To follow up from yesterday’s post on why you should include “free shipping” in your title tags and meta descriptions (only if you offer it, of course) — today I’m going to demonstrate why you should create a unique page optimized for your “brand name + free shipping.”

We mentioned yesterday that people search for “free shipping.” There’s no doubt.

And people search for products with “free shipping” as a modifier.

Guess what else they search on? Your store name plus free shipping. And who ranks? Often affiliates, deals and coupon sites.

Check out the related searches suggested by Google when you search for “free shipping.”

Let’s click on “free shipping JC Penney”:

Now, JC Penney needs a page optimized for “free shipping” so it would rank #1. Of course, JC Penney doesn’t need to offer free shipping all the time to have its own dedicated page. The page just needs to exist, all the time, as a landing page for “free shipping jc penney” traffic.

These searchers are going to find the coupons one way or the other, so why not have a landing page (perhaps a sub-section of customer service) that shows which products qualify for free shipping at any given moment, and has a link to an RSS feed for future free shipping offers, or an email sign-up link? Then you can even segment these cheapo-s out into their own bucket in your email campaigns (I’m kidding, but I’m not kidding).

And don’t forget keywords in the title tag: “JC Penney Free Shipping Offers.”

Affiliate marketing has been a hot topic since the heated session at the Internet Retailer Conference in Chicago. With Affiliate Summit East happening next week, let’s listen to what John Chow, one of the most famous affiliates in the world, has to say about affiliate marketing, and how to treat “super affiliates.”

If you’re hungry for more affiliate tips and commentary, check out our related posts on affiliate marketing.

A Get Elastic reader asked a question last week about duplicate content issues, SEO and providing affiliates with content. Our reader manages SEO for an affiliate site which has a sub-program of affiliate partners that do not use their own content on their sites, rather opt to use the content from the mother-site.

He wanted to know what he could do to protect his site from duplicate content problems that arise from content syndication. This refers to the way search engines filter out copies of a page on multiple domains and choose one or two sites to actually rank for the content.

You as a retailer with an affiliate program may wish to provide content for affiliates such as expert / editorial product reviews, general advice / guides on the product or activities related to the product or even product description content itself. This is great affiliate nurturing on the part of your affiliate management team - but it’s vulnerable to duplicate content filtering.

What is Duplicate Content Filtering?

If a search engine returned a bunch of results for your search query that were pretty much the same, you would get a bit irritated, wouldn’t you? Search engines understand this, and have tweaked their algorithms to filter very similar pages so you get a range of results that are relevant, but still different enough.

Continue Reading:
Dodging Duplicate Content Filters While Assisting Affiliates »

Yesterday we talked about Karmaloop’s SEO success. Today we’re going to talk about its innovative affiliate marketing widget. Most of Karmaloop’s customers and Facebook group members have no clue about what affiliate marketing is. But many are masters of their MySpace domain, or Facebook profile, or maybe even a blog. So they’re qualified to evangelize Karmaloop through these profiles with the widget, while earning “Rep Points” to reward them for their participation.

GET YOUR CUSTOM WIDGET HERE!
Now you can promote your favorite Karmaloop products and EARN REP POINTS on your Myspace page or facebook or website with the Karmaloop Widget. Just fill out the form then copy and paste the code on your Myspace page or facebook or website.

Example:

See the widget in action on Facebook.

Today, we all know how important customer reviews are to retailers and customers alike. They help convert buyers by building trust and confidence in the product, they reduce returns, draw long-tail search traffic and are a simple entry into on-site communities for ecommerce websites.

But there was a time when no one had them. It makes you wonder what we’re missing today that we don’t know we’re missing.

Let’s take another effective merchandising tool: cross-selling. Currently, ecommerce marketers are banking that their personal cross-sell suggestions or algorithmic-based recommendations will be relevant and attractive to shoppers. This *can* be really hit and miss. But what if we gave customers a crack at cross-selling?

Continue Reading:
User Generated Cross-Sells? Why Is Nobody Doing It? »

Last week we held an affiliate marketing webinar with Shawn Collins (recap and replay available). We covered a lot of ground in one short hour, but one area that wasn’t discussed in depth is how affiliate programs can affect your SEO.

