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Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Competition Analysis for the Selection of Shopping Carts

 

Currently there are some mainstream open source shopping carts there: magento, oscommerce, CRE Loaded, Zen-cart, Opencart, Prestashop, and two CMS+shopping carts: joomla & virtuemart, and drupal & ecommerce.

It is important to know when selecting your shopping cart what features you need. All the shopping carts below feature the following:

· Customer management

· Product management

· Variety of payment and shipping modules

· Order receipt emails

· Ability to use SSL secure layers for ordering process

However the shopping carts vary when it comes to:

· Time it takes to modify the cart to look like a current web design

· WYSIWYG ability to modify product descriptions using different fonts, colors, etc.

· Ability to import/export from Excel spreadsheet

· Wholesale/Reseller Pricing

Before choosing the right one, you need to do a competition analysis  to measure the strengths and weaknesses of your business, current competitors and potential competitors.  The analysis helps a business assess opportunities and threats as well as providing help creating business strategies, including the implementation and monitoring of them, to select the right tool, shopping cart, to enhance your online business.

Make sure you know your targeted features of shopping carts  before beginning a competition analysis. The solid base of information that comes from a strong competitive analysis can provide insights to your product and positioning, and help you determine which areas in your market you can succeed the most as well as what places you shouldn’t worry about. And that is one of the best ways to successfully choose a suitable shopping cart.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

oscommerce, magento, prestashop, zencart: the latter, the better

 

 

 

Want to know which one is a favorite Open Source e-commerce solution? Here are some first hand experience and feedbacks.
That’s true about Magento that it is pretty slow and needs to lessen its demand on resources though.  Prestashop just released v 1.1! Its in beta but has some much needed features added, but still lacks some much needed features/add-ons and doesn’t have a very big/active user community.

ZenCart vs PrestaShop is a difficult comparison. Not because they are similar, they are not, but because they both have different qualities.

I think Zen Cart is great but has its flaws and its Admin is difficult for users. ZenCart is mature. If you go on their forums you will find a rich mine of information. Modules are a plenty, skins too, and you’ll find no end of expertise to help you out.

PrestaShop on the other hand is the new kid on the block, but what an entrance. It’s switch, it’s cool, it’s got Ajax and DHTML big time…  Some might call that Web 2.0, they do. On the back end it is simpler, mostly because it has less options, but that can be a good thing. What it lacks is a good user base. The forums often don’t hold the answer, and modules are a bit thin on the ground. Especially when looking at payment systems.

PrestaShop's lovely client experience makes it more than makes up for other sins, since after all, beauty is king. In addition, I feel that this is a well cared for product, with a rapidly growing community. It won’t be long before its shortfalls against ZenCart dis-appear, and we are left with nothing but positives.

In addtion, affiliate programs are a must. Magento still doesn’t have a built-in means of offering an affiliate program. Some of the others at least provide plug-in capabilities for this.

In summary, Magento is a slow dog and Pretashop is way too new with not enough features, oscommerce is too old and to die, and zencart is an adult in the prime of life.

PS
I am very curious to see the new version of zen cart! people on demo said it is very promising and their experience gives a huge advantage against others i think!

Friday, February 13, 2009

cj, clickbank, shareasale and linkshare affiliate link click-thru tracking tips

 

While doing affiliate programs such as cj, clickbank, shareasale and linkshare, Click throughs earn you income. 

To maximize click throughs, of course, you know that you must find out highvalue content that OVERdelivers what your visitors were looking for, tracking these affiliate links is one of the solutions out there.

cj: commission junction

we can track CJ.com's click through by sending them SID value.

clickbank

Clickbank affiliates can track conversions to improve affiliate marketing income, and not have to ask the merchant to add a bunch of code to their website!

Clickbank tracking works simply by placing the following after you affiliate URL.  ?tid=keyword You can substitute “keyword” for any eight characters containing alpha or numeric values. You should make this identifier a unique value for each keyword.  When you make a sale using this method, Clickbank will display which identifier resulted in the sale.

shareasale

AffTrack ID: ShareASale has a parameter called "afftrack=" which can be used to identify a specific click, if your site can insert an appropriate ID (click ID, user ID) to pass as a parameter.
tracking affiliate links through SAS. You need to append 'afftrack=' value and the destination url.

