Archive for May, 2006
Where Is This Traffic Coming From?
Posted by Anik Singal in Affiliate Marketing, Traffic Thursday, 18 May 2006 10:26 No Comments
About 2 months ago I launched a site more for personal reasons – in all honesty, there are not even any really good affiliate programs out there for this niche (a good opportunity for me to CREATE products).
But, my goal was to really have a good place to come to for up-to-date information and to eventually create a thriving community for the members.
For some odd reason, even after 2 months, and seeing Googlebot visit my site about 200+ times a month, they have only indexed ONE page whereas MSN has indexed over 300 (Yahoo over 50) – Yes, I have e-mailed Google to find out why.
Anyways, the site still gets traffic. I check my logs and am amazed at how a lot of these people are just coming DIRECTLY to my site. Meaning no search engines. Now, lets be honest, on my best day so far, I have had about 100 visitors – nothing to RAVE about…
Search engines are NOT the only way!
Email vs RSS? No, Email and RSS
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Marketing, E-mail Marketing, Web 2.0 Marketing Wednesday, 17 May 2006 16:52 1 Comment
Regular readers of the Affiliate Classroom blog may have caught on by now that I’m fond of creating my own kind of mashup. Take two or more news stories with different foci and put them together to make a post that (one hopes) could make an affiliate marketer some money. Today is no exception.
According to the recent eROI study, open and click rates rebounded nicely in Q106. While statements like this:
“Good subject lines and good creative get good results, bad creative and bad subject lines perform poorly.”
could probably go without saying, this:
“Q1 2006 gave us a huge uptake in weekend activity as well a massive upswing in open and click rates with increases of 40% and 60%, respectively.”
is bound to be good news for email marketers. (That’s all of you, right? Remember, here at Affiliate Classroom we recommend using a variety of tools.)
So, where’s the other component of the “mashup”? Right here:
The Pheed Read Spring 2006 study has some new figures on RSS ad CTRs. The figures are not so exciting as eROI’s unfortunately.
Pheedo reports the average CTR of “standalone” RSS ads is only 2.76 percent. Even lower were “inline” RSS ads (ads within an individual feed post): 0.45 percent CTR.
Well, RSS is still building slowly and feeding a more specialized audience so maybe that shouldn’t be too depressing. The upside is, RSS feeds � after being set up � take much less care and, er, feeding. (Once again, hit them from all angles.)
On the positive side, 63% of big companies plan to syndicate content via RSS by the end of 2006, according to JupiterResearch. If that comes true, it would be a huge increase. Currently only 29% do. (But that’s already quite a few.)
Where large companies spend, markets often follow.
And for the last part of our mashup… What kinds of ads should you be feeding them?
Well, according to a new AOL-AP poll 40% of Americans play computer games, 45% of those online. Game sites reach 50% of Internet eyeballs (that’s half the people, not the one-eyed), or almost 77 million consumers, according to comScore data.
Now, if you could only display in-game ads when someone opens an email…
Mashups, Music For Your Eyes
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing, Web 2.0 Marketing Tuesday, 16 May 2006 17:32 No Comments
Google’s recent push into Web 2.0 land is bound to reverberate around the Internet. But in this case, they were far from pioneers. One of the earliest examples were mashups, rapidly gaining in popularity.
Mashup is an ugly word for a beautiful thing. “A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience,” according to a wikipedia article. (It originally referred to songs played simultaneously.)
Our intrepid Affiliate Classroom columnist, Kati, is going to explain all about them in our upcoming issue. So, while avoiding stealing her musical thunder, here’s a taste of delights to come…
One of the oldest applications of the idea, was to overlay online maps and provide them with supplemental information. (Cartographers are endlessly clever people, and have been for a thousand years.) To see a modern incarnation, use Local Search and Google Maps and watch what pops up.
Here is Stacy Reed’s Top 10 mashup applications, from a Tucows review. On the list you’ll find several useful tools, if you want to never leave your browser.
Dion Hinchcliffe � who frequently writes on Web 2.0 � has a number of links to tutorials, here.
But that’s all just to whet your appetite. Get the full scoop from “there’s-no-better-source” Kati in our upcoming issue of Affiliate Classroom magazine.
Feed the (Information) Hungry
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing, Design Monday, 15 May 2006 20:54 1 Comment
According to a study by WebSideStory, repeat visitors are up to eight times more likely to make a purchase from a site than new visitors.
Some may see that glass as far less than half-empty, since it entails a 1.55% conversion rate for brand new visitors. Not very good odds. But to these rose-colored glasses it just looks like normal life.
Do you typically trust strangers with your money? Do you purchase from the first electronics or CD vendor you chance across? Not in these research-savvy, Google search-enabled, Amazon-laden times. You get information first. You compare prices, reliability, and so on.
And when you satisfy those information-hungry customers, they come back for more. And, in these social-networking busy times, they tell their friends. Lots of them. A lot of those friends are now on MySpace, MSN Groups, and elsewhere. 45% of active web users, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, and more all the time.
Those social networking sites enjoy very high retention and repeat visits. People are trading experiences there, sure. But they’re also experiencing trade. They tell their friends about the cool new laser printer they just bought for a great price. They tell them where they got it and how happy they were with the merchant.
That results in more new business and more repeat business. Up to 23% conversion rates, in come cases. Personally, I like those odds.
Jewelry Online, Green From Red and White
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing, Best Business Practices, Niches Saturday, 13 May 2006 16:02 1 Comment
According to eMarketer, jewelry sales online are now at the $2.1 billion mark, constituting 3.5% of the $59.4 billion total. With that figure projected to rise to 7% by 2010, there couldn’t be a better time to start an affiliate business to cash in on this trend.
Luxury items have topped Internet ROI lists for quite a while now. Despite security concerns and the need to see and touch the items, consumers are turning in ever greater numbers to purchases online.
There may be several reasons for this; we can only speculate. Security has either improved or the perception has changed. Better information about the product may be available now, or it may simply be that the considerably better prices to be found online may finally have proved irresistible.
One recent study suggests that the overall increase in shopping online is in large part the result of the greatly enhanced ability to do comparison shopping among a wide variety of vendors.
Price comparison sites can take a large share of the credit for this. Not only do they allow shoppers to find the cheapest price, but they provide reviews from a wide array of shoppers. Since those reviews cover both the item itself and the vendors, those sites in essence constitute a kind of social network. In this case, they didn’t wait for the arrival of Web 2.0, obviously since they’ve been around for 10 years.
Amazon and Bizrate are only two of the most obvious examples, but with new relatively easy datafeeds capability, it’s not too much work to make a simplified version yourself.
If you’re going to go to the effort, targeting Canadian consumers might be a good place to start. With higher broadband penetration and a shopping research-prone Internet population, Canada is primed for contributing increased sales to affiliates.
The difficulty has traditionally lain in Canadians’ security and privacy concerns about shopping online. The marketer who develops a way to reassure them about the safety of online shopping will be near the head of the line for raking in those Canadian dollars.
