Affiliate sites - to blog or not to blog?
I started a new affiliate site
I recently launched a new affiliate site where I write product reviews on products that I actually use that I think other people might benefit from. If you’ve searched for obscure products much on the internet you have inevitably run into several of them - I run a Google Adsense campaign on the sidebar and I have a picture of each product in the review that links to Amazon with my affiliate ID encoded so I get a percentage of each sale that I refer - standard affiliate model. This is a good model because, depending on the quality of your content, you are supplying the reader with information that they are actively searching for - in exchange you are getting some money out of advertising their products. There are some companies based solely on this model - check out Deal News - they are a multi-million dollar company based on this concept.
Blogging is a great way to do it
What I have learned from the experience is that probably the best way to start a site is to start it as a blog. Originally I set the site up as a blog because I love how easy it is to use and how quickly the site is reindexed by the engines. I have noticed that wheras a normal site takes about two or three weeks to be indexed by the engines, every blog I have started has been indexed within a couple of days (in one case within hours). It doesn’t stop there, though - the sites are all reindexed every 24 hours like clockwork - anybody who has waited for a crawl to get a new product page indexed knows how great it is to find out that your content is constantly being updated in the google (or any other search engine) index. Also, if you use Wordpress, check out wp-amazon - it is a plugin that makes adding images to your site a breeze - you can also set it up to automatically tag the image link with your affiliate ID.
I ran into some problems with the blog format
Originally my blog’s home page was being indexed every morning. This was cool, but I was adding a lot of content (which is crucial to any site), so the information that google had stored for my homepage and what was actually there was different (note: on my blog I show a maximum of 10 posts to make it manageable for the reader).
I noticed that a lot of people were searching for products and I was ranking pretty well, but when they would click on the link in Google my homepage didn’t have the information they were looking for (they would have to look in the archives). I doubt that anybody is going to spend a significant amount of time searching for that certain post and the data supported this (I had a very high abandon rate).
So I changed the format
I threw together a quick and dirty site that did everything I wanted it to do. It is still easy to add postings, but now it is more like a traditional page and I am even using mod_rewrite so the page looks static to the search engines (note: most engines can handle dynamic sites now, but you are still better off moving to a more SEO friendly format - even though Google will index dynamic pages I think that they penalize for them).
I’m still being indexed regularly
Well, my site is still being reindexed by Google every morning so I’m happy. I guess the hardest thing about getting indexed is the first crawl and by using the blog format you can ensure a pretty quick crawl. It is important to have a few people add you to their blogrolls or get some links from a site that is being crawled (otherwise the engine won’t know you’re there), but after getting that crawl you should be able to change the format without losing your importance in the engine’s eyes - I could be wrong about this, but so far it appears that I’m right. I’ll keep you updated.
A blog may still be the best format
That being said, if you don’t have a full weekend and some decent php programming skills to put your own site together, you may still be better off sticking with the blog. This is especially useful if you don’t plan on adding a ton of products every day - Google will index your individual pages (posts, category pages, etc.) and so eventually the engines won’t just find your posts on your homepage but on your permanent URL’s.
The Small Retailer Catch-22 - finding suppliers
One of the hardest things to do as a small retailer is finding suppliers who are willing to work with you. Most suppliers will work with you (or agree to sell to you through a distributor), but until you do a significant volume in annual sales your prices may be worse than some of your larger competitors are offering at retail. This is a serious problem and it puts a small business in a catch-22 - do you grow at the expense of profits (through equity funding or a modest credit line) with the idea that you can scale down costs when you have some purchasing power in the hopes that you will then be profitable? This seems like a large gamble.
My suggestion is to shop around - the vast majority of manufacturers won’t work directly with you, but you will find a few here and there that will. You can be profitable as you grow with these relationships and as you become a bigger player in your industry, you will have purchasing power to get decent pricing from other suppliers. The common thing with every large internet retailer is that they started out as small companies that hit a point (sometimes referred to as the “critical mass”) where people finally knew who they were and had confidence in giving them money. The growth during this critical mass resembles the upswing in a J-curve. You are sure to face a lot of growing pains when you hit this point, but to anybody who has every struggled for survival, growing pains sure do feel great.