Linkshare

LinkShare Tracking does not rely on cookies to track affiliate referrals. There is direct communication between the Merchant and LinkShare, and the web browser does not present an additional potential point of failure.

The exposure of cookies to browser behavior is nothing new. The industry has long recognised the risks of cookie deletion as a result of:
• Browser privacy and security settings
• Anti-Spyware program/s
• Anti-Virus programs
• Users manually clearing their cookies
LinkShare’s patented tracking remains the most reliable and secure in the Affiliate Marketing industry.

Some LinkShare (LS) RSS Merchant Review

 

Linkshare affiliates can find a list of RSS data feeds in the new publisher dashboard. Go to Links > Data Feeds and select RSS Data Feeds.

Linkshare can also find all of them in the old interface:
FeedSynergy-> RSS Data Feed
But actually most of them are not very up to date.

Merchant name: EastBay
RSS Title: Eastbay Deals and Coupons
Review: promotions way out of date like this one (valid 4.9.07-4.28.07.)
Merchant name: Drugstore.com
RSS Title: Drugstore.com Monthly Promotions
Review: No expiry dates listed although I can see they were created way back in july.
Merchant name: Diamonds International
RSS Title: Diamonds International Deals and Coupons
Review: Good to see expiry dates listed and promotions up to date

 

Merchant name: ESPN Shop
RSS Title: ESPNShop Promotions and Coupons
Review: promotions don't seem to get updated, here is an example of what they are offering in December: ESPNShop

Mother's Day Sale
Merchant name: Forzieri
RSS Title: Forzieri Long Term Coupons
Review: promotions never updated, about as bad as it gets, check this example of what they have to offer affiliates: $10 Off all Orders Over $125 at Forzieri. Expires: Sept 1st 2007  (Don't all rush to add this)

Unfortunately, there are reports about the instability of linkshare datafeed files, the files were corrupt when they were unzipped a couple of product datafeeds from Linkshare

Monday, February 9, 2009

Free CBTopSites Clickbank Mall Makes Online Money Easy

 

 

From now you can make more money with your free CBTopSites Clickbank Mall.

They have introduced some very useful improvements to your Mall.

1) Most popular products in your Mall are displayed using ‘Most
Popular’ link in the Menu of each page.

You can promote this link :
http://cbtopsites.com/search/YourClickbankNickname/downloads

Please remember to replace YourClickBankNickname with your own clickbank nickname.

This link displays the most popular products from all the categories.

2) Keyword Links for sites in your Mall are displayed as ‘Related
Sites’.
3) Category links for each site in your Mall are displayed as ‘Related Categories’.
4) All sub-categories are displayed in the right column of inner pages of your Mall.

These improvements motivate visitors to explore your Mall better than before and help to make more sales. These and many other previous improvements has made CBTopSites’ ClickBank Mall the best on the net - far better than CBMall in my opinion.

I wish you all success and hope you make lots of money.

Clickbank Ads (CBAds) vs. Google Adsense

 

 

There are many methods to make money online, but the easiest method is to earn money by displaying Google Adsense Ads. Agreed it is the most dominant contextual advertising program, but it has some limitations too, for example

1. The website/blog should be approved by Google and adhere to its terms and conditions.

2. Abide the restrictions on the Ad placement

3. You do not have power to mange the Ad.

4. Awarded only for clicks but not for the sale made through clicks

5. You receive only a few cents per click and thus a low income

6. Most important, to get a minimum of $100, you need to have thousands of Adsense clicks

So, utilizing the Ads concept, a new form of high earning potential ClickBank Ads were designed. These CBAds have remarkable features and are much efficient in terms of earning power, for example

1. You are awarded with full affiliate commission rather than pay per click for any sale

2. The affiliate commission ranges upto 75% of the product price, so you can make good money.

3. You have a perfect control over the Ads displayed.

4. There are no restrictions for Ads placement.

5. You have the flexibility to display the Ads depending upon your choice of keywords.

So you are the boss of your Ads, you can customize your ads as per your choice. You have the full control over the Ad content too. Apart from that you can even change the format to suit your needs.

In summary, why to waste your traffic in accumulating just cents from Google Adsense? Make thousands of dollars with it. Signup ClickBank Ads and keep the 100% of the profits made through your efforts.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Magento Open Source Shopping Cart with Affiliate Program

 

 

Are you looking to setup your own Affiliate Program for something that you are selling online? Well if you are willing to use the new and slick Magento open source shopping cart,  there is a free and open source solution for you for creating your own affiliate program. It’s a component for Magento called Affiliates For All and it’s completely free and open source.

