to be an absolute authority in a particular field.

A website is the best promotional tool an e-business can have. The business can advertise all over the web and set up pay-per-click campaigns, but if the site itself is weak, you cannot expect web surfers to stick around or come back a second time. Custom content is all about keeping surfers on site and coming back for more.

The more content you have, the more chance there will be that a surfer will type in that keyphrase that matches content found in content. However, keep in mind that web surfers can smell fake content—content that is purely used to generate traffic, with awkwardly phrased keyphrases and grammatical oddities. Your better bet is to write content that is factually relevant: informative content, rather than just keyword-driven content. In relevant content, a large number of keyphrases will be covered, in addition to being a trusted source on the topic.

A hundred pages of informative content can be far superior to a hundred pages of keyword-driven content. If a spider detects that too many keyphrases are mashed together on a page, the site could be red-flagged, or even banished to a permanent low ranking in a search engine. In the past, a website owner could write the same keyword over and over again at the bottom of the page. Spiders got wise to this and now this tactic can be more of a detriment than a benefit. Relevant, custom content will never be red-flagged by search engine spiders.

Custom content can lead to sales or new clientele. Think of two sites: one site offers little to no information on a topic. Another site addresses any and all topics affecting an industry. Which site do you think a potential customer is going to trust? Content is not just about ranking high in search engines via page ranking, but about providing a quality website. Custom content should be a mixture of both naturally keyword-rich content as well as highly useful information.

Web Site Optimization



All optimization is not equal. There is such a rush to optimize a website for search engines that people don't realize that some SEO techniques can be self-defeating. Either a lot of work will go into a particular type of optimization that is fruitless or it can be downright harmful for search engine ranking. A high search-engine ranking is the holy grail of search engine optimization, but make sure you put your energy in the right place.

The first two issues involve web design: don't use flash or frames when designing a website. These won't get you banned by search engines;but the site might be ignored entirely. While you can use some flash animation within a site, overuse of flash should be avoided. Search engines like text, not fancy graphics. A flash-heavy site could be passed over. The same goes for a site written with frames;frame-heavy sites confuse search engines so the sites are not properly indexed. The text on a framed site is hidden within the frame, so even if there is ample content within the frame, it will not be read correctly. Verdict: avoid it.

When writing content, make sure the content makes sense. In the early days of the web, people went keyword crazy. They would cram a huge paragraph of keywords throughout a page. This worked for a little while. Now search engines are wise to it and this technique can lead to a site being banned. Website owners try to trick search engines by including the keywords within actual content, but if the keywords are too close together, this could also lead to problems.

Another issue is spamdexing. Never use keywords that don't apply specifically to a site. This can most often be seen with site owners using adult-themed keywords to bring in unrelated searches. This will cause a site to be quickly red-flagged. Using invisible text is a bad idea as well. Invisible text is the same color as the background. It can be read by spiders, but can't be read by human eyes. The problem here is that spiders now recognize this technique and it will be red-flagged.

Generally, content should be useful and informative. You can include specific keywords within content, but if you provide enough content, these keywords will be covered automatically without jeopardizing the site with picky search engine spiders. The use of quality content is two-fold: it's a better way to optimize with search engines and web surfers will spend a longer time on the site reading articles or other content. The trick is to create trust;both with spiders and real people.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Win The Battle Of Relevancy Online With Custom Content



It's a dog eat dog world out there on the Internet. There is the capacity for an unlimited number of storefronts on the web that you'd never be able to find on main street. The fact is that there is even more competition for business online than there is in the brick-and-mortar world. This is only going to get more intense. It wasn't so long ago that many people were afraid to use credit cards online. Shopping online was a curiosity. Now, it's a given.

The battle of relevancy online is the battle of one site being more useful than another. In the growing virtual marketplace, it isn't nearly enough to just have a number of products and hope for the best. Look at Amazon.com reviews—they are core to what has made that site grow. A glowing Amazon review can do a lot for a product's sales. Web surfers use Amazon reviews as much as they use a review in the local paper, if not more. Reviews have made Amazon a relevant and trusted resource for a department store's worth of products.

Not every site can hope to have the same review structure as Amazon. A number of affiliate sites use Amazon reviews as their own content. Web surfers are getting savvy to this: they can smell an affiliate site. Why not just go to Amazon directly? The battle for relevancy, then, is to become something as trusted and vital as the major sites online. You can't necessarily wait around for people to write reviews, and the process may not even apply to your site, so a site owner needs to provide content of your own.

