eCommerce and

• Amazon announced new payment services in two flavors - Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay. Frankly I am excited to see what Amazon can bring to this already crowded space (PayPal, Google Checkout, eBillme and many more). Read the thoughts of Linda Bustos and Scot Wingo on the new service.
• I will not make mention of that new search engine and be another one of the 24,928 posts about Cuil. DANG IT.
• Write your own blog? Want to take a vacation this summer? Lisa Barone at Bruceclay is using guest bloggers to cover while she's on vacation. I leave next week for my vacation but luckily I found a blogging service called Posterous which you might be able to use. You can email just about anything to the system and it will post it your blog, pretty slick.
• Say, speaking of taking vacation like Lisa, and the fact that I also live just a couple miles from our office, I was wondering what else I might have in common with some popular bloggers. Please help me find matches for the following or create one for me, I'll take care of the first one.
  • Live less than 3 miles from work - Lisa Barone, Bruceclay.com
  • Is left-handed - ?
  • Was born in the November -  ?
  • Has never experienced a tornado (since I've done the whole earthquake thing) - ?
• I've planned and routed my whole trip using Google Maps. Earlier this week it appeared that Google was testing new features for Maps. As of today it looks like they may have rolled back certain ones, but I'm happy that one feature they rolled back and kept is the ability to reorder your multiple desitinations. I do appreciate the "avoid tolls" feature, that should save me $20 by avoiding bay area bridges!
• Microsoft's Live Search page got a makeover. If you are familiar with Easter Eggs on DVDs, then you'll enjoy finding the hidden hot spots on the page.
• SES San Jose is coming up soon. It's already August?! It doesn't look like I'll be going (not that I have something better to do), but please don't postpone your honeymoon to attend like this guy.
• I lost all my Scrabulous games on Facebook! If you enjoyed this game as much as I did, be sure to add wordscraper, the replacement that was built by Scrabulous developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla.
• I love Firefox 3 more everyday. I found a new favorite Firefox 3 plugin this week that refreshes webpages at customizable intervals. No more pounding the F5 key during a Woot-Off (I mean to review our orders tab without having to always keep logging in). My top 3 Firefox add-on's I can't live with out at work are; ReloadEvery, Screengrab!, and Live HTTP Headers. Zach suggests Search Status, Session Manager, and Web Developer for SEO-minded folks.
• Ask yourself, am I a Guru or an Expert?
• My random fact of the day is dedicated to Matt, our Development Manager, who's been looking to adopt a dog. Los Angeles' top dog is the chihuahua according to the LA Times.

I thought starting a new regular post discussing what affiliate websites are doing to be profitable and effective, affiliate websites that are downright hilarious, and affiliate websites that fall in between these two ends of the spectrum would be beneficial to our readers. My goal is to point out aspects of publisher websites that are unappealing, and also support those who are doing it right. I don't want anyone to feel ripped on, but I think we can learn from the bad websites just as much as we can learn from the good. Sometimes the sites are funny, like the ones that put pictures of themselves from way back in the day all over the site.  Sometimes there is so much going on with colors, animations that are flashing and making noise, and pop-ups that I wonder if they may cause viewers to have an epileptic seizure.  Still other times I question what the webmaster is thinking, for instance I recently came across an affiliate website that used a 7 year old Drowning Pool song as background music "Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor" (shudders).  While these examples may be obvious “no no's” to those attempting to create a quality website, there are a few basic rules that I would like to point out this month that may help affiliate marketers make improvements.

Site 1: HydroponicsUSA.com - This website does not have a strong affiliation to our products, unless you really want to classify it as "Home and Garden". From what I'm aware, hydroponics are used frequently to grow illegal substances, and whether or not that is all they are used for, the correlation is strong enough to make me question the website before I even see it. Consider the affiliation between your brand and the connotation of hydroponics.  I guess it depends on who your target market is, but for me a red flag goes up. One of the first things that I notice when I look at an affiliate website is the contact information; it provides a sense of validity to the retailer and potential guests.  What I notice about this website is that there is no contact information or about us so that visitors can find out more about the website. This always makes me concerned about the legitimacy of the website.  

