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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.

Thank you to the alpha testers who have helped us over the past few months. Coming up next is our beta release which will include our “maiden voyage” feature set. If you want to be notified when our beta is up and ready to be explored, sign up at PrestoGifto.

CafePress has two options. One is the premium shop that allows you to brand your CafePress storefront and create as many products as you want. That’s $6 or so bucks a month. The other is the “basic” shop. This is a simple HTML storefront that is branded CafePress (well, you can upload your logo…) and they limit the products that you can sell to one of each. That means that you can only have one mug, one bumper sticker, one ornament, etc.

If you’re a webmaster or blogger and aren’t interested in becoming a CafePress power user with thousands of products in your shop, then a basic shop is a great, free solution. This is especially true for those who have content-rich sites and some traffic that could potentially contribute some non-advertising revenue.

Let’s say you have a WordPress blog that’s gaining momentum and that you’re starting to acquire a fan base. Let’s also say that you have a basic CafePress shop that you opened with a couple designs and you’re wondering if you should expand to a premium shop so that you can sell more stuff.

A good option is to import the products you already have (don’t worry, that’s super easy to do!) into PrestoGifto and then find affiliate merchandise to round out your store. Chances are if you’ve got a message, then someone else on Cafepress has the same message or cause and there’s great stuff that your users would find appealing. The benefits?

• Making money selling other people’s stuff
• Not having to design anything
• Not having to upload anything
• Selling outside the stiff competition of the CafePress marketplace
• Offering a diverse selection of items
• Integrating your store right into your blog or site’s UI
• Keeping your users on your blog or site while they browse

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!

Sign up at PrestoGifto to become one of the few people using a pre-release version of PrestoGifto. All we ask is that you send us an occasional� e-mail with feedback. Oh, and call your mother.

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.

There are lots of different types of shops, sidebars, ad, and more that you can create with PrestoGifto. The most basic thing you can do is put a full, robust gift shop in your site. Just pick a spot on your site and embed your code.

There’s really only three steps.
Step 1: Create your shop
Step 2: Paste the code snippet into your site where you want the shop to appear
Step 3: Hit F5 on your site and, ta-da!

Here’s an example from allthingspug.com. This site, dedicated to Pug information, articles and photos, enhanced a relatively empty page with funny Pug stuff.