I am puzzled by a question that has been raised frequently as of late: “In my store can I affiliate link to other products that I don’t carry?” The short answer is no. The longer answer is to actually ask a question back – “Why do you want to send the shoppers looking for your products away to someone else?”

If you are an ecommerce site (meaning you sell products using a shopping cart) and you have an affiliate program (meaning you pay affiliates to make sales of your products) you want to keep your traffic on your site purchasing from you. Many affiliates will not promote merchants that are featuring products not for sale on their own site. They don’t want to send you their traffic when you might receive compensation, but they definitely will not.

Aside from the affiliate aspect, there is the fact that you as a merchant want to look professional and trustworthy to the shoppers that find your site. If you have links that send your shoppers away, even if they were going to purchase your products and they were just curious and they clicked a link that took them away, they might never find their way back to you. Oops. Plus, it devalues your site and your product(s). Shoppers could get the uneasy feeling that you don’t believe in your product line if you are also selling other people’s products through outbound links.

While you may not have enough merchandise to sell, or you think people are looking for something you don’t have when they land on your site, the better way to handle that is to be sure that your site marketing efforts attract the right shoppers. Then once you have them, you make them feel that you are the only place they should be buying from. If you are selling blue widgets and people are landing on your site from searches for pink widgets, then you need to look at your site structure and content so that you are getting consumers who want to buy blue widgets.

It is the same for information products and sites selling services. If you can’t supply the service directly, have your visitors contact you about what they need, and then you can refer them privately after you have discussed their needs and determined you aren’t the right fit. Sites selling information products tend to cross promote, but again, you are sending your potential buyers off on a “maybe”. It’s much better for you to focus and sell them your own product instead.

You built an ecommerce site to make money by selling your own products. If you want to sell other people’s products, make a separate Web site.

Deborah Carney is an Outsourced Affiliate Program Manager and eCommerce Consultant (TeamLoxly.com) with a site dedicated to teaching affiliates and merchants (ABCsPlus.com) how to maximize their online earnings.

Originally published in FeedFront Magazine Issue 9.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 9 here

The rush of Christmas is over, so now would be a good time to see what sold during the holiday season and dedicate a site to that topic. I normally use January as a time to focus on one brand-new site. You can go into your analytics programs and see what people were looking for and make a new niche Web site.

I like to make sites that are not just sites that sell products in the fourth quarter. Too many marketers focus on making a site just for Christmas. You should focus on a site that sells year around. It is also a good time to make that hobby site that you’ve wanted to make for a long time… you know that labor of love that you’ve always wanted to make.

Try to think of things that would sell throughout the year, such as team sports products. Every time you turn on a game all you see is people in the stands with jerseys on from their favorite team. Somebody has to sell them the jerseys it might as well be you. You can also think of all the sports that run the most during the year, my last site was based on NASCAR, since the season practically runs 10 months out of the year.

Kids are playing soccer all seasons, especially in the warm weather states. These kids need new cleats, shorts, balls, etc. You can also look towards your favorite hobby and develop a site around it. Hobbies are all year round also, you don’t take a break from your favorite hobby. Like I’ve said there are many ideas you can get just by looking at your analytics programs.

In addition to your analytics program, you should also look at Google trends, and take a look at the fourth-quarter searches. Odds are using these two tools will enable you to come up with a new site idea.

Some categories that are strong across the calendar year are home renovation, cooking, tools, automotive, and you can break each one of them down into a niche.

For home renovation you might just want to focus on bathrooms. Cooking can be anything from recipes to cooking utensils. Mechanics use tools all year round, and the automotive industry could be broken down in hundreds of ways, from tires to auto insurance.

Speaking of automotive, many people research new cars online before they go into a dealer. They could be doing this research on your site. Automotive manuals are always a big seller for people trying to repair that car.

Affiliate programs exist for almost every niche, and if you can’t find a good one, you can always turn to Google AdSense or some other contextual advertising program.

Vinny O’Hare is the founder of Vincent O’Hare Consulting, (VinnyOHare.com) an Internet marketing service that provides information on how to make money online with affiliate programs and contextual advertising.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 9 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/24376105/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-9
FeedFront issue 9 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article002334

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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