Site 2: BurberryCoatReview1234.blogspot.com - If your website listed in the program is a blog named BurberryCoatReview with a string of numbers, you are probably spam. I wish there was a way to block affiliates based on their URL, or words within their URL. Spammer affiliates will create hundreds of free blog websites about a particular product or brand in order to try and gain massive exposure to visitors. You'll also notice that such sites will have 1-2 posts that are likely very old. The publisher writes an article or two, then moves on to create another blog website account. If blogger affiliates are signing up for your program, verify their start date and look to see how many posts they have in their history. If there are only a few posts, most of which are older, and there is a good chance that this is the case, the publisher will not likely be a quality affiliate as most blogs fail when they are abandoned by their owner. 

Site 3: CouponCactus.com - This is an example of a wonderful effort by David Fitterman to collect and organize coupons from merchants. With a strong offering of exclusive coupons, Coupon Cactus has over 800 stores and 2,000 coupons to check out. The site provides visitors with the ability to browse by store, category, size of discount, new and expiring, as well as site favorites. Coupon Cactus incentivizes its users to sign up and register to earn cash back to their account, similar to Jellyfish cashback. While there has been much talk about coupon sites and whether or not they should be part of a merchant's affiliate program, I believe with the right approach and management a coupon affiliate site can be a positive addition in an affiliate program, and I think this is a good example of a publisher that is doing it right.

Site 4: Homeincomeportal.com/... - If your site is about how to make $$$$ from home in just minutes a day, you will get declined, at least by our affiliate management team. The quality of these sites is generally terrible, packed with false/questionable statements and gimmicky software solutions for sale, such as "traffic magnet" or "banner fiesta". This specific example has dozens of different topics including software ads, recipes, testimonials (with a picture of a man with no shirt on), and ten plus links to products called "Buy this here". The page was so long, I seriously had to scroll for quite a long time to review all the content (if you can even call it that). Such a long page is poor design and ineffective at generating conversions for your program.  This design structure and get rich quick type of marketing is not something I consider to be beneficial to the retailer, or all eCommerce for that matter.

Let's recap and look at the key takeaways for both publishers and affiliate managers this month:

1. Don't use animated gifs (especially ones of flames touting "Hot Deals!"), tiled/repeating background images, mouse cursor effects, useless sound effects and background music. 
2. Don't use free hosting site urls like tripod, geocities (yes, I still see applicants with these), etc. Spend $7 and purchase a domain, it will be worth it in the long run. 
3. Provide links for retailers to contact you for recruitment purposes or other reasons. 
4. Don't get nasty with the affiliate manager. Yes we have received, such distasteful replies to our publisher decline emails as "your loss", "it's your money (aka your company's) that you're losing" or "I don't know what your problem is". Let's act like responsible, grown up, mature professionals. We are trying to do business together to benefit both parties.  
5. Do include your affiliate ID in email communications, as it helps pull up your account instead of hunting you down by domain. 
6. Don't use free templates for affiliate sites. I usually get about a dozen applications a week that use some sort of pre-configured template. 
7. Avoid creating a page full of 468x60 banners that takes several minutes to load even on broadband. No one, I mean no one, will wait to see all the banners to load. 
8. Build a site that the merchant would be proud to link to and be associated with. 

Look for next month's edition with more reviews and tips. 

Well nothing crazy happened to me last Friday (phew), hope you were left unaffected as well. Vanessa is still out, so I’m covering the blog again. Disappointingly enough for Vanessa, the Lakers lost. She now owes Matt, a fellow coworker, dinner. If you are in the Southern California area I hope you are staying cool during these 100+ degree days. We are especially appreciative of the PlumberSurplus.com food program for providing ice cream sandwiches!

• If you live in California, new cell phone laws go into effect July 1^st. To make sure you are covered, I suggest picking up a hands free device soon. I’ve heard great things about the BlueAnt Supertooth Light available at Amazon (assuming they don’t go down again). For a low cost solution, purchase a plug in corded hands free device for your phone.

• Who else is getting worried about eBay and their desire to force PayPal as the only eBay payment option?

• Having trouble finding which social networking site your target demographic is on? RapLeaf (via Marketing Pilgrim) has some data which shows where these folks prefer to hang out.

• In case you were not one of the 8+ million users who participated in the world record attempt by Mozilla called “Download Day” and got FireFox 3, you can still get it at their site. I’ve been using it all week and it does seem to provide a faster browsing experience without any hacks.

