Affiliate marketing, affiliate data feeds, and search engine marketing tips from Affiliate Insight.
With a new PHP-based datafeed that has been nearly 1 year in the making, XLP has now made it possible for affiliates to grab live pricing data as well as to place items directly into the XLP shopping cart. While the direct connection to the shopping cart promises higher conversions, the overall setup leaves quite a few loose ends for the affiliate wanting to leverage standard datafeed tools. Is there a better way?
If you’ve followed the advice doled out by just about everyone in the affiliate marketing space, you will have spent the month of August building and writing and testing and getting as much work done as you possibly can. Conventional ‘wisdom’ on strategy has it that while consumer sales in the northern hemisphere go through a seasonal lull, affiliate marketers ought to use the time to work, work, work. Here’s to dumping conventional wisdom and thinking for yourself.
The folks over at RXL — one of our ‘top picks’ affiliate programs — have completed their previously announced pricing updates and have made some small changes to the overall product catalogue. Together with earlier hikes in FedEx fees, which have been passed on to customers by most affiliate-driven programs, these increases provide further evidence of firming in the prices paid by pharmaceutical end customers.
Have your conversions dropped? Or are you just in awe at how impressively your traffic levels have grown over the last few months? Either way, bad bots — automated crawlers that ignore established web standards for excluding them — could be inflating your traffic levels beyond all recognition. Unless you are taking specific steps to handle them, it’s likely that you don’t nearly as much as you’d like to know about your own web traffic.
Jeff Moolander has brewed up a real tempest in a teacup by publicly advertising and selling — to anyone who asks for it — a list of top performing affiliates. Selling information that was originally obtained with an understanding of confidentiality is a very serious matter. But our take on the controversy is that little of the ire which Moolander’s move has generated comes from concern over breaching confidentiality: rather, it comes from worries about having black hat or other illegitimate techniques exposed to affiliates’ competitors.
So you’ve read our previous article on the ‘Top 5 Reasons to Avoid Javascript Datafeeds’, and you’re wondering what to do if you really have to use a Javascript feed — for instance, because that’s all your merchant provides. You’ve come to the right place… This article explains some of the steps you can take to overcome some or even all of the disadvantages of a Javascript feed.
The folks over at RX Limited have boosted their product catalogue with over 100 new products and have updated their ready-to-fly affiliate templates to incorporate the new products. There is also news of some small changes in FedEx shipping charges.
If you haven’t tried Google’s AdWords yet, what are you waiting for? For a limited time, Google is offering a free £20 voucher to new advertisers.
Barry over at SE Roundtable mentions a new blog dedicated specifically to link building, run by the folks behind Text Link Ads. Already a few good articles are turning up in the new link building blog.
We hear from the folks at XLP that a sudden spike in the number of chargebacks is due to a large number of fraudulent orders which hit the merchant over the last several weeks. Apparently it is under control now, and affiliates can look forward to the chargeback rates dropping back toward zero.