In January 2006, they launched an ebay seller research tool that allowed sellers to research products before putting them up for sale on the auction site. Then, in June they launched an eBay buying research site, called “Collectors’ Corner”.
At this point, i began to wonder. At first, all i knew about the company was that they were there to build a great new selling tool for eBay. In fact, the wayback machine turns up this early homepage of them, which announces their great new selling tool. No word on a shopping tool. Launching an eBay research tool for sellers was in line with the initial strategy, since it was a tool focusing on selling on ebay. But then, the shopping tool started to emerge as the real focus of the company. The homepage was taken over by the research tools and the selling tools’ login links were harder and harder to find. As a user, I felt like i wasn’t the focus of the company any more.
Turns out i was right. On November 22nd, 2006 I got an email from mpire announcing that they discontinue their ebay seller tools effective January 31st, 2007. That is, today. So let’s analyze a bit where this company, that had an initial mission statement to build the perfect eBay selling tool, is today.
A look at their homepage today reveals what their new strategy is: they are becoming a web 2.0-ified affiliate site. They put a new spin on product comparison sites by adding price trending, added some great features like RSS feeds, social bookmarking, customer voting on products and deals, and lots of AJAX action (i wonder about their SEO results though… in fact, a quick check confirms they don’t seem to have their deals and product pages indexed properly).
They have a downloadable firefox/IE7 plugin, which overlays product comparison data and deals (not just related to the product itself) on supported shopping sites’ product pages while the user is shopping online. (Gasp - a downloadable affiliate shopping helper…)
While the new features are nice, i am not convinced they have enough competitive advantage to be a destination site - and seeing that they are not well-positioned in Google, they will need to work hard to attract user attention.
Overall, mpire leaves me quite disappointed, because they first lost my trust as a seller when i had problems with their product (they lost all my data overnight), then by abandoning me by changing their focus, and now because i am not too impressed by the new offering. I’ll be following their story nevertheless, because it’s an interesting case study on many levels.
The one positive moral of this story? Affiliate marketing is a hot market. And so is Web 2.0. :)
]]>First, here is a report comparing offline magazine websites’ web 2.0 features: “Analyzing the presence of American Magazines on the Internet“. They found that 48% of the top 50 most circulated american magazines’ websites uses RSS, and 40% of them have at least one reporter blog.
Then, today I read this post at Read/Write Web on mainstream media’s implementation of social bookmarking and RSS. Their quick scan of some mainstream media websites (and not all of them tech-oriented!) shows that all sites now have RSS feeds, and Time magazine and the NY Times offer all web 2.0 features examined (digg links, etc).
Add to that the fact that IE7 now has RSS support, which could give the final push to RSS for mainsteam consumer adoption. And once a consumer figures out why RSS is cool, it is only a baby step to discovering social sites. Maybe 2007 will be the year of web 2.0 and social media going truely mainstream.
]]>The first quarter is the best time to do some housekeeping. In this article, I talk about how to go about evaluating where you are and set your goals for where you want to go with your affiliate (or other business) endeavours, and how to re-vitalize your affiliate business in the new year.
by Katalin Török
Regular maintenance ensures a bug-free and up-to-date website, but are you attending to the core of your affiliate business with the same regularity? Periodic check-ups ensure that you are ahead of trends, show you what is working in order to prevent wasting valuable resources on dead ends, and ensure that your business is moving ahead in line with your plans and strategy.
Have a plan
The starting point for a periodic assessment of your affiliate business is a plan. Have a plan with measurable goals and benchmarks to help evaluate your progress and your performance. It is easy to get sidetracked with the day-to-day practicalities of maintaining an affiliate site (and come up with excuses for getting sidetracked), but the numbers show everything black and white: they serve as a reminder that you did things well, or that you didn’t do as well as you planned to. Every business starts with a business plan, keep it updated every quarter to see where you are going and how far you have come.
But the plan is only the starting point, you will need to compare your results with it regularly. Get into the habit of doing a quarterly, bi-annual, and annual review of your affiliate sites. The end of March is the end of the first quarter of 2006 - the perfect time to get into the habit of reassessment and reevaluation of core aspects of your business.
