Direct to merchant (DTM) pay per click (PPC) advertising is being restricted more and more, with major merchants like Amazon and EBay recently saying that they will no longer allow affiliates to use the merchant site as their landing pages in PPC campaigns. What this means is that affiliates that never built websites now need to learn how to do so and how to make landing pages that convert. Even though many affiliates made a lot of money using DTM PPC, the technique has flaws that smart affiliates should have recognized long ago.

First, affiliates have been paying for traffic and sending it off to direct to the merchant. So when the merchant pulls the plug, as many are now doing, they don’t have any residual traffic to a website of their own. The affiliates perfected the keywords and ads, but instead of sending traffic to the merchant, if they had been sending the traffic to their own website they would A. be able to continue without an issue and B. would have been building a site that had some authority and customer trust.

Next if the affiliate had their own landing pages, they could have been building a mailing list to use to contact people about similar or better products. Not a spam list, but a real list built from people that were interested in the product being promoted and possibly other similar products that can be featured on the same site. You can’t go back and change the past, but for the future look at this as an opportunity to do more for building a company brand.

Affiliates that are able to sell well through pay per click ads in the search engines have unique skills that many other people (not only affiliates, but merchants!) don’t have. Leveraging those skills to build traffic to their own websites and to build their own authority, credibility with shoppers, and email lists should take them to new levels that they weren’t aware they could achieve. If an affiliate isn’t good at building websites and landing pages, I recommend they partner with an affiliate that is good at that part, or go to sites such as elance and outsource the pieces they can’t do themselves. In the everchanging affiliate and online marketing landscape, the more you are able to utilize your skills and adapt to new requirements, the more successful you will be.

This was published in FeedFront Magazine Issue #7

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– By Deb Carney a.k.a. Loxly

Web sites need images to break up the text and show your visitors things you want them to see. Taking photos that you specifically want to use on a Web site is different than taking family photos or photos for print production.

First, they don’t have to be huge in size. You simply want an image that is big enough to show what you need, clear and properly exposed. Let’s take this step by step.

Good camera
It doesn’t have to be a DSLR to get good images to use on your Web site. You can use a small camera or even the camera in your phone, as long as it has good optics and exposure settings. The largest size image you want to show on a Web site is about 500×500 pixels, which is very small by today’s camera standards.
But you want that image to be super sharp. If your phone takes blurry underexposed pictures, don’t use it. Most digital cameras are fine for general photography.

If you need to take close ups of products, you will need a better camera, one with a “macro” mode that will let you get close to your subject. Be careful, though, with close up shots that you don’t use a lens that makes the subject distorted (fisheye effect).

And remember that since you don’t need large files you can crop to make the subject bigger.

Hold it Steady
Hold your camera steady when you are taking pictures that you are going to use online. If it is in the evening or at night and you don’t want to use a flash (like night shots in a city for a travel site) lean the camera on a light pole or a mailbox.

Anything that you can set the camera on that won’t move can be used as a makeshift tripod. Even if you have a tripod, some cities and parks don’t allow them to be used in certain areas without a permit.

Good Exposure
For daytime pictures, shooting outdoors in sunlight is usually fine, but avoid shooting directly into the sun. Indoors you want to use a flash to avoid images that are dark or have a yellow overtone to them.

Crop it
Use a photo editing software (most computers come with them now, and there are plenty of free ones) to crop your images and resize them.

The image that comes straight from the camera is WAY too big to use on your Web site. Don’t use the resize tags in your HTML code to make the file fit. Doing that uses valuable bandwidth and slows your page load time.

Open the picture in your editing software and use the crop function to eliminate extra space around your subject. Next resize the image so that it is 500 pixels on its longest edge. Then use File, Save As to save the modified version of your image.

Hopefully these tips will help you take pictures that will spice up your Web site and make a good impression on your site visitors.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 5 here