The Consumer Grudge and Why I Hate Wal-Mart
Four years ago I needed money
When I was in college, I had a series of jobs that just didn’t work out. I either didn’t feel like I was getting good real-world experience or I wasn’t making enough money. Finally, I came to the point where I decided to just do something different. I contacted a company that sold insurance and thought I would try my hand at that. It was a relationship marketing opportunity where you received leads from the company, then visited people in their homes and attempted to get them to sign a policy.
Making money sounded good and I was excited for a sales opportunity that didn’t require me to generate my own leads. As anyone who has done sales knows generating leads is the hardest part of the sales process for an amateur.
“Meet me at Wal-Mart”
So one of their “experienced salesmen” met me at Wal-Mart and I left my car in their parking lot while we ran to the appointment. When I got to the Wal-Mart I still had about half an hour so I ran in and bought some things that I needed - the total bill was about $20.
Side note: An “experienced salesman” in Utah County is someone who hasn’t realized yet that the stories of riches they heard in the interview are fiction. Typically you can take whatever they tell you they make and drop a digit to figure out their true salary. In this case the salesman claimed to be making over $100K per year, but was driving a 15-year-old Honda because “his wife had the Lexus” - thinking that he was joking I told him that my Bentley was in the shop. Apparently he wasn’t joking.
I came back to a boot on my car
When we got back to Wal-Mart I had a boot on my car. I figured that it was just a mistake, so I called the towing company to let them know they had made a mistake. The guy came and told me it would cost $50 to get the boot removed. I told him I had actually purchased merchandise from Wal-Mart - I admitted that I had left my car there for about 45 minutes, but I was a customer and not somebody just taking advantage of their parking lot. Note that the University Parkway Wal-Mart in Orem has a huge parking lot with plenty of empty spots.
Wal-Mart considered not charging me $50 to shop there
He called a manager from Wal-Mart and had me go in the store to speak with the manager. I showed the manager my receipt and he didn’t think that I would need an hour and a half to buy the stuff I had bought - I admitted that I had left for 45 minutes. He told me that parking was for customers only and when I left the property I was no longer a Wal-Mart customer.
They were right about one thing
I haven’t been a Wal-Mart customer (except when I absolutely had to go there) since that day. I have bought things from time to time when I couldn’t find something anywhere else or it was the only store I was near, but it has always been grudgingly and I always recognize they are the enemy - the only exception are the friendly senior citizen greeters - everybody else works for the devil himself.
The experience started to fade away in my mind and I always tell people that I don’t like to go there because it’s crowded and everything they sell is a poor quality - while this is true, the main reason I don’t shop at Wal-Mart is because they train their employees to handle problems by the numbers - they don’t care about people.
Do business the right way
Sam Walton would have a heart attack if he saw the way his company was being run today - Sam Walton cared about selling quality products at prices that everybody could afford. Executives today are driven by the dream to become the first $1 trillion dollar company - it is business by the numbers, not business for the people.
Differentiate yourself and build a true brand by focusing on the people you serve - this is one thing that I think we do very well at Sewell. Most of our competitors charge a fee for returning or exchanging products and don’t offer technical assistance. We have always offered full refunds for returns and tech support by a knowledgable staff. It is a seemingly small difference, but when our customers need another computer product, we are always the first place they check. That kind of loyalty is priceless.
The .xxx domain debate
ICANN approved the .xxx top-level domain extension in June expecting that webmasters could be able to register domains in the “red-light” district of the internet by the end of 2005, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. The Bush administration, among other political groups, has voiced its concern over the use of the new domain. Also, for very different reasons, the ACLU is questioning the implementation of the .xxx domain because some non-pornographic sites with sexual content could be forced to move to the new domain - this is the first time I can remember seeing the Bush administration and the ACLU on the same side of the fence notwithstanding their different perspectives on the issue.