Measure and assess
Every business relies on numbers, statistics, and benchmarks, but the affiliate industry is in an envyable position regarding access to vital business information and data. Other industries need to invest thousands of dollars into CRM and reporting software to collect and report the sales stats and trends and measure the effects of marketing actions, while all this information is readily available to us affiliates from our business partners, the merchants and affiliate networks. You are given the tools to track your business down to the smallest step in your marketing. Take advantage of this by using these stats and building a business information system that helps you in your everyday work as well as in your strategic planning.
Chances are you log in to your network account every day to check your current earnings and also have some kind of a web statistics program running on your website to track visitors and referrers. Creating a chart to track your monthly, quarterly and annual progress in earnings, visitors and conversions is a start, but by slicing and dicing the data provided by your merchant partners and your own stats can provide a much clearer picture of where you are, what is working and what isn’t .
Every business is different and therefore needs different kinds of benchmarks to evaluate its progress. Looking at your own affiliate business, your goals and activities, work out your own indicators, that provide a view of how successful your business is overall, which areas drive your business, which are the problematic area you need to work on, etc. As your business matures you will need to adjust these indicators because your goals and approach will change at different stages of launching and running your affiliate site. At the beginning measuring traffic and analyzing where it is coming from will be a priority, while as your site matures monetizing the existing traffic will gain more importance.
By recording the statistics of the important aspects of your business and compiling them into usable (for you!) data sets, you can better evaluate which marketing tactics actually bring you results. In addition to analyzing your logs to compare different sources of traffic, consider keeping a marketing diary where you record all of your marketing steps in order to cross-reference them with the traffic data. Record every ad you run, every mailing you send out, every coupon you add or remove and annotate your traffic charts with this information.
This will help you to see the results of your marketing in more detail: for example instead of seeing 3000 new visitors and 200 new sales as a result of last month’s email marketing, you will be able to break down these numbers into each single newsletter you sent out. You can then evaluate these against each other, and against other traffic sources.
This approach will ensure that you get a complete and more realistic picture of what’s working and what’s not by measuring your marketing actions one by one as well as evaluating and assessing your marketing strategy as a whole.
Do your market research
In addition to data-mining, you can derive valuable insight from those who are the lifeblood of your business: your customers. It is important to continue doing your market research periodically, and not just before launching your affiliate business. Integrate market research into your bi-annual business check-up to stay ahead of changing consumer behavior or preferences.
Analyze the email that you receive from visitors commenting on your site. If you have a forum or guestbook, keep an eye out for insights into what people like and dislike on the site. If you don’t have any interactive features on your site, you can always turn to industry message boards, blogs or other online communities, where thousands of net users are discussing every single product and service on earth. Run a survey with simple questions about what users are looking for in your site. There are inexpensive, even free scripts and services out there providing online survey tools that are easy to set up and use.
Weeding out what’s not working
By carefully analyzing your stats and sales data you will have an overview of what parts of your business (be them merchant relationships, networks, product categories, pages on the site or marketing efforts) are most successful, and which ones aren’t working. Obviously you want to concentrate on those things that bring the visitors and the sales, but it is too easy to just leave the unsuccessful pages or merchant relationships on the site, just in case something magical happens and they start performing like you hoped they would by now. In most cases, there is a good reason why something is not working, and unless you can remedy the problem, it’s best to move on. Remove the non-performing products, product categories and pages and don’t waste any more of your valuable time on them. Unsuccessful efforts require maintenance as well, and will only suck away your time without gving you any benefits or motivating successes.
If a merchant or product category has not produced a single sale in the past couple of months and you didn’t find the time to make any efforts to find out why or change things around, there is a good chance you won’t touch them in the next 3 months either. You’d better move on to your next idea or dedicate more resources to the successful parts of your business.
In addition to the products that do not work sales-wise, there are those that do not work, literally. We are talking broken links here. In the affiliate industry you are earning your living through links, so it is absolutely vital to check your links periodically to find dead or outdated product links. In addition to ensuring that links from your site are functioning, it is a good idea to regularly do a check whether they still point to the things you think they are pointing to. Merchants change their product selection, offers expire, advertisers expire from the networks (in which case you lead your visitor to an error message on the network’s site, not very user-friendly, is it?), etc.
Refresh your site
We have discussed a couple of approaches to analyzing your business periodically, now here are a couple of ideas on how to refresh, even renew your site periodically to maintain momentum of your business.
