Shopzilla’s free affiliate program - turning quality traffic into revenues

Archive for November, 2009

Integrated Dynamic Assets With Your Website’s Content

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Hey Publishers,

Sometime it’s also worth reading the blog from our sister affiliate program in the US and see what Publishers are doing on the other side of the pond. There the Shopzilla Publisher Program has been around for more than three years now and has several thousand publishers onboard. One blog post in particular that we’d like to point out is Publisher Spotlight on Tim Flight and GPSReview.net from June  2008.  Tim from the GPS review site (www.gpsreview.net) gave some great tips on content integration which is why we’d also like to share this advice with our UK publishers.

How well does the Shopzilla UK Publisher Program content you select fit with the context of the page?  Is your audience reading about Nike trainers, but your assets display Adidas and Converse sneakers? We get a lot of questions about how to generate more quality clicks and one of the answers is integration. Our UK Publisher Program offers a wide set of product offerings from thousands of different merchants, so take advantage of it by displaying assets that suit the content of the page!

Tim also gave a very detailed tip for WordPress users interested in using Dynamic Assets. While we cannot be held liable for any code you may accidentally break (read our FAQ), Tim’s advice has brought GPSReview much success:

Create the Dynamic Asset using just the letter “a” in the “Search For” field as the keyword. Pick the banner size, set your colors, etc, and then get the HTML code. Look in the HTML code for the following:

/keyword-a/

Replace that with this:

/keyword-<?php echo(urlencode(strtolower(single_post_title(”,FALSE)))); ?>/

That code should take the title of the WordPress post and use it as the keyword for the ad unit.
Keep in mind, this will be optimal only for those publishers using the product name as the blog post title. Hopefully, this will help you save time by making our dynamic assets… well… more dynamic! As always, please contact us with any questions or comments.

Difficulties finding the right product category? Read more about the structure of the Shopzilla inventory.

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Posted in Publisher International, Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »

Publisher Spotlight: pic2shop has integrated Shopzilla content to supply shopping options on the move

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Price comparison on the move with pic2shop app. With only 2 and a half years on the international market, Apple’s iPhone has become one of the largest global smartphone companies, accounting for one fifth of total sales. One of the biggest factors behind this has been a nearly 50% year-over-year growth seen in the third quarter of 2009. With this growth comes huge opportunity in the apps or application sector. Apple’s App Store currently has over 100,000 applications available, showing the popularity and growth in the industry. Latching on to a winning concept can result in windfall earnings for any investor, take for example the iFog app. One application that caught our eye recently, was the pic2shop app. Since we are a comparison shopping engine, we are always interested in seeing how the marketplace is evolving. And, as an added bonus, pic2shop has integrated Shopzilla content to supply shopping options to its user base. We caught up with the creator of pic2shop, Benoit Maison, to find out a little more about the application, and his thoughts on the future of smartphone technology.


Diana: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, Benoit. Tell us a little about pic2shop and exactly what it is.

Benoit: pic2shop is a free iPhone application. It reads barcodes using the iPhone camera, and then looks up and compares prices at online retailers.

Diana: How did the idea come about?

Benoit: It all started as a technical challenge: reading barcodes with the iPhone was supposed to be impossible because the fixed focus camera made them all blurry (that was before the iphone 3GS). The first working version of pic2shop was released in April’09, and there was a lot of worldwide interest immediately. Since then, we have perfected the barcode scanner, made it work in real-time on the iPhone, and added many retailers and millions of products to our database.

Diana: The pic2shop team has been working with Shopzilla for several months now. How has the experience been?

Benoit: It has been very rewarding. We chose Shopzilla early on because it was the most expedient. But Shopzilla turned out to have to best product coverage for our purposes (UPC lookup), and to give great affiliate revenue. We are very excited that the program is now available in the UK, France and Germany!

Diana: You currently use our FTP Data Feeds; how has the integration process been?

Benoit: The FTP Data Feed has a standard format and was very straightforward to integrate. The only problem is the coverage in terms of EANs, not every merchant has included this information yet. This information is necessary for us in order to match the offers with the barcodes. For the retailers who are reading this, please include EANs in your feeds!  Without them, we cannot show your products in pic2shop.