Personally I think the .xxx TLD is a good idea. I work on the internet for a living and have had several experiences where I came across content I didn’t want to see - fortunately we have a very good filter so this isn’t usually an issue, but I’m sure there are a lot of houses in the US that don’t have intelligent filtering and so children are finding this stuff too easily. By having a .xxx extension on a site, it will be very easy to block all of the domains with the extension and hence make surfing the internet a little safer.
I understand that all webmasters are not immediately going to embrace the idea and move their porn sites to .xxx domains - in other words, this is not going to be an overnight fix to filtering porn - but I think it is a good first step to solving the problem. If it is going to cause even a small percentage of smut to be easier to identify (and hence not to visit), I think it’s worth it. If the Bush administration thinks that it’s going to be too easy for people to find porn because of the consistent use of the .xxx domain, they obviously haven’t spent any time on Google.
Yahoo pays $1B for 40% of Alibaba - are you serious?
I know that I’m not in a position to criticize Yahoo’s decision to buy a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1B but I’m going to anyway. For those who don’t know, Alibaba is a trading platform where buyers and sellers can come together, usually at the international level to import/export goods. I have been registered with Alibaba for about two years now and I have never, ever met a real person on the exchange.
Well, that’s not exactly true - I have met a few children of generals in Nigeria, a couple of people helping a rich heir get out of Nigeria and a zillion people doing business in the USA with a branch office in Nigeria that they needed goods shipped to. Maybe there are legitimate business transactions that take place on Alibaba, I just haven’t seen them - I have used the exchange to look for various new items I wanted to import with absolutely no success.
Maybe Yahoo will help Alibaba suck a little less.
Traffic Power - Stay Away!
A little over a year ago we were talking to a company based in Las Vegas known as Traffic Power (aka First Place). At that point we were considering outsourcing some SEO work, so when they cold-called us we gave them a few minutes to give us a pitch. They are a true black hat SEO company that tries to manipulate the search engine algorithms in order to get their clients higher in the search results. I asked them about the possibility that we would be blacklisted from Google (and the other SE’s) for links from their link farms - they assured me that while they did use link farms, they were “relevant” link farms like About.com, so we had nothing to worry about.
We negotiated a price for their services and we were literally a few hours away from signing up with them. Note that during the entire negotiation process they were very pushy and came off more as used car salesmen than internet professionals. They even went as far as to come back to the negotiating table saying “OK, you got me, you win” - the next time I hear those words I’m going to run the other way. But I digress…
Before signing the contract for service that they had provided, I decided to do a quick Google search on their name. I figured that because they are SEO’s, they would come up high on the SERP (search engine results page). They didn’t come up, so I did a “site:trafficpower.com” - they didn’t exist in the Google index! So I knew from what I had read that they had been blacklisted by Google… red flag, at this point the deal was off.
I did, however, find another site called Traffic Power Sucks that had actual clients complaining about their service. Apparently there is currently a class-action lawsuit where their former clients are trying to recover not only the fees that they paid Traffic Power, but the financial damage that was done when Google blacklisted them - so all of their clients have been blacklisted by Google as well.
If an SEO calls you from First Place or Traffic Power, I would just hang up the phone. They are trying to promote their website again and are actively recruiting clients. In fact, if an SEO calls you from Las Vegas I would do some serious digging to make sure that it isn’t these guys - it’s not worth risking your rankings in Google. If you are interested in white hat SEO, I would check out InfoSearch Media.
Avaya: The Update
A few weeks ago I wrote about a decision that we were struggling with at work concerning Avaya vs. Fonality for a new phone system. After weighing the costs and benefits, we ended up going with Avaya because it is a scalable solution that will serve our needs for years to come. That is not to say that the Fonality system (or Vodavi, another system we were considering) is not scalable, but I like the reputation that Avaya has and, as I mentioned earlier, the fact that every vendor compares themselves to Avaya.