Design
Chances are you arrived at the current design of your site by carefully evaluating screen real estate to find the most profitable layout and content distribution. If the design is working, you can still freshen it up periodically to keep the site up-to-date and modern. Use new techniques like AJAX to make the site more responsive and interactive (for example there are free code snippets out there for live search, a search box that provides instant search results as your users type their query on your site). Make your design CSS-based if you have not done so yet, and by separating design from content you will be able to reduce page load times, and cut down on HTML code significantly.
Add a seasonal touch to your logo or your color scheme, or even change your design completely. Sites that follow web design trends (we are not talking about copying popular designs but adapting trends to your site and layout), give the impression of familiarity -making customers feel more comfortable by providing a familiar environment - and modernity. By using a modern, up-to-date design you are branding yourself as a modern, up-to-date, trendy site!
Besides aesthetics, don’t neglect usability! Ask a friend or relative, or even better, a visitor or newsletter subscriber to browse the site and tell you what they feel comfortable with, what is causing them frustration, what is easily findable, and so on.
For a good overall introduction to usability read this book: „Don’t make me think! A common sense guide to web usability” by Steven Krug http://www.sensible.com/
Content
If you publish articles, reviews or reports to draw visitors, periodically (bi-annually) check if your content is still valid and up-to-date. Update, or remove outdated content, or archive it to reap the benefits of it being valuable spider food for search engines. If you leave it up on the site, make sure to let the visitor know it’s archived content and lead them to the more up-to-date parts of your site.
Analyze your website stats to see which sections and pages attract the most visitors, draw the conclusions and re-evaluate your content strategy to match actual customer demand.
Experiment
Make it your quarterly task to consciously seek out and try new things in your business. Try new technologies, new merchants, a new network, a new niche or even that up-and-coming service provider that can ease your marketing efforts but you never bothered to sign up for the 30-day demo (see the article „Top 6 resolutions for affiliates in 2006″ in our January 2006 issue for ideas and inspiration). By taking care to refresh your site, your business quarterly, you will not only have a greater chance at finding more and more things that are working for you, but you will also stay more motivated and maintaining your site will not turn into a boring chore, but continuously feel like an exciting new experiment.
Originally appeared in Affiliate Classroom magazine
]]>I covered some issues and tips that are generally missing from “how to enter a foreign market”-type articles. In fact much of that I learned from my own affiliate business experience, as some of the same issues come up no matter what direction you are taking: being an American affiliate marketer trying to conquer Europe, or (as is my case), a European affiliate marketer targeting the American market.
I hope this helps affiliates who want to target the European market. I would love to hear your thoughts about this topic, experiences in the European market. (Post a comment below or send me email.)
by Katalin Török
You have read the facts, seen the data, familiarized yourself with the euro and decided you’re ready to jump the pond and conquer Europe. Even Google makes 38% of their revenues from outside the United States now, so why shouldn’t you be next?
Before you make the leap, I would like you to consider a couple of thoughts from the European perspective. Yes, ours is a globalized world, markets are wide open and consumers are happily shopping across oceans. It’s getting easier by the day to operate an across-the-border e-business, be it an affiliate site or an online store shipping goods worldwide. However, there are still issues and aspects of marketing globally that have the potential to make or break your international venture’s success.
Accessing the European market
One of the founding principles of the European Union is the single market: the freedom of movement of goods, services, capital and labour. The free movement of goods is facilitated by an open market with common policies and consumers are made aware of their continental freedoms at every single opportunity that presents itself, presenting a great opportunity for marketers. However, despite a common European identity, differences in languages, currencies and culture, however insignificant they may be, still exist between countries. Consumer behavior and preferences vary from country to country or region to region. Computer and internet adoption varies significantly between northern and southern, western and eastern parts of the continent. To successfully reach the right audiences with the right message within this colorful and diverse, yet united continent you need to be conscious of these differences, and find the right - localized - combination of markets, products, locations, audiences and marketing methods.
One solution is to take a segmented approach to conquering Europe. You can concentrate on certain lucrative regions of Europe, like early-adapter Scandinavia, where consumers are experienced online shoppers. You can choose to build niche sites for specific audiences across the continent, for example target European moms, or European Star Trek fans.
You can segment by language and build the same site in the main European languages. Build a Francophone, an English, and a German version and you’ve covered most of Western Europe. One word of caution, though: don’t rely on automatic software translations when building a multilingual site. Find a freelance translator and have your text translated at least semi-professionally. Even a very amateur human translation will result in a more customer-friendly site than an automatically translated one. Grammar and spelling mistakes are easier to forgive than the impression that the owner of the site didn’t respect foreign users enough to work on their content more than simply running the site through a translator tool. Using English as the only language will work to some extent, as most European internet users speak English as a second language, however there are significant regional and demographic differences in this regard as well.