• Looking for inspiration and innovation for your ecommerce site? Jason Billingsley at Elastic Path had a great webinar yesterday on Ecommerce Innovations. I can’t imagine implementing Coastal Contact’s “Try before you buy” feature on some products (shall I even mention toilets?) from our site…

• AdWords Quality Score is now influenced by page load times. If you run SEM, spot check some of your keywords for every domain you have ads for to ensure you have not been impacted by this change.

Now to all those I promised, its time for some pictures from Internet Retailer!

Channeladvisor Booth

Singlefeed Crew- Angela, Colin, & Ben

McAfee’s Shannon Carter

Jay from PowerReviews

The Smarter Ladies

Andrew and Ian from Google AdWords Retail Team

Siva and Larisa from TheFind.com

Jeary from LivePerson

I’ll be helping with this week’s variety post while Vanessa is out. Eek, its Friday the 13th! Having just returned (albeit much later than planned) from Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition 2008 in Chicago, I have so much to share with our team and our readers. You have to love being separated from your luggage, missing connecting flights, and staying in foreign places overnight, but it was all a small price to pay considering I just had the amazing opportunity to speak for the very first time at IRCE.

• Danny Dover posted on SEOmoz a “Beginner's Checklist For Search Conferences” which is especially helpful if you’ve never attended such an event. Luckily it wasn’t my first time at a conference, just my first time speaking. I strongly agree with his point that you should blog about your trip (I can check that one off the list) once you return.

• My flights were uber-delayed causing me to spend the night in Dallas. Don’t worry though I had awesome seats on every connecting flight thanks to SeatGuru.com. Use the SeatMap Key to find the best seats with power outlets and the most legroom.

• Last week Microsoft adCenter announced Microsoft adCenter Desktop (Beta), an application similar to Google AdWords Editor. I immediately signed up for the betaAdWords Editor 6.0 late last week. that day, and was just sent a link to download the application. I haven’t installed it yet, more to come from me on that later. Google just recently released AdWords Editor 6.0 late last week..

• If you attended the workshops on Monday at IRCE, you may have caught the session about Affiliate Marketing. I was asked many times what my stance is on the subject, and honestly, we love affiliates and what they are able to do for us by driving additional sales and revenue. We work directly with publishers to provide them special coupons and incentives. You can catch panelist George Michie’s response on the RKG blog. Other than doing some “affiliate hunting”, one way affiliate coupon sites and merchants can get along is to have well developed policies and terms.

• Speaking of policies and terms, Linda at Get Elastic recently touched on 9 tips for privacy policy usability. Linda is amazing; not only was she staffing the booth at IRCE, attending sessions and taking time to review passerby’s site’s (including ours), she still found time to blog!

What’s an Affiliate Hunter you ask? It’s just one of the many hats I wear here at the Surplus. While overseeing our affiliate program, there are certain responsibilities of that job which has led us to come up with the term “Affiliate Hunter” (thanks Zach!). An affiliate hunter is someone who I picture wearing khaki colored safari shorts and carrying standard hunting equipment; except instead of binoculars you have IP addresses, urls, and search engines, instead of shorts and a hat you are dressed to meet your company’s dress code policy, and finally instead of a high powered rifle you have the power to terminate publishers and deny commissions with the click of a mouse.

If you are a merchant or advertiser running an affiliate program on ShareASale, Commission Junction, or elsewhere, there are a few activities to keep an eye out for when dealing with publishers. Affiliate’s can hijack your tracking code, bid on keywords you don’t allow, or buy domains that are similar to yours. One type of resource I often reference is affiliate forums, like ABestWeb. If your affiliate program has been around for any length of time you’ve probably experienced some if not all of these tactics used by publishers, but for those who are new to the game you’ll at least become a junior affiliate hunter by the end of this post. So put on your safari hat and lace up those chukka boots, we’re going affiliate hunting!

1. Keyword Bidding: Part I- Do you allow affiliates in your program to bid on keywords? If you do, do you have terms that affiliate publishers are not allowed to bid on, like your company name? One of the most productive ways publishers generate traffic is through keyword bidding on the search engine advertising platforms. If you do have a list of terms that are off-limits to publishers, you need to share it with them. Add the blocked list-o-keywords to your program details, include it in your approval emails, and remind them to check the list frequently. If you’ve already done all of this, or are having an epiphany right now, open a browser, go to a search engine and search your blocked terms. If you see ads for your name that aren’t yours, they could be a competitor’s but it’s most likely they are an affiliate’s. One method you can use to find out who the affiliate publisher is, is to click on the ad and see if the url redirects or forwards through with any kind of affiliate tracking. Within that url you can find the publisher id number, which then lets you check your approved publisher list.  