Diana: The Shopzilla UK Publisher Program will be offering a Catalog API in early 2010. Is that something you are looking forward to?

Benoit: Yes, we look forward to the upcoming Catalog API.  We have had a very good experience with the US web API. Having an API was more convenient than, say, an FTP feed. As volume increases, we just need to cache results. Integration was very straightforward, and we never had to make any change since then. As a developer, that’s the highest praise I can give.

Diana: Mobile applications are becoming ever more present on the market, where does your application figure in terms of category relevance?

Benoit: Besides games, comparison shopping may be the category with the broadest appeal. Who does not like to get a better deal? We are looking for ways to increase the appeal of pic2shop, so that it is the first place iPhone users and retailers turn when they think of comparison shopping. Many people are not even aware that this stuff is possible, but when they learn about it, the reaction is invariably an enthusiastic “Wow! How do I get it?”

Diana: What makes pic2shop so unique/important to the market?

Benoit: Well, definitely the real-time barcode scanner. Just point the camera at a barcode, wait a second, click! You get the online prices and links to explore further. There are only three apps (out of 100,000!) on the App Store right now that can do that, and pic2shop is the most flexible of the three. In many ways, it is like a mobile browser with barcode input. It can show prices of course, but also product specifications, user reviews, demonstration videos, coupons, anything you can dream of. Some manufacturers want to build their own iPhone app, and we license the barcode reader to them, but some are just happy to give us material to include in the results.

Diana: In your own personal opinion, how much success can be achieved with this type of application, and how far can this technology go?

Benoit: I believe that mobile advertising will soon be larger than online advertising. It can reach people wherever they go, not just when they sit at their PC. If it’s not intrusive, it can provide tremendous value by being highly relevant and timely. It is not clear how the technology will evolve. For example, will people want dedicated apps, or just mobile web sites better integrated with their phone’s camera, GPS, and other capabilities? We will probably see a few iterations before the dust settles. In the meantime, we’ll take pic2shop as far as we can.

Thank you for your input Benoit, and we hope to see pic2shop evolve into a leader on the marketplace! For anyone interested in finding out more information or wanting to download the app (it is free to download!), head over to the pic2shop website.

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Posted in Publisher Feedback, Spotlight Interviews | No Comments »

Optimising your Article for SEO

Friday, November 20th, 2009
SeoJoBlogs Jo Turnbull is an SEO strategist who began her career in marketing for SMEs. A keen interest in web development and marketing, she taught herself SEO and has been blogging ever since. In addition to her blog, which centres around mobile and SEO (of course) she enjoys travelling the world and is currently learning her fourth language. Here she gives Publishers some advice for optimising SEO. Check out her site at SeoJoBlogs.

“If you have an article that you want to publish, you want to make sure that your article is seen by as many unique visitors as possible.  Here are a few ways to do this:

1. Be different
There is a lot of competition out there on the web.  If you are writing an article, make it stand out. Make sure it has a catchy and informative header that encourages visitors to read on. Try being controversial or provocative to grab reader interest and attention.  For example if you are writing about the increase of social networking sites, I suggest you use the title “Facebook’s user base has topped 300 million” instead of “There are lots of social networking sites”.

2. Share
If you are hosting the post on your own website, install social bookmarks such as Digg and StumbleUpon so that if someone likes what they see, they can bookmark the information and tell  their online friends.  You are encouraging your visitors to take part in viral marketing – spreading the word about your article.

3. Links
Don’t be afraid to link to the source of your article.  Readers will appreciate you giving them more information and they will like going to the source and finding out more.  If they liked your article they will come back.

4. Short and sweet
Internet articles tend to be shorter – keep the article between 200 - 400 words and make sure the paragraphs are clearly spaced and easy to read.  A lot of your visitors will be scanning the articles to take the best information so make sure these parts stand out.