You have chosen your niche, your target region and language, now you’re ready to sign up for European merchants’ affiliate programs. But where to find them? The safest and easiest access to European merchants is at one of the local subsidiaries of the bigger US networks. Log in to your Commission Junction account and browse the directory by country. You will find merchants from Europe across many product categories, and the same tools and linking methods you’re used to on home ground. If you are accepted to foreign programs, the commission you generate will go into your current, normal CJ account, making this a safe trial environment for venturing out internationally.
When you’re ready to move to a European network, or European merchants’ in-house programs you will sooner or later encounter being automatically rejected based on your geographic location. I’ve had more than my fair share of automatic rejections from merchants in countries from Australia, across Europe to North Ameica, just because I am located in Central Europe. The key is to learn not to leave it at that: I’ve persuaded networks who never thought of accepting affiliates from my country to add my details by hand to their database. Usually an email to the affiliate manager explaining the situation solves the problem. If you believe there is a potential for a lucrative partnership, explain your concept to the affiliate manager, treat it as you would treat an elevator pitch. Keep in mind, sometimes there are legal issues or company-wide policies preventing them from signing you up, in which case there is not much more you can do than to move on.
You will often find the same merchant running several affiliate programs at different networks, with the same offers. This is actually quite common in the European market. The upside is you can choose the network with the more preferable affiliate environment, tools and services. I’ve encountered merchants who run 3 different programs at 3 different pan-european networks, but only advertise one on their site, so it never hurts to run a search for the merchant name + “affiliate program”. Also keep in mind that in the UK, an affiliate program is often referred to as “affiliate scheme”.
We’ve covered some of the issues affecting an international affiliate business, however, as usual, still barely scratched the surface. If you’re interested in taking a conscious approach at targeting Europe, here are a few tips for doing market research:
Join European affiliate communities. There is a good chance your favorite affiliate forum has a sub-forum for European affiliates and merchants, so look around on your next visit. Affiliates4u is a popular European focused community focused mostly at the UK market, but covering other European countries as well. http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/
To get a taste for brands, product selection and prices, as well as find merchants, take a look at the European versions of price comparison sites like shopping.com and the like. Try these European sites, all of them present in several countries:
http://www.kelkoo.com/
http://www.ciao.com/
http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/
Now that we have covered how to access the market, let’s look at the specifics of marketing to European consumers.
Marketing in Europe
You’ve registered your .co.uk or .de domain, put the EU flag in the logo and ready to pick and choose the products to fill your site with shopper-magnet goodies. Here are a few hands-on tips to help you pick a truly winning selection and market them in a eurofriendly way.
Product compatibility:
Not all products are created equal when it comes to their international marketing potential. While our world is becoming more and more standardized, our standards are still surprisingly different on the two sides of the ocean. Electricity, TV and DVD standards, clothing and bedding sizes, all kinds of measurements, even paper sizes differ in Europe from the North American standard. While this cuts down on the selection of US-based products you can promote in Europe, it also presents an opportunity to market American products to European buyers, be them American expatriates looking for familiar home goods, or European cooks who prefer measuring by the cup instead of grams and deciliters. If your chosen niche falls into one of these product categories, it is a good idea to offer conversion tools on your site, and explain differences from European standards.
Language and wording:
Nurture the relationship with your visitor by making them feel at home: use wording common in Europe. Ecommerce sites tend to use the term “delivery rates” instead of “shipping rates” and “shopping basket” instead of a “shopping cart”. You can include flags or wording indicating a European focus, the EU flag will ring a bell with consumers across the continent, so it’s the safest bet.
If you feel like targeting at the country level, using the Irish flag in addition to the UK one, or the Austrian flag next to the German, and making a locally targeted page will bring rewards from patriotic shoppers from those often neglected (flag-wise) countries.
Pricing:
Be sure to indicate the currency next to all prices. The most consumer-friendly sites provide on-site currency conversion. This is not only important because you want to present your offer to the European consumer in their familiar currency, but because several currencies on a single site makes price comparison tricky. If your offer is competing on price, rather than for example quality or scarcity, it is essential that your customers can convert currencies in order to make your offer easily comparable to local prices. Remember, in this case it is your price, plus the applicable shipping charges to get the goods to the shopper in Europe, converted to their local currency, that is your actual offer competing with their neighborhood shopping mall’s prices.
Currency conversion site xe.com offers a popular, fully customizable converter widget you can integrate into your site. You can choose from an ad-supported free version or a paid, ad-free version.
http://www.xe.com/ucc/
Payment issues:
While credit cards are the number one payment method in the US, the European payment landscape is more fragmented. Bank transfers, cheques and postal money transfers are common payment methods, along with debit and credit cards. It is not uncommon to accept payment upon receipt of goods. The store delivers the order along with the invoice, and the consumer makes payment after receipt of goods via bank transfer, or any of the above methods.
Preferred payment methods vary from country to country. In general European consumers are less trustful when it comes to using their bank card online than their North American counterparts, and they might not be in possession of a suitable card in the first place. In France, everyone has a checkbook, in Germany bank transfers are more preferred, while in Hungary payment on delivery is the most popular method of payment when it comes to online purchases. However, Paypal is now available in most European countries and offers a welcome alternative to these slower and clumsier offline payment methods.
When targeting European shoppers with overseas products, make sure your merchant can handle international payment transactions. Imagine the frustration your visitor would feel, trying to place an order at an online store that advertises shipping to Europe, only to find that their payment processor isn’t equipped to accept international credit cards.
Shipping:
International shipping charges and methods can at first seem outrageous if you are used to flat rate or even free shipping, buying and selling domestically. International buyers are well aware of the importance of costs and shipping times, and will look for this information very early on in the shopping process. Explain shipping policies, specify costs and projected arrival times if available, make the customer understand when they will actually receive their order. Do not try to hide the shipping details fearing that the costs will scare off buyers. The opposite will happen, not finding the information will alienate the shopper.
Marketing tools:
Some of the most popular consumer marketing techniques used in the US are rare or even completely unknown in Europe. Take coupons, for example. In some European countries paper-based store coupons are entirely unknown, and while digital coupons are used in online stores, they are significantly less popular in Europe than in the US. So think twice before putting all your eggs in the coupon site basket on the European market.
Rebates are also practically unknown. If you are promoting US-based offers to European buyers, be careful not to promote prices that contain rebates only available for US and Canada-based buyers (like most rebates are), as you might be misleading shoppers.
Last but not least, with more controversial niches, it is essential to first check whether it is legal to market your chosen product category or services in the EU, or in the countries you are targeting. Gambling and betting sites are the the first to come to mind - for example in my country it is illegal to promote foreign-based gambling or sports betting opportunities.
To sum up all the practical details, be sure to keep in mind these three points:
Bon Voyage!
Originally appeared in Affiliate Classroom magazine
]]>by Katalin Török
From the cover of the latest issue of Newsweek magazine to your favourite marketing blog, it seems like everywhere you look, a new article or discussion pops up on the new trend, ãweb 2.0″. The web is debating whether it actually exists or if it is merely some kind of a thought bubble kept alive because we keep taking about it so much. And there is the unavoidable comparison with the dot-com bubble of the nineties. But deep down web 2.0 may be a revolution in the making. Ignore it at your own risk.
What is web 2.0?
The term was first popularized by a 2004 O’Reilly Media conference titled, well ãWeb 2.0″. The glitterati of the internet world gathered to talk about ãthe next web”. Rather than merely being a networking session of the rich and famous of the e-business, this conference jumpstarted discussions on the evolution of the web, the social trends driving changes on all levels of the internet business environment.
After years of discussions around it, it is still hard to find a concise definition of what web 2.0 actually means. It is still very much a developing concept, or rather a group of concepts. And yes, it is a buzzword as well. It is a trendy trend, and thus it attracts endless attention. The term is stuck on logos of ambitious start-ups in hopes of attracting media and investor attention, and written up in articles, forums and on blogs all over the web.
One approach often used to explain the concept is to list companies that are definitely and unanimously considered to be web 2.0. Flickr (http://www.flickr.com), del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us), 37Signals (http://www.37signals.com, makers of the popular project management tool Basecamp, and related web-based productivity software) come to mind as the poster childs of web 2.0. Another approach is to compare technologies, tools and services of the ãold web” and the ãnew web”. Contextual CPC vs CPM advertising, tagging vs centralized directories, blogs and user participation vs traditional publishing are often cited differences between the old and the new web.