2. Keyword Bidding: Part II- Other tricks publishers might use with keywords includes scheduling them to run during the night time when you aren’t at work looking for them, and geo-targeting the ads to show everywhere but your region. Ask a friend or relative on the opposite coast to run some searches for you. 



3. Domain Stockpiling- Do you own all the common variations, misspellings or extensions of your domain name? If not, someone may have already purchased yourdomain.info or yourdomain.extensionofchoice. This tactic is referred to as typosquatting.  We have seen strikingly similar variations of our domain being utilized by publishers. While we do own several domain extensions of our domain and misspellings we saw a publisher using the combination of our domain misspelled at a non .com extension which we did not have. We were able to politely email the publisher and offer then a little bit of money (to cover their domain purchase cost and transfer fees) and they accepted. If you aren’t sure who owns the domain in question, simply run a check through the whois database and then cross reference the registered user’s name in your list of approved publishers. 



4. Promoting Coupons- Many affiliate sites excel by offering merchant coupon codes and discounts. Some of these coupons are exclusive for select publishers; others are widely available to all. Keep track of who coupon codes are shared with, some affiliates may steal codes that are only for select affiliates and repost them on their site. This is a rather unfavorable thing to do, and the violating affiliate can quickly rack up many sales or leads by piggybacking off the popular merchant’s coupon code. 



5. Dropping EPC- On occasion publishers will send you tons of leads and traffic but it will not convert. Depending on how that affiliate is generating the traffic, it may not be very qualified for your site or offer. Lots of traffic and low conversions spells LOW EPC for a merchant. Find the publishers with low EPC rates and email them asking if they need any help, and give them some pointers for what works well in your program. They may realize they cannot generate sales for you and stop sending high volumes of non converting traffic, but if they continue and your EPC is sinking faster than the Titanic, send another email and let them know you may have to let them go. 



6. Automate Approvals- As I mentioned in my last post, some networks provide tools to automate the approvals of applications. It’s pleasant to know that as I lay my head down to sleep, I am approving qualified affiliates to join my program. With these automated rules, you can prevent publishers from certain countries, low performance levels, or by particular categories their website is listed in from ever entering your program. I’ve been told it’s more time efficient to let everyone in, then weed out the undesirable publishers as you come across them. Imagine throwing a black tie event, you wouldn’t let people in the door wearing Wranglers would you?
   
   
7. BONUS- I would also like to recommend two tools that have been very helpful in hunting down affiliates using redirects and encoded links. Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer is a free tool available online. I have also found a FireFox extension called LiveHTTPHeaders.

Let’s face it, there are necessities in life. We need reliable transportation, food, shelter and social interaction. There are also needs at your job in order to perform the tasks required of you. As a search engine marketer, coming from a young internet retail company, I have humble roots. As we continue to grow, we are able to finally afford many of the more costly solutions we once dreamed of using. I’ll go back to my roots for this post.  To help those just starting out, here are some free, or relatively inexpensive, tools and resources to get you on your way.

