Boost Your Online Shop’s Sales with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a method by which a person promotes a product he/she does not own in return for a commission. This commission is usually per sale. Some are paid for delivering business leads, such as credit card or loan applications.

A popular affiliate program is Amazon’s Associates program, which has popularized the idea and has been running since 1996. Enthusiasts linked their own websites to Amazon’s site and Amazon tracked visitor referrals and paid a commission on any resulting sales.

For a business owner, affiliate marketing can give you an instant access to third party marketers who will help you promote your products through advertising, email, online links and social media networks in return for a commission. Although setting the program can be surprisingly easy, it does need good, critical thinking.

In Forrester Research’s U.S. Affiliate Marketing Forecast for 2009-2014, it estimates that the affiliate marketing industry will grow from $1.9 billion in 2009 to $4 billion by 2014. The growth will presumably be driven by better affiliate site content and increasingly transparent dialog between affiliates and marketers. – from http://www.practicalecommerce.com

Launching an affiliate network program can be done by your own proprietary program, or you can join affiliate networks such as Tradedoubler, Buy.at, Affiliate Window, Commission Junction and more.

Regardless of whether you are working on your own program or using affiliate networks, it is best to fully analyze and review all the policies and regulations of the program. This will save you costly mistakes later on.

Quick Product Promotion via “Like” and “Share” on Social Networking Sites

Today, nearly everyone is active on social networks like facebook. Other than SEO, this could prove to be a great avenue for increasing awareness for your website and the products you offer.

With over 35 million social network site users, you can create more successful business through social advertising means because these users are your potential customers, too! What are the benefits of advertising your products on these popular sites?

• It does not cost a fortune
  Setting up a profile or a fan group is easy and free. You can choose to invest a little using PPC (pay per click) structure. You only pay for each click on your advert.




• It can help you easily reach your target audience
  This can help increase the number of “Like” and “Share” for your product because your advert may be tailored to reach the right people according to gender, age, status, likes and dislikes – the people that are likely to be interested in your products.




• It allows you to grab attention
  The way you advertise is not limited as you can use photos, videos, music or text. You are free to add extra something to attract extra attention depending on how creative your advert is.
  Promote your site, create awareness, and make use of social network sites. With millions of daily visitors, you can significantly increase your chances of raking in profits through ad conversions.

Promote your site, create awareness, and make use of social network sites. With millions of daily visitors, you can significantly increase your chances of raking in profits through ad conversions.

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Social Media Strategies for Startups

WeMakeWebsites’ long term friend and social marketing guru Adele Barlow is speaking this Wednesday on social media strategy and management, specifically for startups. This class will cut through the hype to help you understand how you can realistically and effectively use social media to grow your venture. By outlining common best practices and case studies from startups like airbnb to corporate campaigns like Red Bull and Starbucks, this class will cover:

- The best tools available for management, tracking and analytics
- Understanding your cost-per-acquisition and ROI
- The importance of storytelling and putting your users first
- Evaluating average vs. excellent social presence.

It’s sure to be useful and entertaining too. More details here.

2012 Online Marketing Trend Predictions

Here are five 2012 marketing trend predictions according to Econsultancy.com.

1. Online marketing will begin to drive in-store retailing. Technology such as Google Wallet and near field communications will allow brands to track the impact of online activity on in-store sales. Google’s paid search for mobile enables brands to serve relevant ads to consumers while they are in the store vicinity, as well as providing directions to the store.

2. Online marketing will be driven by smart multichannel attribution. Many predicted that by 2011, brands would be able to have a complete, single view of their customers. Thanks to improved analytics technology such as Google Funnel, an evolution of Google Analytics, this will soon become a reality.

3. Google may entirely dominate the search market. The current search market share of Google is 90% plus it owns 98% of the mobile search market globally. With over 100 innovations from Google in the past year, Google continues to grow and become a dominant influence on consumers. With 90% current market share (98% for mobile), next year they could well and truly leave Bing and Yahoo! behind.

4. Brands will invest more in getting to know their customers. With the 2012 economy prediction looking gloomy, the demand for discounts is expected to increase again. Some brands will be looking for a stronger promotional strategy. Some clever brands are going beyond offering discounts by offering deeper understanding of their customers’s drive to buy in order to gain loyalty from the customer and maintain a good relationship with them.

5.Facebook won’t master social commerce. Facebook hasn’t been successful in social commerce so far, with Facebook Deals closing only four months after launch. Brands should consider Facebook as a social medium to understand and communicate with customers and to build brand reputation, not as a direct selling tool.

How To... Get the First Few Clients

This is the first in a series of How To posts that we’ll be publishing, aimed at startup web agencies. We’re not sure if it’s a bit pompous writing this as we’re only 6 months in, but it’s based on our experiences dealing with real problems that startup agencies find themselves with and so we might as well share what we’ve learnt so far.

The Number One Problem when starting any business is getting the first few clients. Your first clients are important because they provide a chance to prove you can deliver on your promises, in addition to providing a foundation for your portfolio which can be used by future prospects to gauge your capabilities. Of equal importance, they will be paying you, which is an absolute priority during those first few cash-tight months, especially if you are bootstrapping.

So how do you seed your portfolio when you’re new? As with most business advice, we can tell you what worked for us, but it might not work for everyone.

First off we tapped our personal networks and looked for people we knew that needed websites which we could build quickly and for a discount, or sometimes free. At this time, both Piers and I were both working full-time so we weren’t desperate for cash. Building the first two or three sites allowed us to prove that we weren’t a couple of clowns (at least, in a professional sense) and that we could deliver on our promises.

We also arranged a promotion with a local charity organisation that supports small to medium-sized craft businesses. We offered a discount to their members in the hope they would distribute this to their members. They did, and this brought at least three deals our way, which was great news as at this point we still had an empty portfolio (even the sites we were building for free weren’t ready yet).

The final channel for ‘seed clients’ was gumtree, which has been an unbelievable source of business for us. Believe it or not, some of our biggest clients found us on gumtree. To give you an idea, two £5 ads on gumtree have brought us perhaps £10k of business.

I think the success of our gumtree campaign is based on most Londoners’ trust of gumtree as a source of genuine offers of or requests for help. The tone of our ad was casual and just explained, with honesty, that we were a startup and needed a selection of early clients to build our portfolio with, and that we were offering a discount. Even if you’re not totally sure this route will work for your company, there’s no reason not to try it for £5. There are plenty of other classifieds-style sites that may be more appropriate for you depending on where you’re based.

Your first few clients can be a challenge to find but things will get easier once you’ve seeded your portfolio and can refer future prospects to completed projects. It is also an important learning process, as it will be the first time you work as a team with others at your agency and figure out what tools and processes work for you.

If you have your own experiences in this area please feel free to leave a comment.

In the next How To we’ll be discussing how to set up your business administration, so you’re not overwhelmed when you have a line of clients knocking at your door after all your successful seed work.

Credits: Photograph taken by BreakfastPirate.

Dixons capitalise on the brands of their rivals

Whilst waiting for the tube on my way home last week, I was drawn to the above advertisment for Dixons.co.uk.

Firstly, as someone called Piers, I was mildly offended at the association of my name with snobbery (ok, so maybe it is a bit of a pompous name, but I didn’t choose it! Thanks mum).  Once I’d got over the attack on my monicker, however, I took another look at the poster and fully appreciated its brilliant use of a rival company’s brand.

The campaign is the work of ad agency M&C Saatchi and features three posters each using the familiar fonts and colour schemes of popular London department stores - Harrods, John Lewis and Selfridges - cleverly tapping in to the zeitgeist of shoppers using high-street retailers for advice on products before buying them cheaper online.

As well as no doubt boosting the traffic on dixons.co.uk, M&C Saatchi’s play on the instantly-regonisable identities of Dixons’ rivals serves as a testament to the strength of Harrods, Selfridges and John Lewis’ brands. It is a reminder of the power of good branding and how important a strong brand can be for your business.

Take a look at the full series of posters here.

If you’re looking to create an identity for your business or are looking for a re-brand, get in touch.

Note: Since it’s launch, the campaign has certainly caught the eye of a number other people, notably John Lewis who have reacted somewhat unfavourably!  Who knows how successful the campaign will be for Dixons sales, but the press attention certainly won’t do them any harm.