Another word for relevancy is usefulness. It has been shown that the longer a person sticks around on a site, the more likely he or she will make a purchase. Even if that person doesn't make a purchase the first time to the site, the site will have left an impression. People are looking for information on a product or service as much as they are looking to make an immediate purchase. Web surfers like to be informed shoppers and the web gives them an unlimited amount of places to get this information.

This is where your site comes in. Don't make a web surfer click off your site to find information on a product—give them the information right on site. This means you should have articles available about any and all issues affecting a particular type of product or service. There can be hundreds of potential topics on one type of product, and a site may have dozens upon dozens of products available.

Not only will this type of information keep your site relevant to web surfers, it will be relevant to search engines as well. With content, these make up your target audience: search engine spiders and real people. If you provide relevant content that speaks to both, your site can compete with the giants.

Web Site Optimization



All optimization is not equal. There is such a rush to optimize a website for search engines that people don't realize that some SEO techniques can be self-defeating. Either a lot of work will go into a particular type of optimization that is fruitless or it can be downright harmful for search engine ranking. A high search-engine ranking is the holy grail of search engine optimization, but make sure you put your energy in the right place.

The first two issues involve web design: don't use flash or frames when designing a website. These won't get you banned by search engines;but the site might be ignored entirely. While you can use some flash animation within a site, overuse of flash should be avoided. Search engines like text, not fancy graphics. A flash-heavy site could be passed over. The same goes for a site written with frames;frame-heavy sites confuse search engines so the sites are not properly indexed. The text on a framed site is hidden within the frame, so even if there is ample content within the frame, it will not be read correctly. Verdict: avoid it.

When writing content, make sure the content makes sense. In the early days of the web, people went keyword crazy. They would cram a huge paragraph of keywords throughout a page. This worked for a little while. Now search engines are wise to it and this technique can lead to a site being banned. Website owners try to trick search engines by including the keywords within actual content, but if the keywords are too close together, this could also lead to problems.

Another issue is spamdexing. Never use keywords that don't apply specifically to a site. This can most often be seen with site owners using adult-themed keywords to bring in unrelated searches. This will cause a site to be quickly red-flagged. Using invisible text is a bad idea as well. Invisible text is the same color as the background. It can be read by spiders, but can't be read by human eyes. The problem here is that spiders now recognize this technique and it will be red-flagged.

Generally, content should be useful and informative. You can include specific keywords within content, but if you provide enough content, these keywords will be covered automatically without jeopardizing the site with picky search engine spiders. The use of quality content is two-fold: it's a better way to optimize with search engines and web surfers will spend a longer time on the site reading articles or other content. The trick is to create trust;both with spiders and real people.

The Essentials Of Keyword Planning



Remember the web in the old days? You could cram in a bunch of keywords at the bottom of the page regardless of grammar, and pretty much devoid of any aesthetic sense, and search engines ate it up. It's probably a good thing those days are over because websites have become a lot more professional. That still doesn't mean that people are using keywords to the best of their advantage. In fact, because it is much harder to write keyword-targeted content, many site owners avoid the issue.

This is good news for anyone looking to improve their page ranking. The market is wide open for people who use an effective keyword strategy. The main issues are both quality and quantity. A few pages of keyword-driven content just aren't going to do it anymore. If you're really looking to improve your search engine ranking, and ultimately improve your sales, you have to provide dozens of pages of content.

To do so, you need to first research keyword strategies employed by competing businesses. Type in the most obvious keyword for your industry. What comes out in the top ten? What have those sites done to achieve that ranking? Keyword planning tools will tell you the popularity of certain keywords, but you should do some brainstorming on your own. Try and think every possible permutation of a possible search, including misspellings—even for easy-to-spell words.

Each search engine will provide keyword planning tools, potentially for a fee—you can check the keyword relevancy in Google, Overture, Yahoo, and others. It's not a bad idea to check how keyword popularity compares in different search engines. You should be looking at potentially a hundred or more keywords—though this can vary according to the site. If a site sells a variety of different products, or provides different services, you're going to be able to multiply that keyword list.

Each keyword list should be tailored to a specific demographic. Once you have the keyword list together, it is time to optimize content so that the site provides relevant content surrounding that list of keywords. The most important part of content optimization is the title. What this means is you should title the article with a specific keyword in mind—the HTML link for the article is vital for page rank. This keyword should then be repeated in the article—but not so much that the text becomes unnatural or, worse, unreadable.