1. A high speed internet connection - Cost: Free.  At most locations. When navigating through thousands of keywords, in several ad accounts, waiting for pages to load will definitely eat up a good portion of your day. Also, that time spent downloading and uploading CSE data feeds on a regular basis is better spent with a caramel latte.  Find your nearest local coffee shop and connect! 
2. Your own dedicated phone number – Cost: Free. When a team member at “X” company needs to call you, but you don’t have a dedicated phone line it can be difficult to conduct business, one easy and free solution is to have your own “business direct” line.  This is easy using Google’s GrandCentral. With the ability to setup custom greetings, screen calls and more, it’s an economical way to use an existing phone (like your cell) for multiple uses. 
3. AdWords Editor - Cost: Free. The only sane way to handle 10’s of thousands of keywords in Google AdWords. 
4. The Permutator – Free to try. In my opinion every SEM marketer needs a keyword permutation generator tool that helps save time when creating long tail keyword lists. 
5. Data feed management/optimization tool - If you submit products to multiple shopping engines then you should consider such a tool. SingleFeed offers one month free for Google Product Search accounts. ChannelAdvisor, and competitors, can run a few hundred to few thousand dollars per month but add many additional services. 
6. An Analytics solution - Cost: Free. You are paying money to bring traffic to your site right? Then you need to know what that traffic is doing once they get there. A solution like this sounds expensive but Google Analytics is free with any Google AdWords account. 
7. Internet Retailer - Cost: Free. If you don’t already subscribe to this publication, you can get 12 free issues and/or daily email newsletters, just by signing up on their website (also free). Stay up to speed on upcoming industry events, and get the latest ecommerce news at your fingertips or email inbox. 
8. Business cards - Cost: Free. You likely won’t need this item until you have #2. You can get cards printed for free at Vistaprint.com. Handy for cocktail conversations at conventions and industry events. Business cards really complete you as a professional; showing that you have an actual address, phone and email give validity to you and your organization. Also consider having different cards made for all the different specialties and ‘hats’ you wear. 
9. Large supply of heavily caffeinated beverages - Cost: Free. Thank you PlumberSurplus.com for providing this.  I don’t know how we all would have gotten this far without Folgers, Diet Coke and Mountain Dew. When your boss’ instant messaging moniker is “I coffee coffee” and there’s a coffee pot and stocked refrigerator in every building, you know you’re at an online company. 
10. USB missile launcher - Cost: Free (thanks to my significant other). Used to thwart off any belligerent coworkers in the next cubicle (or across the coffee shop if you are utilizing #1). 

I recently read a post that discussed the refuse-like quality of Commission Junction from a publisher’s side. I haven’t been on CJ’s network that long but I have nothing but great things to say about my experiences thus far as a top merchant. I’ve put together 7 reasons why I think CJ’s affiliate network is a great choice for larger volume merchants.

1. Increased Profitable Sales - Since adding the CJ network to our affiliate program, we have grown affiliate sales over 140%. I mention the profitability in this point because more sales are great, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that more sales at a less profitable level is not as good. We were able to successfully add CJ to our repertoire of marketing methods and it has been proven successful.

2. Program Performance visibility - publishers (the folks who sign up for our affiliate program), are able to quickly and easily see the merchant’s offers and compare them side by side to determine which program to apply for. On the merchant side, we are able to see how well our program stacks up to the competition. When we first developed an affiliate program via another affiliate newtork, we had a hard time finding out where we were positioned relative to a.) Other merchants in our category, and b.) Other merchants on the network.  CJ’s functionality gives us the ability to do so.

3. Extendable Commissions - I mention this one not to sound naïve to the despicable practice of some affiliate program managers, but on a serious note. We regularly have orders that become cancelled completely, or partially cancelled. With our returns process it may take 1-2 weeks before the product refund is issued or replacement item is delivered. When we find affiliate based orders that have an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) request, we extend the commissions in order to ensure no changes are made to the order total once the RMA is completed. This helps us protect ourselves from affiliate driven orders that might be cancelled beyond the default 30 day period.

4. Automation of Approvals - CJ has made automated publisher approvals easy to configure, which saves the merchant a significant amount of time. In our program, as with any other affiliate program, a good deal of our time is spent processing applications. Through the use of some simple automation rules, based on publisher category, publisher location, and performance criteria I can approve or deny publishers in my sleep. If there are publishers who solicit certain types of offers, or who don’t meet your performance minimums, they are automatically denied from our program. We try to avoid allowing publishers who have certain types of websites or who promote particular genres of offers to avoid unfavorable affiliate activity.

5. See number 1

6. Personable Publishers - I have not met an affiliate publisher in our program who is not friendly and personable. I treat them with respect and take into consideration how actions to our program can directly or indirectly affect our publishers. Any affiliate who I’ve contacted for a discerning reason has been more than willing to correct the problems and have offered many apologies. I believe that simply bringing up the issue to the publisher in a non-confrontational way leads them to realize you are willing to let them stay versus a hasty expulsion from the program similar to the “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality.

7. A Surplus of Support - I have yet to encounter a situation, as a merchant, that I was not able to get a quick, detailed answer to, by any of the many questions I've had for the folks at CJ.  Ranging from questions about basic account settings to advanced program terms like tiered commission levels reset time frames, I have always received clear, concise answers. Even questions involving URL tracking and forwarding have been answered promptly and thoroughly.  Their online CJU (Commission Junction University) advertiser support and account managers are all supportive and helpful, and offer a wealth of information quickly.

So while Aaron Wall of SEOBook may think that Commission Junction is garbage, I have reason to disagree.