| (c) Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved |
Not a week goes by that half a dozen people don't ask me
what separates a great, money-making website from a bad one.
In response, I surveyed of a number of different websites,
large and small, to find what they share in common to make
them so successful.
With few exceptions, every extraordinarily great website
contained the following elements.
~ Testimonials
Every great website has testimonials from satisfied
customers. These testimonials help set the potential
customer's mind at ease that the products or services sold
online will perform as promised.
Truly great testimonials not only endorse the product, but
clearly state how the product increased sales, saved money,
or benefited previous buyers in very specific and tangible
ways.
Testimonials should present real benefits others can readily
identify with, understand and, more importantly, want those
same results for themselves!
~ Headlines
Headlines capture visitors' attention and get them involved
in the website.
How do you read the newspaper?
If you read like most people the headlines first catch your
attention and determine whether you'll actually read a
story.
Similarly headlines on a website determine whether visitors
get involved in the information or surf away never to
return.
My own experience has shown that the proper headlines can
easily and quickly double, triple, or even quadruple a
website's sales almost overnight.
~ Bullets
Bullets communicate various and subtle bits of information
about a product or service without making readers plow
through paragraphs of information to get to the meat of a
website's offering.
Bullets arouse interest, build excitement and convey a lot
of information very quickly to time-starved web surfers.
~ Bonuses
Every great website offers bonuses to people who buy, apply
or fill out a form.
Nothing induces someone to do business with you online like
offering them something extra for taking the action you
want.
Offering a bonus report, tape, extended membership, extra
quantities of product at a deep discount, coupons, or just
about anything makes people more willing to go ahead with
the purchase decision.
~ Guarantees
Everyone takes a risk whenever they buy anything from
anyone.
The risk centers on whether or not the product or service
will perform as promised. In a retail store most people feel
pretty confident the store will still exist if they need to
make a return or exchange in a few days.
On the web, however, that risk in making a purchase seems
much higher than in the 'offline' world.
Every great website makes a point of specifically telling
customers about their return policy and truly exceptional
sites offer 100%, no-questions-asked, money-back guarantees.
People rarely take advantage of such guarantees and I have
personally seen a website's sales increase by 45% just by
extending the guarantee period an additional 30 days.
~ Phone numbers
Every great website has a phone number with a real live
human being on the other end who can answer questions and
provide product support.
So there you have it!
With few exceptions this represents the formula for creating
or identifying a truly great website.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jim Edwards, author of numerous best-selling ebooks, earns
thousands in affiliate commissions every month! Jim has
developed "Affiliate Link Cloaker," the easy, FAST, safe way
to STOP affiliate link "hijackers"... Dead in their tracks!
Click Here => "
Affiliate Link Cloaker"
| Copyright 2004 Konstantin Goudkov |
I am not going to describe what a product feed (or a
datafeed) is. There is a lot of information out there
about how to use one to build sites. Instead, I want to
talk about how you can actually make more sales with
datafeed sites.
The program that I manage offers a product feed, and I get
a chance to see a sad picture of many good affiliates
wasting their potential.
Here is my advice from the affiliate manager's perspective.
Whenever you join (or think bout joining) a program, you
need to look for two things:
- Temporary or permanent opportunities
- Flaws of a merchant
Here is an example of an opportunity that was created by an
outside factor.
Recently, we got removed from the Yahoo index because of a
penalty. I have no idea when (or if) we will get included
back in, but I do know that it makes one decision much
easier for our affiliates.
Judging by the numerous posts on various SEO-related message
boards, it looks like Google and Yahoo use very different
algorithms to rank pages. So for any given site, you have a
choice to make. You can optimize for Yahoo, for Google, or
for both.
Since Yahoo and Google use different algorithms, it is
going to be hard to optimize the same set of pages for both
of those engines at the same time, unless you employ heavy
cloaking. And the way I see it, for an affiliate, it is
better to appear high on one search engine than to appear
low on both of them in an attempt to optimize for different
algorithms at the same time.
Imagine that you are one of our affiliates. Given the
information I just told you, shouldn't you concentrate on
Yahoo for that datafeed site that is being used to promote
our products?
Why spend (at least) half of your time and resources on
optimizing for Google when you know that we are nowhere to
be found in Yahoo?
You have to have an extremely well linked and optimized
site to get ahead of the merchant for the exact product-name
search terms. The merchant is your biggest obstacle when it
comes to the search engine traffic. So if there is a route
that lets you get around that obstacle - take it!
Most of our well-performing affiliates did just that.
Either intentionally or unintentionally, they ended up
making much more money by appearing high in Yahoo results,
while not being ranked high in Google.
So on a practical side of things, here is what you
should do.
For your existing merchants, check if they are removed from
the index in any of the major search engines, and if they
are, then start reading and implementing SEO tips for that
particular engine.
And if you are thinking about joining a program and can't
decide between several merchants, then check if any of them
is not in the index of either Yahoo or Google. If you find
a merchant like that - drop everything else you are doing
and jump on that program.
As far as theory goes, this was just a simple, but specific
example of what you should look for to make your efforts pay
off. There are many different opportunities to get ahead in
existing programs with datafeed sites; you just have to look
for them.
Now, let's talk about flaws of merchants and how you can
exploit them to make more money and help consumers at the
same time.
I will give another specific example, but you should be able
to apply this concept to many different programs.
Our site has one huge structural flaw: we only list products
by product-oriented categories.
In other words, there is no way to navigate our site by a
specific occasion or by the purchasing intent of a visitor.
You can follow a path like:
widgets -> wooden widgets -> red wooden widgets
This setup works fine for some type of shoppers, but is a
complete turn-off for others.
And the problem is that most affiliates simply mirror the
catalog structure of a merchant according to their feed.
But if you structured your site to list widgets as:
- widgets for birthdays
- widgets for girlfriends
- widgets for those who are over 50
- the Independence Day widgets
etc.
then you would attract different type of shoppers. You would
no longer compete with the merchant, but instead you would
complement them.
A visitor who is looking for a gift for his 50-something
friend and has no idea that a red wooden widget would be
perfect, will not travel down the path laid out by our
catalog. So if he gets to our home page, we simply lose a
sale. And if your datafeed-based site follows the same
structure - you lose as sale as well.
Also, since the visitor does not know that he really wants
a red wooden widget, he we not use those keywords while
searching for a present on the search engines.
But if you attracted that visitor to your site, presented
him with ideas for older friends' birthday gifts and guided
him to that specific widget's page - then we would make a
sale, you would make a commission, and the visitor (turned
customer) would get his present with much less searching
around. Everyone wins.
Such approach takes more work than simply cloning the
merchant's site with a feed, but affiliates who actually
do something to complement merchant instead competing with
them make a lot more money. After all, if you create a copy
of a merchant's site - you are not only competing with the
merchant, you are also competing with all of their
affiliates that use the same feed in the same way.
----------------------------
Konstantin Goudkov,
bcc-news@genericgifts.com
http://www.GenericGifts.com2500+ products in a data feed. 20% commission.
5 years cookie expiration.
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