We have had the system for a couple of weeks and I am very happy with it so far. We are using an auto-attendant, which is nice because it makes sure that people are getting through to the department that they want to talk to. I especially like the fact that everybody in the company has their own voicemail - it sure makes it easier for each of us to keep in touch with important people.
I think we are all getting used to the system, but it was definitely a necessary expense and I feel good about the system. I will say that on about 20% of the calls I have taken so far, the person on the other end kind of sounds robotic. However, nobody has complained about poor quality so I am guessing that it’s on our end only. This is a small price to pay for full PBX functionality from an inexpensive solution. In case you are wondering, IP Office (from Avaya) will run you about $10K-$20K for a 10-15 person setup depending on what features are important to you.
Search Engine Strategies, Day 3 & 4
Days 3 and 4 were great, although there were noticably fewer people that attended the show. No complaints here, I actually got a seat in the seminars that I attended.
In the “Landing Page Testing and Tuning” session, they talked about the “Buy” vs. “Add to Cart” button. Apparently sites that use “Add to Cart” tend to have a higher conversion rate because the commitment level is not as high as asking somebody to buy something. In other words, the shopper knows that they can remove the product from their cart at any time if they decide they don’t want it. From an internet retailers perspective, this is very helpful information.
One thing that I have always struggled with is testing different ad copy and landing pages. As far as the landing pages go, I was impressed with Site Tuners. Basically, they will help you optimize your website and test different variables on landing pages. What really sets them apart is that they don’t charge you anything up front - you agree upon a fixed percentage of the lift you see on your site as a result of their services and you pay them on the backend. For this reason they are probably pretty selective about who they are willing to work with.
I had a chance to eat lunch with Allan Dick from Vintage Tub & Bath. I learned a lot about carving out a vertical niche and really owning the category. He has done a great job with clawfoot tubs and other specialized home products. You wouldn’t believe how well such a specialized internet retailer understands search engine marketing. Any retailer who has a chance to meet him or hear him speak should definitely take advantage of it.
What really shocked me about the retailers I met at the show was the amount of time they have had an online strategy and the volume that the average retailers are moving. The average annual sales volume of the retailers I met with with somewhere between $20 and $30 million/year. This is impressive, especially considering that most of these retailers had been focusing on a predominately online strategy for less than five years. Also, the average retailer stocks about 50% of the products they are selling - drop-shipping is becoming increasingly more important, especially for high-consideration items.
Search Engine Strategies, Day 2
Blog and RSS marketing
I went to this seminar to get a feel for how other retailers are doing with blog marketing and to learn more about the application of RSS as a tool to syndicate content (other than just through the blog channel). To be honest, I was surprised at how few people are actually taking advantage of blogs for their businesses. Don’t get me wrong, most people in the room had a blog in some form or another, but very few people were actually using them to share information about their specific field or products. They are only using them as a sort of open diary. Don’t get me wrong, I think that sharing personal information in the blogosphere is appropriate, but if you are really looking for a following with a blog, I think you need to have some vertical depth.
The most important thing that I took away from this seminar is that RSS is “the killer app,” not the blog format. The blog format is an example of the application of RSS. Another thing I learned is the “Paul Revere communication model.” Apparently Paul Revere did not actually tell the whole community that the British were coming, but he warned opinion leaders which then dispersed the information to the masses. This approach is common with blogs - you will reach a few opinion leaders who will then share the information with the masses.
Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO
This was mostly just a debate between white hat and black hat SEO’s. For those who don’t know, black hat SEO’s are Search Engine Optimizers who chase search engine algorithms with the intention of finding holes that they can exploit to acheive higher results (think keyword stuffing, cloaking, doorway pages, etc.). I tend to side with the white hat SEO’s who tend to think that you can build more residual traffic with “natural SEO” - this includes things like writing rich content, appropriate titles, etc. I never knew how much friction existed between these two groups of people - it was fun to watch their debate. While I wasn’t fully convinced by the black hats, I think I have a better idea of their perspective now and I realize that they are not all opportunistic vultures as I previously thought. By the traditional definition, none of these guys were black hats - they were mostly “grey hat” SEO’s.
