Affiliate Programs - Retailers, watch your backs
I was sent a link today about opportunistic affiliates taking advantage of internet merchants - I have to say, the information scared me. And this article is not about 2-bit Yahoo store retailers being swindled - the case study shows examples of web giants Blockbuster and Netflix being overcharged by shady affiliate traffic.
We are excited about the launch of the Sewell affiliate program, but this serves as a good reminder that we need to keep an eye on what our affiliates are doing. Within a week of launch we saw some questionable techniques (which we addressed).
My conclusion? Have a sharp affiliate manager (like Postelwait) or hire a company to manage your affiliate program who knows what they’re doing.
Framingo
I just got around to going through some pictures that I took while visiting some factories in China last October. Yes, this cup actually says “Framingo” on it with a picture of a Pink Flamingo. That’s why we hire awesome copywriters and editors for all of the products we import - any retailer involved with importing should consider doing the same.
Economics at the gas pump
via Cameron’s Effective Wage for Gas at Costco
I studied economics in college and am constantly suprised at how irrationally people value their time - people, for instance, making $50 an hour and willing to spend 15 minutes to save a buck. For an interesting perspective check out Cameron’s post.
The Internet, in my opinion, is a different animal. Some people spend hours and hours to generate an additional $1/day in ad revenue. This ad revenue, however, is usually residual and smart people build up media networks in their spare time that can generate serious income.
I have met numerous people at conferences who started websites for fun on the side while working a real job and ended up making much more online than from their employer within a couple years.
Using Google rankings to sell?
I was curious the other day about Utah custom home builders so I did a search for “utah custom home” on Google.
Note: I have absolutely no affiliation with any company in this space.
I clicked on the first result, ultimatehomesutah.com, and was surprised to see that they actually advertise on their home page:
Ranked #1 on Google for Luxury Homes in Utah
I did a search for “luxury homes in Utah” and, sure enough, they were #1. That got me thinking, though - what if they lose their ranking? I mean, that wouldn’t look good, right, claiming #1 if they didn’t have it?
Also it drives home a suspicion I have always had about people’s perception of Google - people think that a high-ranking site is more credible because Google is “voting for it.”
This is not the case - Google’s rankings are determined a mathematical formula, or algorithm, but that doesn’t really matter if people think that a high ranking denotes more authority.
A local Utah company (a sometimes competitor of our Utah SEO company) really drives home the point that rankings don’t matter. I strongly disagree with this - not only do high ranking sites drive higher levels of traffic (they claim that traffic doesn’t matter, just the conversion rate) but, from what I’ve seen, they convert better as well.
Pragma:no-cache
Yesterday I thought Google was having problems with capitalization but it was actually a problem on our end with our header returning Pragma:no-cache. Basically we weren’t allowing the engine to index our content.
The only thing that I can think that they may have done is grab the title from anchor text. Two things are still confusing me though:
1) How did they know our pricing?
2) If they are grabbing anchor text from our site (which would have included pricing) why wouldn’t capitalization work? We capitalize everything.
In conclusion, if you are working with server-side cacheing be very careful about screwing your titles/descriptions up in the SERP’s.