If that's the case, you could risk the site being banned by search engines outright. In addition to keyword popularity tools, you should also use keyword density tools for your site's content. If the keyword density is too high, the site could be red-flagged as offering unnatural, inorganic content. All of these issues are core to keyword planning.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Why Organic Real Estate On The Web Is So Important



When it comes to real estate, people usually shout out the mantra: location, location, location. When it comes to web real estate, you could say the same thing: location, location, location in search engines. Organic real estate on the web refers to the positioning your website has on the web landscape. A solid organic real estate design and SEO strategy will make a website as necessary a destination as the corner market. In short, organic real estate keeps a website from languishing unseen in cyberspace.

So how does Organic Real Estate work? What makes Organic Real estate, well, organic? The main feature of Organic Real Estate is quality, informative content. This is what sets quality SEO plans apart from those that are merely trying to trick search engine spiders. Content should be natural, not written as if composed by a machine. Natural, well-written web content will increase page rank at a faster rate than content that is written only with keywords in mind.

This is especially important for web entrepreneurs who run affiliate sites. Web surfers are getting savvy to the fact that many affiliate sites are just a dummy site set-up to "hopefully" bring in some sales. Experienced affiliate marketers know that you can make a site that is as competitive, and useful, as the affiliate's host site. The more quality content there is on your site, the better an affiliate site can separate itself from the crowded web marketplace.

But Organic Real Estate is about a lot more than content—and this is where a lot of SEO plans fall short. In addition to providing content, a site owner must determine a target audience. In one way, content and target audience go hand in hand. You have to figure out target audience and tailor content accordingly. In addition, you may have a different target audience for different products or services offered on your site. Content and keyword targeting must be tailored to each potential type of client and customer.

Without these strategies, what will you have: a site that looks more like a link-factory than a trusted resource in a particular industry. In the past, people stressed the need for quality web design. While this is no doubt important, it is now much easier for amateur's to design a high-quality looking site. It is far less easy for site owners to provide fresh and useful content. You'll find a bevy of nice-looking sites with little or nothing to offer in terms of content. In Web 2.0, content is what separates the great from the mediocre, and the organic from the artificial.

What To Look For In An Affiliate Partner



Affiliate websites are one of the fastest growing wings of e-commerce. You can literally find thousands of affiliate partnerships to choose from. This is both good and bad news. The good news is that there are great affiliate deals to be found online that haven't yet been over-saturated by partnerships. The bad news is that there are affiliate partners out there that you shouldn't touch with a virtual ten-foot pole.

There are a number of steps you should take before signing up with an affiliate partner. First, you should read the affiliates terms and conditions. Too often, budding marketers skip over an affiliates terms. An affiliate partner may not allow for Google Adwords or other marketing avenues so make sure this is not explicitly laid out in the affiliates terms and conditions. If there are no terms of service, this should be a warning in itself. A reputable affiliate will normally have terms of service.

Payment is obviously a huge one. Make sure the affiliate has reasonable terms. Some affiliates, such as Amazon, only pay out after a set number of sales—you do not make a dime on the first, second, or even tenth sale. Other affiliates will pay out for each sale. The flip side is that an affiliate with a sales minimum may also have a better percentage payout. The best-case scenario is to find an affiliate partner that pays out for every sale and offers a good percentage.

This will be all for naught if the affiliate does not pay out in a timely manner. Try and not learn from experience, in other words, don't get burned. Instead, learn from other people's experience. Go to affiliate marketing forums to see if a particular affiliate has a good or bad reputation. The trouble here is that a new affiliate might not have a marketer base yet, and these affiliates usually offer the most attractive terms in order to bring affiliates in. Use some common sense—if the affiliate's site is well designed and they offer a good and useful product, you could try and test the waters.

On that front, it is sometimes a good idea to find an affiliate partner that is not overly saturated. If you offer a service that can't be found on every other web page, it can lead to a better sales rate. However, once again there's a flip side: if it's a virtually unknown site, it's harder to build up buyer's trust, as compared to well-known affiliate programs like Amazon or the Discover card. A lot of the onus falls on you—if your site is well designed and well managed, buyers will trust your affiliate links.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Top Resources For Affiliate Marketers


By and large, the top resources for affiliate marketers aren't so different than the resources for standard businesses. Of course, affiliate marketers have some unique concerns: payment scale, new affiliate opportunities, where to place links, etc. But affiliate marketers are the most successful when they don't think of their sites as "dummy" sites, but full-fledged business opportunities. Another way of stating this is an affiliate marketing business and the host business are one and the same.

For both affiliates and marketers, one of the most important tools available is the site meter. Affiliate marketers should check in and out clicks. In-clicks will tell you what searches are being used the most often. You could then write some additional targeted content around this search term to bring in even more web surfers. Out-clicks are just as important. Out-clicks will show you which pages are the least popular. You will want to write some new content and/or redesign the page to help with a page's popularity.