LinkConnector’s innovative “Naked Links”
One thing that I have gone back and forth on is whether to create a customized affiliate program or to use a third-party solution. The advantage of writing your own program is that you won’t have to pay a commission to a third party and all of the inbound links to your site will not actually pass PageRank. This is actually a pretty big issue - if Ben’s Bargains is your affiliate and you are using a third party solution, that relationship is meaningless unless they are sending qualified traffic that is resulting in conversions. If you are using a direct campaign, however, they will be passing some PageRank to you that provides a benefit even before they produce conversions. LinkConnector is offering the best of both worlds - right now they are waiving their enrollment fee and they only charge 20% of the commission that you pay to your affiliates. Their Naked Link technology allows you to add a snippet of Javascript to your page that allows the customer to link directly to you rather than through a redirect. This is hands-down the best affiliate program I have seen yet.
As a side-note I had a chance to meet Lee Odden from Top Rank on the show floor. If you are interested in SEO, Lee is the best-of-the-best. Subscribe to his blog and if you don’t like it, I’ll double your money back (since it’s free).
The Google Dance
I have to be honest, I was disappointed. I have been looking forward to seeing the Googleplex for a while now and I knew they would be doing some cool stuff. I’m not saying they didn’t do a great job, but as a married guy who doesn’t drink, it wasn’t really that fun. I was hoping that they would have more networking areas where I could have met fellow marketers, but it was more like a club with a lot of ice cream and beer. To their credit, I’m sure it was a lot of fun for single guys who drink, but I’m content with my Google t-shirt and the quick tour of the Google campus (which, by the way, is one of the coolest places I have ever seen).
Search Engine Strategies, Day 1
I’m not going to do a whole rehash of Day 1 at Search Engine Strategies (I’m sure that plenty of bloggers will be doing that), but I wanted to hit some highlights.
Google doesn’t see separate management of search and content match as a priority
I just thought this was funny - Brian Axe, a Sr. Product Manager for content match with Google, was asked directly in the Q&A why content match required a “quick and dirty workaround” to test by itself (NOTE: To test content match by itself, you have to make a duplicate campaign, drop the bid and enable content match on the new campaign - after it is enabled, disable content match of your original campaign). Brian said that “Google is not opposed to separating out content match, but they have other priorities” above this feature. Come on, Google - search and content match are your bread and butter. I would definitely think that you could make this a priority unless there’s something that you don’t want us to know…
Jeremy Zawodny shows up for the API session
OK, I’m not a technical guy, but I figured that the session on API’s would be helpful to understand for some new projects we have coming up at Sewell. So I showed up at the session and was pleasantly surprised to see Jeremy Zawodny on the panel (he was not listed in the show guide, but because he works like 15 minutes away it probably wasn’t a big deal to pop in). I’ve been reading his blog for a while now and I continue to be impressed with how forthright he is - he never unneccessarily plugs Yahoo products and I have even seen him talk about Google products that are superior to comparable Yahoo products… of course, in these cases, Yahoo is usually quick to clean up the features.
His speaking style was very similar to his blogging - direct, to the point and easy to understand. He explained Yahoo’s Advertiser Web Services and gave a pretty compelling argument for the REST interface when dealing with API’s rather than SOAP (but did mention that AWS would probably support SOAP eventually). After the session, I got a chance to meet him, which was cool. He’s a nice, smart guy - a poster child of a “search evangelist, geek and blogger” (a direct quote from his business card).
Yahoo’s Search Night Off at Great America
I’m finding that when you pay for a conference (rather than attend for free like I usually do with high tech shows), the advertisers tend to treat you a lot better. After the day’s seminars were over, they loaded everybody up into buses and took us to Paramount’s Great America. They let us in the park for free and provided a huge barbeque for the conference attendees. My wife met me there with her little brother and sister and some of their friends - it was a fun way to end a long day of meetings.