The old web and the new web co-exist. Encyclopedia Britannica still exists next to Wikipedia, and email newsletters are still an important tool despite the increasing importance of RSS. But a revolution is in the making on the world wide web and the affiliate marketing world had better take notice.
We could fill this entire issue comparing every nook and cranny of the old web to the new, but others have done it for us before. A search for ãweb 2.0″ brings up 71 million hits in Google, and even page 86 of the results brings up interesting articles analyzing the importance - or the existence - of the trend. A trip to the newsagents and you will have a library of web 2.0 material to process.
As an affiliate marketer, you want to keep track of the evolving web, the trends that affect your business environment, user behavior and competition, web services and software. So let’s look at the trends, features and concepts that affect the web at this moment, the ones that have a direct impact on the affiliate playing field.
The social web
One of the building blocks of the new web is social software, social websites, social everything. Whereas personal websites, traditional bookmarking services or photo galleries merely provided an outlet to publish or store your content, bookmarks or holiday photos, the new incarnations of these tools have an added social aspect. They give users the ability to give and take, and leverage the value of the aggreagate activities of the community of users, to derive value from sharing.
The new web is open for user participation and collaboration, explicitly - as in Flickr user groups where people voluntarily join to talk and share photos on given subjects - or as a welcome side-effect of seamlessly aggregating the activities of users - as in browsing photos on Flickr by tags aggregating the user base’s records of every subject from kitchen cabinets to interesting shop portals. The resulting mass of content is elevated to a new level by the collaborative organization (tagging!) and evaluation (voting, commenting, backlinks) of the users.
An important driver of this trend is that every single day more and more of our lives are ported to the web. The ãubiquitous web” - there is a phrase for every trend within a trend - means that we can access the web everywhere and anytime and we will use the web for everything and everywhere. Your bookmarks move from a file on your computer to del.icio.us, your calendar moves from your day planner to a web productivity application, and lately, office documents move from your shared drive to web-based collaborative word processors. And once our life is on the web, why not share it and benefit from the added value of aggregation?
You may recall that ãcommunity” used to be the buzzword of the 90s internet gold rush. User particiation is not a new trend, rather social software is extending it to all aspects of web life and building the tools for sharing and collaboration into the software and services themselves.
The rise and rise of data and related services
One of the strangest sounding new words that emerged around web 2.0 is ãmashup”. A mashup is a website that combines content and data from several different sources, integrating them seamlessly in one central web site. This is the realm of web services and APIs, from big merchants like Amazon and eBay to services like del.icio.us and Google Maps, data services provide a mindboggling selection of data to combine in every imaginable manner.
As more and more merchants and services offer APIs or other methods for data and content syndication, endless possibilities emerge for twisting these data sets into niche products, be it mixing ebay ads with maps showing listings in a certain neighborhood, or complementing product data from a web store with related links to reviews and manufacturers, or even photos of the product in use by actual users from Flickr.
Some affiliate marketers have been riding this wave for years, since datafeed sites that combine several merchants’ products are in a way mashups - slicing and dicing different data feeds for added value. Complementing such sites with new data sources - especially aggregate data from services like social bookmarking sites - can result in rich and colorful new sites creating unique content from external data.
Clear design is good design, the rise of the web app
The strikingly similar look and feel of some of the web 2.0 companies and services is the subject of many jokes about the web 2.0 hype: ãbuild a site with big bold type lots of pastel colors and gradients, and you are web 2.0.” But behind the looks there lies an important trend: the new web sets new standards for usability and design.
Good design has never been so important in society, and the web isn’t left behind in this trend. Web 2.0 is as much about good design as it is about user participation and data. Clever uses of new techniques (e.g. AJAX, which we could easily call ãJavaScript 2.0″, not meaning to the exact version number) make websites more responsive, easier to use, faster and sleeker than their web 1.0 predecessors. The clean and polished look of current web design trends accentuates the things that create the real value of a website: the content or service it offers, resulting in a better user experience.
A good illustration of the power of web 2.0 features is the rise of collaborative word processors. Web apps, or web applications are web-based versions of applications like calendaring programs or office suites. The new breed of web 2.0 office web apps combine two important trends: usability - being easier and faster to use than traditional desktop word processors-, and social software - the ability for multiple users to collaborate on the same document seamlessly, even real time, and to share it with coworkers via the web. (See www.writely.com or www.writeboard.com for examples.)
