Product feeds – the good, the bad and the ugly
For those that have been following our progress will notice that we have a lot of sites that feature product feeds from the merchants through the affiliate networks. Getting to grips with some of these product feeds has been hard work. Some merchants products feeds are quite frankly almost unusable. That is the categories, the product descriptions, products being listed more than once are but a few of the pitfalls requiring very carefully crafted SQL statements to manipulate and pull out only those products which are relevant.
So I would like to highlight a merchant who has got their product feed spot on and is the best product feed I have worked with in my long (ok fairly short) affiliate career so far. My award for the best product feed so far goes to Jokers Masquerade who we use for our womens fancy dress site. They have their product feed setup perfectly. The merchant categories are superbly done enabling us to use fairly simple SQL select statements to pull the right information out of our database. The descriptions are great so hats off to them. We look forward to continuing to work with them and add a great range of products to our fancy dress site.
Jokers Masquerade are available through AffiliateWindow.
Exploring PPC and PPL
Recently we have been looking at the use of PPC (Pay Per Click) and (PPL) Pay per Lead usage. Pay Per Click is a web based advertising scheme used on search engines and content websites where an advertiser will pay when a visitor to a search engine or content website clicks on the advertiser’s advert and redirects to their company page. Pay Per Lead is where the advertiser will pay per lead that is generated from a click to their website. This lead might be signing up for a newsletter or the person registering their email address for a brochure or documentation.
We have signed up to a couple of agencies and are exloring their use for the affiliate and the return that can be gained. It will be interesting to see the results over time.
Earn money online from Amazon Affiliate Program
The Amazon Affiliate Program, also known as their Associate Program is an affiliate marketing program that rewards bloggers or publishers websites up to 10% for click throughs that result in a purchase.
The program is very simple to use and offers links, banners, product images, widgets and even your own Astore.
Amazon is a trusted brand and I suspect almost every household will purchase or will have already purchased something from Amazon at somepoint in their lifetime.
Amazon is so successfull and provides very competitive prices for almost any product you can think of. This is a major benefit of using Amazon’s Affiliate Program.
Because Amazon is a trusted brand, their reputation helps promote the products on your site.
Amazon runs its own program rather than through a affiliate network. Amazon will handle all customer service, delivery and tracking of sales generated via a cookie, however I think the cookie only last 24hours.
On the plus side, if you refer someone to Amazon and they purchase something else un-related, then you may earn commission for referring that customer. It’s not uncommon for people to browse and buy other products from Amazon.
There is 2 separate commission programs to choose from. The first being Classic free structure, 4% commission of all qualifying products sold from referrals
The second being Performance free structure, earn from 5 – 10% depending on how many units you sell but has some limits.
The choice of which program will depend on the product you are intended to promote. For example a book that only costs £10-15 at 5% commission is not going to mount up to much so the second program may work best. Now if you choose to promote a larger item, then your commission would be higher and you would probably want to consider the first program because you may not sell as many units and also the limits on your referral fee might not be as good. My tip would be to take some time to figure out how many units you expect to sell and the average commission you expect to get from those referrals.
Check back here or subscribe to our rss feed as we track our progress on using Amazon Associate Program.
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