Affiliates for All is highly configurable. You can set:

    * a fixed commission rate or a percentage,
    * the affiliate cookie lifetime,
    * the currency, and
    * whether commission is paid for the life of a customer or just for the first order.

Some other really cool features to take note of are:

   1. Affiliates for All will (optionally) email affiliates with details of new orders and approved commissions.
   2. Affiliates for All provides your affiliates with many reporting features. They can see graphs of orders and revenue over time. They can view and download lists of orders. If you want to, you can pass customer names and email addresses to the referring affiliates, allowing for further marketing efforts.
   3. Affiliates for All has a user interface similar to Google Mail. Just like Google Mail, this is achieved with AJAX, but you can use Affiliates for All without understanding the details.

This is a really cool open source application, similar to which you will not find anywhere! There just is not really any good open source affiliate applications out there. And this one appears that it could eventually stand head and shoulders above the rest.

Google Adsense Wins Affiliate Programs for Online Money Make

 

 

What are the Google Adsense success secrets that other successful webmasters use to make some great money with their website? Because the Adsense™ program displays advertisements that are so closely related to the website content, it is advantageous to webmasters because the advertisements are actually of interest to website visitors. Adsense will automatically generate ads related to your topic and advertise these on your site.

Just note, however, that while this was especially true a couple of years ago, the prevalence of garbage made-for-Adsense type of sites to try and register a domain name with keywords in have led to this factor being overused and abused. Ways to make money from Adsense by Using Articles and a Viral Marketing Website Any online marketing technique that involves the use of referral marketing or viral marketing automatically has a huge chance of being a success. You can also login on to www.guardadsense.com. You should remember that you will have to churn out articles fairly regularly to keep your safe lists well fed and the traffic flowing to your Adsense sites.

4 Ways to Make Money Online from Contents

 

 

The content is the main factor for which people come to visit your site. If the content is good and offers some value to the readers, then they will come back again or otherwise they will leave for good.

Here are the four ways to make money online from Content. You can combine them to generate your own ways.

1) Blogging

Difficulty: Easy
Cost: None

Blog as a content model is very good and easy to start with. You can create blogs within seconds. There are free blogs available such as wordpress, blogger which can be set up within seconds. Start a blog on a topic that you like and we can keep writing on it. However you should read some good blogs before starting it. Read ProBlogger by Darren Rowse - this can help you to start at a better note.

2) Informational Sites

Difficulty: Easy - Medium
Cost: None

Creating a resource site is little harder than starting a blog. Resource sites are sites which contains static pages on a particular topic which contains huge amount of information about a topic. A resource site will contain almost all the information about a particular topic.

3) Forums

Difficulty: Medium
Cost: None

Forums are the places where people discuss about a topic or area. Creating a forum is easier with many forum creating software available on the net. It is easy to create but difficult to maintain and grow it. Forums are places where people register and become a member. It depends on people to grow in popularity and traffic. It is very good fro the point of view of traffic because members visit the forum many times in one day. Everything depends on how popular your forum is.

4) Affiliate Services

Difficulty: Hard
Cost: Medium - High

This business is great if you can find out something/sites that acts as an affiliates between two systems or two types of users. These types of content models get two types of clients- the users and the sellers. Some of the good examples are ClickBank and other affiliate marketplaces, eBay, advertising companies etc. This is relatively hard to start because it needs programming skills and good startup money. However the return is more in these types of models

Google Adsense Online Earnings vs. Affiliate Programs Online Money Make

 

 

 

There are debating on whether or not to add adsense ads to online money make site which features links to sites which are affiliated with.

Many affiliate marketers today have realized quickly that in some circumstances, google adsense may make you more money than your affiliate programs. Under the following situations where Google Adsense code if placed on your website can actually make more money for you as oppose to a mere affiliate program link.

1. Not all keyword niches have affiliate programs, in contrast, Google Adsense with its millions of advertisers will likely have advertisers who are interested in your current market.

2. Adsense uses contextual advertising Every Niche website even no matter how specialized will face a problem, while affiliate product may not be spot onto the content for that page.