5. Keywords
Make sure your article is centred around keywords.  You can use keyword tools to help you find the best terms for your site.  Google keyword tool is very popular and will let you know the competition for a particular term and give you suggestions of other keywords to use. Having a keyword rich header is always a great start, and use your first paragraph to get across your article’s key message. Your text shouldn’t look too “stuffed” full of keywords so ensure that you find various synonyms to include throughout, a technique very important for SEO. An acceptable keyword density percentage is 3 to 4%.

6. Optimise social media
To increase visibility of the article, you need to promote it.  If you already have an online presence in social media, make sure there are links from your social networking sites. If you have followers on twitter, tweet about the new article you wrote with a link to the url. If you have a linkedin account, post a link to the article on your profile page.

7. Topical
Make sure your article is topical.  If you are writing about mobile phones, talk about the latest mobile phones, the Palm Pre on O2, or the iPhone on Orange.  You want your readers to know that you are aware of the latest news and they can come to you to find it.

8. Expertise
Build on the topical information and you can become an expert in their area. Once you find a topic that you are interested in and write about that is relevant news, stick to it.  You may even find people wanting to link to you. Perhaps write a series of posts on the same topic, or start a blog carnival with other bloggers.

9. Give away information
Don’t try and sell your products or service in the article.  If you are going to write a lot of articles, people will value your opinions and when they are ready will buy from your site because they trust and value your articles.

10. Interact with your audience
Throw up questions, start debates, polls. If you receive comments, make sure you respond to them.  Visitors like to see their comments are well received.  Comments are also a great way to add additional content to your site.

By following these tips you should be able to increase interest and traffic to your articles”

Some great advice there, a big thanks to Jo Turnbull from seojoblogs.com!


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Posted in Affiliate Hot Topics, Spotlight Interviews, Tips & Tricks | 2 Comments »

Category Trees - How to Find the Right Product Banner

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

We’ve heard from some of you that you’ve been experiencing a little difficulty in finding exactly the right product banners for your sites. Well, look no further! Here we’re going to give you a few tips in order to help you spend less time looking and more time earning.

Our dynamic assets give you the most choice of products. (Stock banners are great, however have their limitations. As stock banners are prepared by the Publisher team for popular product categories you may not necessarily find what you are looking for  in this section not necessary. As mentioned here, the best idea is to use our dynamic content.) To begin go to the Dynamic Assets option in the Get Content tab of the Publisher portal.

Most of you have mentioned difficulties when it comes to refining the category for the product that you’re wanting to promote.  Here is a bit of background about how our product offers are structured, which might help you to find and create the product banners you are looking for: BizRate has a tree of categories meaning that the top level category (e.g. Computer & Software) is the parent category which is divided further into more granular categories, for example laptop computers, computer monitors, printers etc.  To find your product category you have to climb through the BizRate category tree.  To help you find your way, below you’ll see a few examples of recent products our Publishers have had difficulty finding and the “category path” needed to locate them:

product-category-trees5

Another suggestion to help you in finding the specific product you’re looking for is to go onto the BizRate homepage and type the product into the search field. Once on the landing page, check under the navigation bar for the “breadcrumbs” (the granular path which leads to the product in a deeper page - see example below). You can then see which category to choose when searching in the Publisher portal.

bizrate-bracelet

We have tons of products available so you’ll be able to locate the banner you’re looking for. Sometimes they may be a little hidden but they are there, just waiting for you to come and find them!

If you’d like any assistance in finding a particular product please get in touch with one of our Publisher team.

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Posted in Tips & Tricks | 2 Comments »

10 Tips for Succeeding in Optimising Traffic Quality

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
We reward for High Quality Traffic

We reward for High Quality Traffic

Here at Shopzilla we like to place great emphasis on the quality of traffic that publishers send to our merchants. As a publisher you have a huge influence on the quality of the traffic you direct to us. By providing quality traffic, it’s also a way for you to maximise your earnings, as our CPCs are dependent on it. (For more info see Shopzilla’s smart pricing). Lately we’ve often been asked how you as a publisher can optimise your traffic quality. To help you improve your sites and ensure they always drive the highest quality of traffic possible, we have put together some tips.