The key to any web business is driving traffic. This traffic needs to be monitored to determine where the site has been most effective. Remember, anything can be improved. Even if you're very satisfied with the amount of traffic you're getting, there are still thousands of web surfers out there who have never heard of your site. Improved content, site functionality, and useful affiliates can all drive repeated traffic to your site.

A website should never be static. You should never just design a site, leave it alone, and hope for the best. It should be monitored and improved—possibly even on a daily basis. Blogging has been an important and highly succesful addition to the affiliate marketing industry. Every day, affiliate marketers can write new content aimed at drawing in a different demographic, or expanding the customer base of a current demographic. Forum software is another good tool for keeping people on site and interested in the site's contents. Both forums and blogs are good for bringing in new registration. An affiliate marketer should keep track of past browsers just like a standard business. Lead generation and organization are important for marketers as well.

Affiliate forums are some of the best places to find information on new affiliates. Certainly, there is stiff competition between affiliates, but there's also a willingness to help each other out. If an affiliate has a particularly bad reputation, you can get the lowdown in the forums. At affiliate forums, you can also find web design tips, read about past successes, and basically start to get a foothold in the industry. As link popularity is enormously important for search engine rankings, you can begin link-partner relationships in forums as well.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is So Important


 Much of the information you'll find online is aimed at affiliate marketers: Make millions online! While many of these claims are overblown, they also get the attention of small and medium-sized businesses that also want to cash in on the affiliate marketing gold rush. Becoming an affiliate is as lucrative a proposition as becoming an affiliate marketer. For this reason, you'll see new affiliate opportunities arising each and every day.


Look at what a business is getting if it starts an affiliate program: free advertising. That's the simplest way to put it. The marketer signs up with the business and agrees to put a link on a website. The business only has to pay for this service if a sale is made—normally for a reasonable commission. As this is a sale that wouldn't have been made without the affiliate marketer's site, it is money well spent.


Even if a sale is not made, the link provides a method of advertising that can increase name recognition. Most business owners know that people might not make a purchase until the fifth time they see a brand name or come surfing to a site. An affiliate program can spread the word about a business on dozens upon dozens of sites. When combined with more traditional types of advertising, this can be a great way for a new business to get a foothold or an established business to expand its reach. These links can help search engine ranking as well.


The trick to a good affiliate partnership is finding quality marketers. While you obviously want to have your link on as many sites as possible, you also want those sites to be adept at generating traffic and sales. The fact remains that a large number of affiliate sites are posted and then never updated again. A business wants to find marketers who will design a professional-looking site and market that site effectively. At affiliate forums, businesses can hook up with marketers to start a relationship. A business owner can get a sense of the marketer's skill and drive from his or her stable of sites.


There's a lot of competition for marketers out there, especially established, quality marketers. Your best bet is to offer very attractive terms—a higher commission than the competition or a unique link layout. It should go without saying that your own site is well designed. An affiliate marketer wants to make a sale just as much as you do, and marketers won't sign up with a site that is poorly constructed. Offer a good site and a good product and you'll bring in more affiliate marketers. All this said, it is no surprise that affiliate marketing is growing at such an exponential rate. It is as important to business as any other type of marketing.

Difference Between An Affiliate and a Super Affiliate


It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Super Affiliate! Corny, but "super affiliate" is the new buzzword for affiliates who are both ambitious and successful at affiliate marketing. There are wild claims online about affiliate marketing: Make Millions Overnight! Never Work Again! Unfortunately, these claims are usually false. To go from being a plain affiliate to super affiliate takes a lot of work. In short, you need to be an affiliate of steel.

The vast majority of affiliate marketing sites online are run by people who have no great interest in turning a huge profit. For example, you'll find thousands of blogs where people put up a few Amazon listings and/or Google links on the off chance that a passing browser will click on them. That's all well and good, but this is no way to make a dent in the affiliate marketing game. To be a super affiliate, you need to treat affiliate marketing as a job, not just something that you do on the side to put a couple of bucks in your pocket.

There is a misconception that affiliate marketing is not a real business. After all, the affiliate is not putting out a product. This is patently false. Even though an affiliate marketer is not manufacturing a product, he or she is still offering the product up for sale. An affiliate marketer still needs to be in charge of search engine optimization, custom content, quality web design, financial management, and everything else that goes into running a successful e-business. As with any business, an affiliate marketing plan is only as strong as the amount of work you put into it.

