Bloggers Digest – 12/14/2007

Get Elastic News

• The archive of the affiliate marketing webinar is now available for anyone who missed it.

• Catch my latest submission to YouMoz for some Pay-Per-Click keyword research tips: How eBay Can Improve Your PPC Campaign Performance (thanks to all who helped it go “hot” on Sphinn yesterday!)

Google News

• Some of you may already notice that Google’s experimenting with new Products layouts in search results, here’s the details from Valley Wag.

  

  I can’t see that layout in my Google, it might be a geographic thing. But I did notice today that Google changed “Products” to “Shopping” – which may be a clearer label for Google’s product search. Google has many of its own products like Gmail and Docs, which may just get ignored by users.

  

• Google Analytics launched some new graphing tools, and Nick Stamoulis gives us a warning:
  

  I’m really excited about this new feature, but a word of caution: It does use different code than Google AdWords’ urchin.js code. If you decide to use it you’ll have to completely take out the urchin.js code on your pages. Otherwise, neither code will work properly and you won’t track squat.

  Affiliate Marketing

  • This is not hot-of-the-presses, but a great introduction for retailers thinking of entering the affiliate marketing game, or those who want to know the best-practices for running their affiliate program. The ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum’s Consolidated List of Affiliate Friendly Policies is a fabulous primer.

  Usability

  • Alexis Brion shares how Amazon’s pop-up product pictures are poor usability, and how Tesco shows us a better way.

  Customer Service

  • Amazon’s Autumn Walker shows some finesse and a sense of humor in response to a sarcastic email from a blogger, complaining that his not winning a laptop in Amazon’s Black Friday promotion robs the world of the next great novel of our time. This is worth a chuckle: Amazon Sends “Best Customer Service E-mail I’ve Ever Received”.

  • Better Retail compares customer experience for competitors Crutchfield and Car Toys.
  • Justin Palmer shares 15 best practices for shipping policies. Excellent as always.

  SEO

  • Matt Cutts (from Google’s Spam Team) explains how the Big G will be handling sub-domains from now on.

  • Jennifer Osborne answers the 5 most common client questions about SEO which is a good read for anyone thinking of hiring an SEO firm, and SEO firms who get these questions ALL the time.