1 -  Good user experience: Use contextually relevant ads so that your visitors can relate to them to the content and therefore to themselves. With the Dynamic banners make sure you use keywords that are as specific as possible to ensure the best results. Maybe you can use the info you have about your visitors (demographics, interest) in order to showcase the most relevant products. Your visitors will love shopping advice that they can relate to. Not only will the traffic quality increase but potentially so will your click-through rate.

2 -  Relevancy: You as a publisher can add a lot of value to assisting one of your users in their buying decision. As a good publisher you will offer all the information that is required to decide on a purchase (or get people keen to shop) before actually having to click trough to BizRate. So make sure that the products that you are promoting on your site are as relevant as possible to the content. All this will help to achieve highter click trough rates and CPCs.

3 - Indicate advertising: It’s sometimes worth letting your visitors know that they are going to BizRate. In that way your users won’t be disappointed to find themselves off your page without intending to be, but are very aware of being taken to a shopping portal if they click. People will love your shopping hints even more. Note: some of our dynamic banners mention it’s a BizRate ad, but if you choose to go for text links for a product pod this is not the case.

4 - Let the user decide to click: Don’t offer your visitors an incentive to click on an Shopzilla Publisher ad.  Visitors who just click for the sake of it, don’t  normally make a contribution to your traffic quality, and this conduct is, in fact, not allowed according to our Publisher Program’s T&Cs.

5 - Optimise your landing page: Try linking to BizRate rather than to merchants directly (if you are not already using this method). In that way your visitor has more products to choose from if he or she hasn’t decided what to buy yet. Of course this may vary if you are writing a blog post or product review on a very specific product, where it makes sense to link to the shops that carry your described product.

6 - Use placement ids: Give your ads a placement ID so that you can monitor the success of each one. Use your EPC data to focus on camplaigns/ads that are performing well and optimise those that are of lower quality. When testing new approaches, it is advisable to set up a new campaign starting with a small volume of traffic, so you can check that the traffic quality is meeting both your and our expectations.

7 - Utilise reports: We have different reports available that show your performance in slightly different ways. Look at your daily EPCs. We also recommend looking at your data over a longer period of time before making any conclusions of the changes you may need to make. The reason for this is that if you are a small volume publisher your results may vary a lot from day to day. This may also be the case if you are a new publisher. The Shopzilla Publisher team is also always willing to help you to look more into your quality traffic. Just give them a shout.

8 - Right mix of advertising: build consumer trust by not over-implementing ads. Too many can make your site look too commercial and it’s hard for people to choose where to click in addition to getting distracted from the great content you actually have on your site. To find the right number of ads is not always easy, but again, it’s worth trying out different positions, different formats and styles. Placement IDs may help you to find the right mix.

9 - Ensure quality for traffic sources: The source of traffic to your website should be high quality no matter if you are getting most your visitors through organic search, paid listings or have a loyal audience. If you buy traffic to your site, make sure that it is well targeted, which is also applicable for any SEO optimisations. Our Publisher Program works best for publishers who wish to ad a shopping element to their site as their visitors are interested in buying and tend to be more product-oriented.

10 - Dialogue with the publisher team: Whether you are not finding the right advertising for your site, or struggling with another issue please don’t hesitate to reach out to Emma or Diana. We are here for you, so that the Shopzilla Publisher Program works for you as much as it works for us. We are always more then happy to give you a helping hand and look into ways of what can be done in particular cases, as all our publishers are unique. Check out our blog regularly or follow us on twitter (@shopzillaUK) for useful advice that may help you to get the most out of the program.

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Posted in Tips & Tricks | 4 Comments »

Christmas ad banners - be one of the first

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Christmas is nigh…

So it’s time to think about Christmas again. Well, if truth be told, most of us have been thinking about it since August (thanks to those cards and decorations peppering shop windows)  and it seems to be getting earlier every year.

Put a twinkle in your eye with early Christmas earnings

Put a twinkle in your eye with early Christmas earnings

Consumer habits are rapidly changing and stores adapt to feed those habits. If shoppers wish to plan ahead and buy Christmas presents in late Summer, why shouldn’t they have the same great deals that last minute shoppers benefit from? Some of you may be aghast by the sight of dancing Father Christmases when the sun is still high in the sky at 6pm. Others may delight in the early festivities.

More and more people are preparing themselves  in the weeks, even months, in the run up to the jolly holidays so that when the 24th December arrives they can look at their panic striken pals, still hunting for that perfect gift, with an expression that implies “told you so”.

Shopzilla’s got some fabulous gift ideas on our site and we offer some great product ads to go alongside. If you were already starting to think about doing something Christmassy for your site, why not integrate our Christmas banners and take advantage of the fact that people are already looking for decorations, Christmas lights and those extra xmassy stocking fillers..and if you’re getting yourself in the festive mood, why not your site as well!

Get in early for some pre-December earnings.

Try creating a wish list, including a dynamic ad in your navigation bar, or even a text link amongst your product reviews.

Have a look at this example* to get you going:

christmas-ad-banners

If you’d like any assistance in finding certain products within our portal, please do not hesitate to contact Emma.

*In the UK portal, find this example in various formats under Christmas –> Gifts, Flowers and Food

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Posted in Banner Ideas, Conferences & Upcoming events, Tips & Tricks | No Comments »

Earning Reports: new updates

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Are you familiar with our estimated earnings, payments and balance reporting data?

We appreciate that being able to view your reports is extremely important, so lately we have made many improvements in order for you to get even more from this tab.

With this great update you will once again be able to view your daily estimated earnings both within the Publisher Portal ‘Home’ page reporting snapshot pod, and the more comprehensive ‘View Reports’ tool.

Thanks to improvements, the reporting tool is now even better!

Thanks to improvements, the reporting tool is now even better!

Notable Improvements:

  • ‘View Reports’ will allow you to view historic earnings data within a 24-month date range
  • Publishers previously unable to view estimated earnings data due to usage of Placement IDs above 99 will be able to view an aggregate total of their estimated earnings, currently labeled as ‘<not-yet-defined>’ (#)
  • The reports are also available for download in csv, xls and xml formats if you prefer to look at them off-line.
  • Not new but worth mentioning, check your payment history

Check out our other blog posts for information on how to measure the success of your traffic, understanding your payment and earnings reporting.

Any questions or queries, please do not hesitate to contact the Shopzilla UK team who will be happy to assist.

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Posted in Payments & Reporting, Publisher Program Updates | 1 Comment »

Can Affiliate Marketing be ethical?

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Getting the balance right can often be hard

Getting the balance right can often be hard

The answer is yes, of course it can. But it is up to you as the Publisher to ensure it.

There are thousands if not millions of people out there who have jumped onto the affiliate marketing rollercoaster  in the last 10 years since internet businesses really launched themselves into society. In recent years that figure has boomed as affiliate marketing and online monetisation techniques have become ever more popular.

However, discussions about the ethics of this particular marketing medium have sparked debates across the world as to how ethical can affiliate marketing really be.

Here we provide some guidelines if you want to make sure you’re doing you’re bit for consumers:

1. Make sure you place contextually relevant ads - match the banners to your content to give your consumers a valued experience.

2. Keep your content true to form - don’t just write an article to promote a specific product, ensure the piece is in keeping with what you would normally write about.

3.  Be honest and advertise only the products you yourself would potentially buy.

4. Do some research on the ad networks/Publisher programs you wish to join before signing up - this will give you an insight into the various offers.

The Shopzilla UK Publisher program encourages publishers to integrate contextually relevant shopping content on your websites. This not only enhances your readers’ experiences (which is what we all strive for in the long-run) but also highly increases the likelihood that those visitors will click on your ads, making you more money in the long run.  Our great choice of inventory makes it really easy for you to find any product you can think of, which in turn gives you complete control over the content you place on your site.

For further tips, have a look at this great blog post from Future Conscience (www.futureconscience.com).

Posted in Affiliate Hot Topics, Tips & Tricks | 2 Comments »

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