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How to Profit from Seasonal Shopping April 2002

Published on: April 19, 2002Category: Ad Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

When our last newsletter was published in January, the Holiday shopping results were not yet in, but reports over the last three months have made it clear that online holiday shopping is a growing phenomenon. For example, the traffic to shopping sites for the five weeks preceding Christmas over the last 3 years has been:

Holiday season Average weekly unique visitors
1999 26,303,000
2000 34,265,000
2001 51,318,000

In terms of unique visits, there is a 50 percent increase compared with the 2000 holiday shopping season and a 95 percent increase versus 1999.
(Statistics provided by Jupiter Media Metrix). Click here for a weekly breakdown for 2001.*

In terms of actual sales revenue, online sales in the fourth quarter of 2001 totaled about USD10.5 billion, up from USD10 billion last year according to ComScore Networks (ComScore’s estimates do not include online travel sales).

Bizrate, on the other hand, estimated online spending for the fourth quarter of 2001 to be USD12.4 billion (up 35 percent on last year) and its estimate for the holiday season is USD 6.4 billion.

In order to profit from an online seasonal rush it is important to think ahead. Unfortunately, most promotion activities take a few months to kick in. However, there are some short term tactics that you can use before an upcoming lucrative season to bring the customers to you. These tactics can be used for any seasonal rush, be it for holidays, sports seasons, back to school or even events such as Formula One Racing, the World Cup Soccer or the Olympics. Below is a breakdown of some short-term marketing tactics that have immediate results, as well as long term tactics that take more time to mature.

Short-term tactics:

Inktomi

  • You can submit specific web pages to the Inktomi directory for under $40 each and they will add you to their database in less than 48 hours! This is great for seasonal specials. However, it is up to you to make sure that your page is well optimized to increase your potential for high rankings. In other words, the page that you submit should be about the keyphrase that you are targeting. Once you are in the Inktomi directory you can also be found in the following search engines: MSN, AOL, Overture, Hotbot, Iwon, LookSmart, About, and Espotting.

Pay-for-placement

  • Starting a pay for placement campaign produces very fast results; but you can bet your laptop that you will not be the only one to bid on terms like “Christmas Gift” next December. Nevertheless, if you have a page on your site relating to something specific, it is a good idea to bid on that item in Overture when the demand is highest. Overture is also useful for seasonal specials since any changes made to a listing are posted the same day. See our previous issue for more details on pay-for-placement bidding.

Long term tactics:

Search engine and directory submissions

  • The most cost-effective way to attract traffic (even for something seasonal like ski equipment) is to work at it all year round. For example, if you have a summer collection and a winter collection of products, you are much better off having two sites instead of flip-flopping your site with the seasons. This way each site will have the whole year to climb in the search results pages and your traffic will be better with each coming year. To switch collections to accommodate each season on the same site would entail having to start from scratch at the onset of every season.

Keyword Research

  • In any search engine positioning campaign, it always pays off to conduct proper keyword research. Knowing which keywords are most in demand, and which ones are overloaded with competition, is essential to making informed decisions about which keywords to focus on.

Other interesting 2001 Holiday shopping facts:

  • In marked contrast to their offline counterparts, few online retailers slashed their prices towards the end of the holiday season. (ComScore)
  • There was a strong growth in clothing and consumer electronics sectors in particular. (ComScore)
  • The number of online holiday shoppers grew from 53 million adults in the 2000 holiday shopping season to 64 million in the 2001 holiday season. (Jupiter Media Metrix)
  • The average spend per order was up 13 percent ($126 USD from $112 USD last year). Consumers also spent an average of 27 percent more on shipping, and 87 percent of orders were delivered on time.(BizRate)

In terms of the top shopping sites, Jupiter Media Metrix provided the following list of average daily unique visitors over the five week 2001 holiday season. These top sites should give you an idea of the holiday shopping mentality.

# website 2001 Holiday Season
Average Daily Unique Visitors in the U.S.
Home/Work Combined
1 ebay.com 4,515,000
2 amazon.com 2,519,000
3 mypoints.com 2,016,000
4 bizrate.com 683,000
5 half.com 660,000
6 mcafee.com 652,000
7 columbia house sites 598,000
8 eshop.com 588,000
9 americangreetings.com 563,000
10 toysrus 515,000
11 barnesandnoble.com 447,000
12 walmart.com 434,000
13 bestbuy.com 416,000
14 dell.com 408,000
15 bmgmusicservice.com 379,000

If you are wondering which products or services to promote, visit these sites to see what they are offering. If you can combine the right product with the right keyword, and promote it so that shoppers can find you, then you will truly profit from the public’s growing love affair with e-shopping during the holidays.

Jason Campbell

If you have any comments on this article, please respond to news@redcarpetweb.com

Jason Campbell is the co-founder and President at Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc.