A super affiliate will be able to turn as hefty a profit as a standard business—several sales a day on a number of different fronts. Remember, successful affiliate marketers don't necessarily stop at one site. They set up a variety of affiliate sites with a good web address, quality web design, and lucrative affiliate marketing opportunities. Additionally, once you start selling at an accelerated rate, some affiliate programs will promote you from regular affiliate to super affiliate. If you start sending sales and traffic to a business, they will reward you with better terms.

This isn't an easy proposition, but it is possible. Make sure that an affiliate program has a corresponding super affiliate program in place—better terms for more sales. Even if they don't, an affiliate with good terms up front can really pay off if you're able to make a several sales a month. Affiliate programs with great terms are also sometimes referred to as super affiliates. Find these and you know you'll have a good marketing in place at the start.

How To Make Money With Affiliate Programs



Affiliate programs can either be a way to put a little extra cash in your pocket or, hopefully, become a full time job. However, it's not like you can put up a bunch of affiliate links and expect to start making a mint. If you want to make a full time job's worth of money off affiliate marketing, you have to work at it full time. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that it works 24/7—but this doesn't mean you should also put in several hours a day of your own time.

The affiliate marketers who have had the most outstanding success are normally those who have more than one site working at once. It's much harder to make a decent amount of money if you have one affiliate site at a time. Experienced affiliate marketers will have a number of different sites running at once, all with different types of affiliate links. What this means is that each affiliate site will need separate SEO: new content in the form of blogs, forums, articles, and other techniques.

A key to a successful affiliate marketing program is to make the affiliate site a useful resource. Just posting a bunch of links is not going to impress many web surfers. They'll leave and likely never come back. The trick to any web business is to keep people on site—this is true for the affiliate partner and it's true for affiliate marketers. An affiliate site shouldn't necessarily scream, "affiliate site." Instead, it can be a trusted resource on a particular topic.

Useful content is the best way to make this possible. Take a site that has a number of links to sports-related businesses (apparel, equipment, tickets, books, etc.). The affiliate marketer can then set up a forum that talks about different sports teams, strategy, and so on—potentially, this forum could bring in sports fans from across the country. Blogging is another great medium for affiliate marketing. On the same site, the blogger could write reviews of new equipment or write in depth trade talk about a variety of sports. These are just a few ideas but they show how affiliate marketing can—and should—be a serious, long-term proposition.

What it comes down to is that affiliate marketing is no different than running the host site. Both are about running a business, even if an affiliate marketer has no direct product or service to sell. An affiliate marketer should set up a site that is useful and informative—a destination that people will come back to again and again. In some cases, an affiliate site might even be more informative than the partner's website.

Only until these issues are covered can an affiliate marketer hope to make a good amount of money with affiliate marketing. Sure, you could put up links and hope for the best, but you should think about investing some time into the site if you really hope to turn a respectable profit.

How To Become An Affiliate



Becoming an affiliate is one of the easiest business propositions out there, which is why it is so quickly gaining in popularity. Businesses want to have as many affiliate marketers working for them as possible, after all, it's really just a form of free advertising. For this reasons, businesses make it very easy to sign up for an affiliate program. Find a program, sign up for free, and just like that you're an affiliate.

The most important part of affiliate marketing boils down to one word: relevancy. In order to be a successful affiliate, you need to choose partnership programs that correspond to the nature of your affiliate site. So if you are running a travel affiliate site, link to affiliate sites for airfare, travel packages, clothing, and other relevant sites. Linking to a pet product affiliate doesn't make so much sense.

This is core to why experienced affiliate marketers will have a stable of sites. They'll have their travel hub, pet hub, book hub, and so on. Some affiliate marketing links will cross over, for instance, everyone needs credit cards and even airfare deals could find a home on a pet site. The basic rule of thumb is that affiliate links should be on topic.

If you're just starting out, one method to starting an affiliate site is to thumb through affiliate marketing directories and see what affiliate marketing programs interest you: do they offer a good product, do they have good terms, do they have a good rating? You could then design your website around a particular type of product based on the affiliate program you have found in an affiliate directory. If you already have a running website, check directories for new affiliate marketing programs that correspond to the site.

At times, less is more. There are literally hundreds of affiliate deals out there with good terms and a good product. Don't just cram hundreds of links onto one page. Your affiliate links should be easy to read and access, and they should be organic: they should appear to be a part of the site, rather than an obvious moneymaking opportunity. The more relevant these affiliate sites are to the main theme of the site, the more likely it is web surfers will click on the link and make a purchase.