3.  Dead Affiliate links caused by not quite often updates by affiliate marketing managers. Google Adsense changes with respect to your webpages content and being totally externally driven will have no faulty links so you get paid from each and every clickthrough.

Finally, a tip for people to choose between adsense and affiliate programs for online money make is if your site attracts a lot of international visitors adsense can also be a benefit. Google displays advertisements based on geographic location of the website visitors so you might be able to generate profit in countries which would not have been possible with static affiliate links.

Friday, February 6, 2009

Adsense vs affiliate programs vs clickbank

 

 

People always ask what is better for sites to make more money: adsense, affiliate programs, or clickbank?

Well the answer is: why stops you from using both (adsense and clickbank/regular affiliate programs). There is always better to monetize your traffic using more methods.

According to online survey, adsense is the best, they pay good if you have good CTR,  Lets say you get a better return on adsense, i would then say focus 80% of your ads using adsense and continue to experiment with the remainder 20% - as you never know when affiliate marketing may be better than adsense. sometimes you can see trends for example Travel, affiliate marketing may be better Jan to April but after this adsense may be better.

The last tip is that if you wanna make money with adsense, your site content should be updated frequently. If you make money with clickbank and other affiliate programs, you should write a landing page, and then promote the landing page.

In summary, you can make split tests and see which one performs better, check your data regularly and wherever you are making a better ROI.

The spider process and site architecture SEO

 

 


There are a number of site building decisions that can impact your success with search engines. Let's take a look at several important areas.


Search engines index pages depending on how a site is built and the value it provides to certain audiences or visitors. Search engine spiders crawl the Web and include web pages they find relevant within their search engine index.

According to some industry watchers, search engines actually index only about 20% of most websites' content. If that estimate is true, then:
You want your website to be above average in terms of indexing and;
You need internal links from those pages that the spiders are picking up to other important pages within your site.

Domain name
Your domain name is your first opportunity to make a good impression and invite people to look at your site. If at all possible, your domain name should be short, should not include hyphens or numbers, should be a .com (rather than a .net or .biz) or country specific (for example, .co.uk)and should describe your business in terms of keywords. (Read our article on domain names to learn more about this subject.) By the way, since Google gives more worthiness points to domain names that have been around longer, because spammers buy domain names for short periods then abandon them, be sure to purchase your domain name for a multi-year period. It's not terribly expensive and makes your site look like it's here for the long run.

Home Page
Your home page is typically the landing page for most viewers. This means that your home page needs to do a lot of heavy lifting to attract your viewers to move deeper into your site. Your home page should contain links to all of the other major areas of your site. Even if you operate an ecommerce site, don't fall into the trap of making your homepage into your store. Remember that when users get to your store, you want to convert them to buyers. You may need to use one strategy to get a high page ranking for your home page and a different strategy to create conversions.

You should have the standard links to about us, contact and site map in place on the home page and every page then expand on those links with a clear picture of your site's offerings. For example, if you sell management software, you may want to have home page links to client case studies, products, technical specs, resources, blog and so on. Your resources link might have a drop down menu with choices such as technical articles and industry news.

Presentation
It's important that your site presents as attractive, professional and appealing to viewers. Although spiders can't 'see' your pages' appearance, other website managers can and you'll be less likely to attract high quality links if your site doesn't present well. Additionally search engines are increasing storing data on your visitors' usage of your site: the more visitors use your site, the higher your site's perceived usefulness, the higher your rankings.

Blog content
Blogs are a great way to add quality content quickly. Each blog looks like a new page to the spider. Therefore, by actively blogging, your site will be identified as having a good supply of fresh content as the spiders pass by and sample your site over time.

Bottom line
Fill your site with interesting content, make it appealing to look at and build sensible navigation paths to all of the information.

 

Search tails
Most people optimise their homepages for the more general keywords and keyword clusters. For example, if you sell garden plants, you will probably be using keywords and clusters such as garden, plants, gardening, greenhouse and cultivate. However, these words are so general that while they may bring traffic to your site, they're far less likely to convert to a sale. These words are often referred to as the 'head' words of a search. The words that tend to create conversion are most often the 'tail' words, those words that narrow a search down to a much more specific product. If you optimise your home page using 'head' words, you can draw viewers to conversion pages by links that contain 'tail' words such as water plants or even more narrow, pond lilies.