300

Affiliate marketing

Published on: August 19, 2001Category: SEO Blog

The Merchant’s guide to affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is the invisible sales force behind e-commerce. It is the wires that we do not always see, but that we know are carrying a current. Setting up and running a successful affiliate campaign is not as easy as connecting a few loose wires. An affiliate campaign requires experience and planning. Fortunately affiliate marketing has been around for about six years, so you can learn from the experience of others. As for planning, we have assembled some guidelines to facilitate the task.

Affiliate marketing is used by a long list of companies of all sizes. Some examples of popular companies with affiliate programs are Amazon, Gap, IBM and Xerox. These merchants, for example, pay commissions to anyone who generates sales by placing links to the merchant’s products on their website.

Chris Diggins is a programmer who works from his cosy apartment in Montreal. Three years ago he created an online guide for Montreal students that consisted of useful resources and links to other websites that would be interesting to international students in Montreal. (See www.studentsguide.com). The idea was to generate traffic and then to find a way to make money with that traffic (Sound familiar?). However, rather than selling advertising space on his site, Diggins chose to become an affiliate. In other words, he found merchants who would give him commissions on goods that he sold from his site. Soon after, the student’s guide had a poster gallery where visitors could browse through popular posters and order posters from a merchant’s site. For each poster that Diggins sold from his Montreal student’s guide he received 25% of the sale price. He has built other sites since and currently generates sales in excess of $25,000 per month (He receives about 25% of that amount in commissions).

How do you attract people like Diggins to sell your products? First you need to figure out how to set up a program to track your sales from affiliates. You can track your sales with a third party affiliate manager or you may decide to create and manage your own affiliate program in-house.

Third party

Third party affiliate managing companies take care of many of the tasks involved in running an affiliate program.
They provide:

  • Quick exposure
  • Experience dealing with affiliates
  • Infrastructure for tracking and reporting
  • Access to a large number of potential affiliates who would be interested in marketing your products on their website or creating websites to market your products.

The most popular third party affiliate managers are Commission Junction, Be Free, Linkshare and Reporting.net. Depending on which company you choose, you will be required to pay a start up fee, an additional percentage of the commissions that you are offering your affiliates or a hefty fixed annual fee.

Chris Diggins’ advice about using a third party is that it is a good idea, especially if you are just starting your affiliate program, or if you do not have much experience in affiliate marketing. Even with a third party there is still a lot of in-house work, including managing, verifying, responding and recruiting affiliates. After several months, if you realize that your affiliate campaign is successful enough to support an in-house affiliate program and that doing so will save you money in the long run, then it may be time to switch to an in-house system.

In-house

To bypass the third party affiliate manager, you really have to know what you are doing! Technical knowledge and experience dealing with an affiliate program are necessary. You will probably need a team of developers and an experienced affiliate program manager in order to run your affiliate campaign. Your team will require the following skills:

  1. Technical skills to update and improve the automated affiliate management system
  2. Marketing skills for strategies to make your affiliate program successful
  3. People-relation skills to keep all of your affiliates happy

Top affiliates

With either a third party or an in-house system, you will soon learn that a few of your affiliates are generating most of your affiliate sales. The 5/95 rule applies in which approximately 5% of your affiliates will be generating approximately 95% of your sales. Many merchants have wondered how to attract “top affiliates.” Top affiliates are hard to find and hard to attract.

Once you have signed up affiliates and they have set up links to your site, it is important that they remain satisfied. Treat your best affiliates with special care to make sure that they continue to work for you.

  • Remember that affiliates can quickly grab one of your competitors instead of you, so it is important that they remain satisfied with your affiliate program.
  • Remember that affiliates talk amongst themselves. If you upset them, if you are not paying them on time or if you lower their commissions it will really hurt your affiliate program.
  • Remember that you cannot take money away from affiliates once you have already paid them. So take returned items into account when choosing your commission structure and schedule.

Learn from your competitors

Affiliate marketing is more flexible than just paying commissions to your affiliates “per sale.” There are various models of commissions. The most popular commission models are: “per sale”, “per lead”, and “per hit.” In order to choose a commission structure, first consider what type of commission your competitors offer. Each industry has its own standard.
Click here for more details.

To be set up you must 1) have the tracking program in place, 2) have determined your commission structure 3) have attracted a team of affiliates. Once you are set up the next task is to help your affiliates to do well. Encourage affiliates by offering extra incentives. Provide tools such as banners and searches for them to link to your site. Think of them as a sales team that requires your support. Diggins’ says that an affiliate is:

“like a travelling sales man, like a franchiser, like many things but no exact parallel exists in traditional business. You have to treat it just as seriously as if you were franchising things out. You can’t go in half-cocked. The biggest drawback is poor planning. If you have to go back and fix an error such as lowering commission rates for instance, it will cause a major setback to your affiliate program.”

If you have been planning to launch your affiliate program I hope that I have provided new points for you consider. The best advice that I have heard so far is to become an affiliate for another merchant before launching your own program.

Good luck!
Jason Campbell

Jason interviewed Chris Diggins on July 30th 2001 on the subject of setting up an affiliate campaign.
If you have any comments on this article, please respond to news@redcarpetweb.com

Jason Campbell is the co-founder and President at Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc.