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.

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 »

Widgets are becoming the norm on social networks, blogs, and start pages. Google has just released their version of an ecommerce widget (which they call a gadget) for the iGoogle start page and everywhere else that can take a snippet of code. It was announced on the Google Checkout blog.

Now, this is not what I would classify as an ecommerce gadget. You cannot conduct a transaction, but it is a good indication of what Google has in mind.

Continue Reading:
Google to Shake Up SEO With Ecommerce Gadget »

When veteran companies like Random House embrace very forward thinking marketing practices like ecommerce widgets, the winds of change must be blowing.

What is a widget? Simply, a third party item that can be embedded in a web page. The most common being embedded Google AdSense ads or YouTube videos (most often found on blogs and social networks like MySpace).
What is an ecommerce widget? Well a widget that helps sell stuff of course.

Random House ‘gets it widget on’ in a similar fashion as the popular Amazon ‘Search Inside’ feature with something called ‘Insight‘.

Bloggers and social networkers can embed their favorite book widget so visitors to their blog or profile can:

• view the book cover
• view inside the book (or in the case of audio books, listen to a sample)
• buy the book (links into the product page of the online store)
• get the widget code themselves

The Random House ecommerce widget is seen below:

Learn more about the Random House ecommerce widget or read detailed coverage of the offering at Read/WriteWeb - Random House - Widgets and Web Services Done Right.

Note: Random House runs on the Elastic Path ecommerce software platform with excellent integration with SAP, which makes this story even more cool.