Presto Bloggo

So there has been a lot of silence from us these days (and with good reason). Most of our resources have been aimed at PopShops our new affiliate tool which will let you create super showcases from millions of products across networks and merchants.

It will still have the friendly Presto look and feel, but will have hundreds of merchant data feeds powering it. Right now PopShops Free is up and running. PopShops Free is a scaled down version of PopShops and (as the name implies) is absolutely free to use. You keep 100% of your commissions.

Technorati Tags: PrestoGifto, affiliate

Monetizing your blog is more than sticking a few affiliate ads or a snippet of AdSense into your header or sidebar. Those of us who have wasted our time putting Amazon’s dynamic ads into our sidebars or a Commission Junction banner ad into our header and never received a single click already know this. We think to ourselves, maybe it’s just my site…maybe I don’t have enough traffic. Maybe the type of people who visit my site are the “wrong” type of people.

Most people won’t be able to retire on the earnings they receive with AdSense, but, unlike affiliate banner ads, at least they get something for the 30 seconds of effort if the content is right. But AdSense is not about augmenting sites, it’s about arbitraging traffic. You get a tiny bit of compensation for this, but for some types of sites, it’s not worth $.07 to send a user off your site.

ProductWiki just did an analysis of their PPC vs Shopping.com, and their affiliate earnings, and Shopping.com outperformed AdSense by a factor of 4.6! Does that mean we should all go parse the Shopping.com XML feed and stick it into our blogs and websites? No, but we should take a look at some of the key points that ProductWiki is making.

• The stuff you want to sell should be RELEVANT to your users
• The STYLE of your offerings should integrate seamlessly into your site
• Always remember the “IGNORE FACTOR“

What ProductWiki describes as the “ignore factor” is similar to what world-renowned usability expert Jakob Nielsen found in the results of a landmark eyetracking study he participated in recently. The Nielsen research showed that people avoid looking at ads…or more importantly, items they perceive as ads.

People ignore ads that:

• look different than the rest of the site
• are overpolished
• are animated
• appear unnecessary
• look like…well…ads

However, people do look at ads that:

• display items a user many want to buy
• are related to the page content
• match the style of the site they’re on

We as affiliates, need to integrate usability and product design best practices into our merchandising strategies. We need to engage our users by picking products of interest, adding useful descriptions to our products and making sure everything is seamlessly integrated into our sites. We need to remember that it’s about adding content to our websites and blogs, not about sending our valuable users away. Then we’ll have the edge.

Technorati Tags: AdSense, Commission Junction, ProductWiki, Jakob Nielsen, PrestoGifto, usability

If you come from a print or software background, you’re probably used to the idea of “finishing” something before putting it out there for the world to see.

Online e-commerce is different.

If you think of your domain as an investment in the Google stock market, then you know to get it out there immediately, as soon as you can. Savvy webmasters let the internet be their sandboxes to play and grow creative ideas and content. Google loves change, so a work-in-progress is seen as a good thing.

And, like SEO, understanding your customers also takes a sandbox. If you want to take advantage of this coming holiday season (and believe me, you should), you need to know what types of products your customers are finding appealing, where on your site the shops convert the best and what your voice, look and feel should be. You learn this through trial and error.
So…get a shop on your site…now. You can fix it later.
After you paste the code on your site, start watching your traffic stats. You can install free php stats scripts on your server (I use phpmyvisites) that will tell you who is coming to visit, how they were referred to your site and what pages they looked at. Just by looking at your PrestoGifto “Manage shops” control panel, you can tell how many clicks your products are getting and how many page views. Then, adjust your products and your shop locations. Put 2, 3, 5 or 10 shops in different places and see what your conversion numbers are. You can always deactivate the shop if it’s not working for you and you don’t want it to be seen anymore.

Take some time and talk to your customers. Ask them what they think of your site and the products you are showcasing. Incorporate their feedback into your changes.

Test out your assumptions, be nimble, address feedback and your shop will be in shape by October.

As an affiliate you are really an advertiser and your job is to communicate with your users so they’ll be inclined to purchase products. Throw a bunch of random links, banners or products up and your users will leave. Engage in a dialog and you’ll capture their interest.

Competition is fierce and only those with an edge will end up making money. It’s easy to launch a website, join an affiliate program and set up an affilate storefront. To be successful you have to be a good business person, have a unique website and connect with your users so they’ll keep coming back. These merchandising tips will help set your affiliate shop apart from the rest.

Pick great, niche products and make them personable

• Pick relevant, contextual, niche products that people will identify with.
• Don’t just feed in products that may not belong on your site.
• Write succinct, catchy copy describing the merchandise
• For a few products, talk or blog about why you love the items. Put a picture of your toddler wearing a t-shirt you sell, for instance.
• Call out items that are best sellers. Describe why.
• Ask your users for feedback and post it.
• Pick products that support a pet niche cause.

Keep your shop interesting

• Rotate your products seasonally.
• Think about your competition and try to stand out.
• Sell things from all price ranges, including inexpensive “impulse buys”

Know and communicate with your users

• Inform users of sales and promotions.
• Think about your user demographic and pick products accordingly.
• Research your niche. It will be obvious to your users.
• Make it easy on your users. Link directly to the product details page.