This article barely scratched the suface of the web 2.0 trend, in future issues we will explore each aspect more closely. But as a take-away from this article here are a few thoughts on how you can start leveraging the new web environment for your affiliate business:
Web 2.0ify your site design: and we don’t mean to copy the bold fonts and gradient pastel colors. Think about how you can make your site more usable and more responsive. As more and more of the biggest websites take on the new trends (and they already are!), some of these web 2.0 design trends and techniques will become the standards, just like the 3-column layout did a decade ago.
Web 2.0ify your business model: It has never been a better time to get into datafeeds. And by datafeeds we mean all kinds of data. Bookmarks, photos, maps, ISBN numbers, news articles, the web is chock full of free data sources ready to be integrated into your site. Complement your merchants’ product feeds with free data from other services to build up a content-rich site, think about your niche and which kinds of data your users will benefit from.
Web 2.0ify your site features: open up your site for user participation. Does your site have features that allow sharing and participation? Do you allow visitors to share their views and comments on your content? Do you have a blog with an RSS feed to initiate a conversation with your visitors? Add links like ãAdd to del.icio.us” or ãDigg this” to help visitors share your link with one click. Can your users build their own version of your offerings to share with their peers?
It pays to be an early adaptor. Learn about the trends and how the new web functions. Web 2.0 is rapidly going mainstream, so adapt your site and business now to reap the benefits of the new web environment!
Originally appeared in Affiliate Classroom magazine
]]>And it works. These ads “get 23% higher clickthrough rates than traditional banners and those clicks convert 12% better than other banner clicks.” Yay for tagging!
See the case study (free acccess for a couple of days only):
MarketingSherpa > Results from CafePress.com Tagging Test — Clicks & Conversions Increase
That really echoes what I had in mind. Derek had a suggestion for the term’s replacement: Authentic Media. That really doesn’t ring well for me, first, “authentic” is heavy and judgmental, and “media” is too connected to an existing establishment in my opinion. User-created content can become a part of the media establishment, but I would keep them separate by definition and allow them to intertwine as needed only.
My suggestion for the term’s replacement would be “organic content”. Nowadays everything is organic from your toothpaste to your search marketing, but that’s not a bad thing if you ask me. :) Organic implies that it’s grassroots, coming from the source, something raw and natural, untamed. I personally wouldn’t mind people sticking this label on the content I create in different nooks and crannies of the web.
And to echo the thought in the comment I quoted above, the term “organic” reinforces that this kind of content is not explicitly “created” (generated) but is a product of an interaction with the web or among its users.
]]>“Soon we’ll release two useful services: Ziki Groups and Ziki Businesses. Further down the line, look out for the Ziki content search engine, which will make it easy to search through the content you produce. At a later stage will come Ziki Marketplace. Ultimately we want Ziki to be a platform connecting people, groups and businesses, whatever their needs may be.” (From the Ziki blog)
The site relies on tags to connect people with shared interests, or gender, or profession. I remember in high school I was a heavy letter writer, I had penpals all over the world. To connect with new penpals, we had little FBs, or Friendship Booklets going around, traveling the world. When you started one, you added your address and a little bit of info about yourself, then sent it to a penpal of yours, who then sent it to one of theirs and so on, until the booklet filled up with addresses of people all over the world and the last person sent it back to you. In these FBs put lists of interests and “likes”. Mine probably read: “16, Hungarian, ice skating, traveling, going out with friends, internet, ABBA, REM, Madonna, Adrian Mole” (yikes, it’s surprisingly hard to remember what I liked at 16 years of age). In a way, it was an early attempt at tagging myself, with my likes, interests, favourite things, location etc. I had real nostalgia to this process when I was tagging myself (how weird does that sound) today on Ziki.
Besides the tagging ourselves activity, you can tell Ziki where the content you create on the web is located and Ziki will pull it together into one page. Flickr Photos, blog posts, delicious links, maps, videos, audio, whatever it is, if it has an RSS feed it can go into your ziki page.
Why did Ziki impress me? Hard to say, I am not entirely sure myself. I have seen similar aggregators before, but the tagging ourselves and connecting people based on common tags makes the social aspect more interesting. The design is cool, clean, responsive, and fun. Social candy.
Usefulness? Currently it’s more fun than useful. In the future, based on what I quoted above, it sounds really exciting, especially Ziki Business and Ziki Marketplace.
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