Basic Promotion, Search & Affiliate Marketing
“Build it and they won’t come.” This profound statement surrounding the promotion of Web sites is sadly true. You’ve created your site, set-up your payment and fulfillment options, and published it for the World to see. What next? Well, unless you have plans to promote your products, nothing will happen, especially if you have a small product set. You must now begin attracting buyers to your site. eCommerce solutions providers will generally offer merchants two sets of promotional tools.
The oldest and most common form of promotion involves search engines. The newest trend in promotion, created by both the eCommerce solution providers and search engines themselves, is the development of vast advertising networks comprised of “affiliated” merchants.
Affiliate marketing
Some ecommerce platforms provide affiliate and cross selling options. This means that once you set up your store, you can immediately offer to pay commissions for traffic to your site. This includes actual purchases or even if someone just viewed your ad. Driving traffic to your store is not the topic of this site, but it is obviously a key component to your success.
There are two important points to be aware of:
- Promotion is no longer a hobby – it is a profession and an art. If you don’t know what you are doing, you will pay a high price and likely lose a lot of money.
- Watch your affiliate traffic for fraud. This is an unfortunate part of affiliate marketing, especially for traffic coming from outside the US. Losses can be staggering, and you foot the bill. The eCommerce providers make money on volume – good or fraudulent – so it’s up to you to monitor this troublesome issue.
Affiliate Networks
A growing number of eCommerce solutions offer one or more Affiliate Networks. According to Wikipedia, “
Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.” More simply, a merchant joins a program that allows other sites to drive traffic to his own. The mechanism that drives customers can be a display or banner add, or simply a link. When a potential customer follows a link to your site and purchases a product, then the network (and referring affiliate) receives a fee.
What really defines this system as a network is that these referral relationships are reciprocal. In addition to placing ads in networks to drive traffic, you yourself may actually host ads from the networks and receive compensation. One of the largest affiliate networks is AdWords/AdSense program by Google.
- With AdWords, merchants can choose to advertise on affiliated sites that sell items or provide content related to their products. So, in addition to appearing on the search portal itself, the merchant’s ads will appear on affiliated Web sites based on the criteria specified by the merchant.
- AdSense is the “alter ego” of Google’s AdWords paid search program. With AdSense, merchants can choose to host ads from the AdWords network on their site, and they will receive compensation for any business they drive to the advertiser. Many eCommerce solutions will allow their merchants to host ads from such networks as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Internalized Affiliate Networks
While many eCommerce providers will allow you to host ads from the major search engines, they also operate their own internal platforms. Reg.Net, regNow.com, Click Bank and Amazon, for example, all operate their own affiliate platforms. Because these vendors tend to cater to complimentary sectors (e.g., digital goods), they exhibit high levels of “cross-pollination” and therefore tend to be more effective at driving sales than the search engines. If you build your store with Amazon you get both direct traffic and cross selling options. Digital River offers a good affiliate network through
oneNetworkDirect. As a result, merchants should be sure to consider these networks when selecting payment or eCommerce solutions.
Search Engines
Natural Search and Search Engine Optimizations (SEO)
Search engines like
Google,
Yahoo, and
Bing scour the Web with “robots” and “spiders,” indexing vast amounts of Web content. Although the engines rarely publicize their algorithms, most index sites based on relevant content. That relevant content is often an interpretation by the search engine from the words (“keywords”), headings, and other elements on your Web pages. Most eCommerce solutions offer tutorials and optimization tools to help you optimize your site such that perspective buyers will find your store when they query a search engine. Some services will even submit your site to the search engines automatically.
Paid Search
Paid search is a service offered by virtually all search engines. The most popular paid search program is
AdWords
, operated by Google. Unlike natural search, paid search operates exclusively on keywords or groups of keywords (phrases). Merchants bid against other merchants for relevant keywords which trigger sponsored ads when potential customers search for these words or phrases on the search portal. Sponsored ads appear adjacent to the natural search results. The Ad’s position is determined by the amount of the bid. Generally speaking, paid search is available only through the search engine companies. This model, however, is key to understanding a very important promotion tool known as the Affiliate Network.