Be a better business person

• Understand the basics of SEO.
• Start thinking about the holiday season in July.
• Have a blog, a forum, a site and a shop.
• Provide “forward this page” links.
• Don’t hide your shops behind a single link that nobody can see. Have an eye-catching, graphical link to your shop on high traffic pages.
• Distribute your links in newsletters, signatures and blogs.
• Think about your competition and try to stand out.
• Know how much traffic your shop pages get, what the click-thru is and what the conversion rate is. Adjust things and see if it changes.

One of the most basic mistakes people use when selling affiliate merchandise on their site is not taking visibility into account when placing their shop. The most basic rule is that if your affiliate shop can’t be seen, you won’t get the clicks you need. And if you don’t get the clicks you need, you won’t get any sales.

Think about it this way. If an average click-thru rate for your type of site with the affiliate merchandise you’ve chosen is 2%, that means that for every 100 visitors, you have two clicking a product. Then, there’s conversion. It might be, again, 2%. So you would be getting 2 sales for every 100 clicks (your mileage will certainly vary).

What that means is that, no matter what affiliate program that you’re participating in, you need to make sure there is traffic coming to your� affiliate shop, viewing your banners, or whatever.

So, the first thing to ask yourself is, how are my visitors getting to my shop? If the answer is, “A text link somewhere on the homepage” then, unless you’re a really busy site, that might not be enough.

Some ways to enhance your visibility are:

• Put a cool graphic on your homepage promoting (and linking to) your shop
• Put a featured product on your homepage and talk about why you like it (I’ll describe how to do that easily)
• Put a small shop right on your homepage (make sure you’ve got fun things to say about the product so it doesn’t look out of place
• Talk about how the shop supports your site
• Talk about your shop in every e-mail you send to your users
• Promote it. Promote it. Promote it!

When I first discovered CafePress, they had no affiliate program. I had one of their shirts on one of my sites (and a link to them) just because I loved the product and it was so perfect for my niche. I really didn’t even know what CafePress was.

I was already involved in Commission Junction, Link Share, Amazon and other programs, but wasn’t making much with the 5% - 10% commissions they paid out. Besides, some of those products just weren’t great. It was a ton of work sifting out the junk, copying and pasting links and keeping the merchandise fresh (I certainly wasn’t going to put stock banners on my site). But it was all there was if I was to participate in the affiliate game.

So, CafePress announces their new affiliate program that was going to pay 20% commissions and, well, hallelujah! It was sort of like being involved with Amazon in the old days…I saw the highly contextual merchandise, the big commissions and the simple link structure and was all over that program right away.

It’s almost embarrassing� to talk about now, but when I started selling CafePress affiliate products on my site, I went through a long, tedious process…something along the lines of this:

1. Search on CafePress (using my keyword/tag)
2. Find a product I liked
3. Navigate to the product details page
4. Copy the IMG URL
5. Paste into my html
6. Size it
7. Copy the destination URL
8. Paste it into my html
9. Add my affiliate ID
10. Add a unique PID
11. Plus, about 20 more steps…phew…

I would do a similar amount of work with my all the affiliate programs I was involved with, and on top of that there was the formatting and the CSS work it took to create a cool looking page. The whole process was labor intensive, to say the least, and painful to be quite honest.

BUT, my affiliate gift shop really picked up in October and by November sales were up 7x by December. I started moving away from the other affiliate merchandise in favor of the CafePress merchandise because it moved better and the commissions were DOUBLE what the others paid. After the Christmas season was over, my head was spinning. Wow. It was so much work copying and pasting links but the end result was fun, it enhanced my site and it made good money.

So why isn’t everyone selling CafePress affiliate merchandise right now? Mostly that’s because the tools aren’t there (yet) to help us out. So I did what any red-blooded, ex-corporate product designer, stay-at-home mother of a 1-year old would do in this situation. I went my senior VP of HR (Mr. Craig Slist) to find a developer and created a Modest Little Tool in PHP so that I could have a proper control panel to do my merchandising. I wouldn’t have to touch the HTML EVER AGAIN, and I wouldn’t make typos when pasting my affiliate PID into the code.

I loved my MLT so much (and those I showed it to loved it as well) that I took it into a usability test to show perfect strangers. There were things to work on, yes, but the overwhelming result was positive. So I decided to move forward and try and create a scalable version of the MLT. So I’ve thrown out the PHP version of my MLT, hired Dan to create an awesome Ruby on Rails version and we’re going to be releasing to the wild (in beta) this July. So now, next to AdSense, this is the easiest thing a webmaster or blogger can do to add an instant revenue source (and value) to their site with just a couple lines of code. Only this is different than AdSense because users stay on your site while browsing products, commissions are great, the products are more contextual and affiliates have much greater control over the end result.

In a nutshell, the way it works is this. You get your affilate PID from CafePress and enter it into PrestoGifto. Then you use PrestoGifto to search for and arrange CafePress products that you want to sell on your site. You use our tool to add titles, descriptions, customize the look and feel, size, etc, add tracking TIDs, etc. Then you copy and paste a couple lines of code into your site and hit refresh on your site. Your gift shop is live and you can change anything about it without ever touching that code again. You can create as many shops as you want and you can also paste code into as many sites as you want.

The site is funded with the “round robin” method. 4 out of 5 clicks have the affiliate’s PID. 1 out of every 5 clicks has our PID. This is a difficult model to explain but the thing I like about it is that we never have to charge anything, never need a credit card or any personal information for people to use this tool and the affiliates keep 100% of all commissions associated with their PID. CafePress pays the affiliates directly.

So, that’s the back story of PrestoGifto. Stay tuned for more about the MLT.