Problem: Duplicate Content Knocks Your Pages from Search Engines

Some affiliate networks provide affiliates with direct links to your site with an appended URL including an affiliate ID. An example would be http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456.

When search engines visit your affiliates’ websites, unless your affiliate has added a “rel=nofollow” attribute to the link to tell search engines not to follow the link, the search engine will follow the link and index the landing page — a duplicate copy of your home page, category page or product page, wherever the link was pointing. If an affiliate builds up link juice with keyword-rich anchor text to its own copies of your page (for example, buying paid links on blogs), it’s possible that http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456 outranks http://www.yoursite.com. What’s worse is that the duplicate content filter might wipe out your page for showing in results for that keyword/s, especially when you have thousands of affiliates and thousands of duplicate pages. This means you pay commissions on sales from organic search that you otherwise could have attracted yourself.

2 Possible Workarounds

A 301 (permanent) eliminates this possibility as you tell the search engine that http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456 is forever the same as http://www.yoursite.com. And yes, any Page Rank the affiliate URL has will be passed on to your site. To do this, you likely have to bring your affiliate program in-house and create a proper tracking system so affiliates get their commissions.

Continue Reading:
Tips for SEO Friendly Affiliate Programs »

Thanks again to our special webinar guest today, Shawn Collins. A 10 year veteran of affiliate marketing both on the affiliate manager side and the publisher side, Shawn shared his expertise on a number of topics.

If you missed today’s call, here’s a full recap. If you would rather, just watch the on-demand version of the affiliate marketing webinar.

Affiliate Marketing Players

Affiliates - Refers to content publishers who promote your products for a commission or other monetary incentive including bloggers, product review portals, ezine publishers (experts on a topic with loyal mailing list subscribers) or even social networking sites like Imeem or Last.fm.

Merchants - Retailers (products) or site owners (memberships) that pay a flat fee, per click or revenue share with affiliates for sales or leads.

Networks - Networks like Commission Junction and Linkshare provide a marketplace of affiliate programs where affiliates and sellers can connect.

Continue Reading:
Killer Affiliate Management Tips With Shawn Collins »

Since the launch of the Facebook Development Platform, literally hundreds of applications have been popping up each day. It seems most of these applications will never be added beyond the developer and his Top 8 friends. And you may be wondering: What might possess someone to go through the trouble of creating a Facebook application?

Of course, some developers will slave themselves just to make something cool for the Facebook-o-sphere to love, enjoy and share with all their friends. But there are at least 4 other reasons:

• For Branding (You’re a development house or a popular brand)
• To Sell (Example: Where I’ve Been gets bought by TripAdvisor)
• For Specific Actions (Affiliate products like iLike linking to iTunes)
• For Page Views (If you’re selling banner ad space on your application)

Continue Reading:
Who Makes $1 Million off their Facebook Application Every Week? »

Facebook launched 3 new advertising options for businesses this week: Business Pages, Social Ads and Project Beacon.

Here’s the gist of Tuesday’s major announcement and how it impacts online retailers and other businesses:

Business Pages

Sponsored Groups have been dumped for free profile pages for any brand or business. True, any business can simply create a profile and added friends, but Business Pages are unique.

Here’s an example of the Join (RED) Page:

Continue Reading:
Facebook Advertising - 3 New Ways To Play »

Twitter is a social networking site that has been described as “microblogging” as it’s essentially a way to post really brief content. I believe the original concept was to create a way for people to let others know what they were doing at any given moment (like Facebook status updates) “I’m watching football,” “I’m going out for sushi,” “the cat is driving me crazy” sort of thing. But users have found bigger and better applications for Twitter. Not long ago I reported on Amazon and Woot’s use of Twitter as a way to broadcast short news bytes and deals of the day to customers. Today I’m going to expand on Twitter’s ecommerce marketing potential for one-to-one customer service, reputation management, affiliate management and a free alternative to mcommerce marketing.

Continue Reading:
Ecommerce Microblogging: More Reasons To Use Twitter »