Ranking 4th behind Direct to site (35%), Paid search (20%), and SEO (18%), affiliate marketing is one of the more complex marketing initiatives to get involved with. Due to the complexities in sourcing your own program, or working with an affiliate management company, many smaller web businesses are having a hard time getting started with affiliate marketing.

The great allure to affiliate marketing is that you only pay for those sales that are made on your site. Unlike PPC, SEO and email marketing, your overall expense in using affiliate marketing will be directly coorilated to your sales. In PPC, you are paying for clicks not sales; SEO, your paying for higher rankings; and in email marketing, your paying for emails sent/opened. Affiliate marketing is really the only system that you pay out after the sale is made.

Many of the product/service review, informational, coupon, directory, and blog websites out there are linked in with affiliate programs. This is why affiliate marketing is such a powerful tool.  However, the FTC recently enacted a rule that requires affiliate publishers to disclose their connection with the product/company they are endorsing. The long-term implication of this rule will remain to be seen.

The benefits of the program are many:

• Fixed costs – you set the commission amount for each sale.
• Performance based – only pay affiliates when purchases are made from your site.
• Gain exposure from new mediums (coupon and shopping comparison websites).
• Increase your online visibility and branding with added advertising avenues (in addition to your own marketing initiatives).
• Increase visitors (at low cost) - as affiliates send customers your way, many of them are not going to make a purchase, however, they might sign up for your email newsletter or post your website/products to their social marketing profiles.

Affiliate marketing offers a truly unique approach to increasing sales on your websites.

Some of the challenges with affiliate marketing include:

• Cost of entry – unlike other mediums, the setup costs are much higher.
• Finding quality affiliates – even using an affiliate management company, it is sometimes difficult to find affiliates who will sell your product.
• Affiliate attrition - if your competition is offering higher commissions, or has more appeal to the publisher, you may lose your affiliate partners.
• Maintenance – you will have to allocate time to review affiliates, watch for fraud, monitor affiliate methods, and ensure non-compliant affiliates are removed from your program.

While affiliate marketing has many benefits, it is also a challenging medium to setup and maintain: due to the myriad of options in working with your affiliates. For example, you could use a combination of product feeds, promotions, banner ads, contests, and other such mechanisms to help your affiliates drive more sales for you.

There are basically two methods to start an affiliate program; by managing it yourself, or partnering with a management company. For smaller web businesses, trying to manage a program on your own will prove to be very difficult, if not counter-productive. But it also becomes costly to partner with an affiliate management company.

Top Affiliate Management Companies
As per Internet Retailer; Cj.com (62%), Linkshare.com (24%), and The Google Affiliate Network (13%), are the top 3 providers used by the 500 retailers in thier survey. Below are the topline details of each of these companies. Sign up as a publisher for each of these, and look through their system to see what other advertisers/publishers are using them, as how well their systems function.

Commisions Junction (Cj.com)

 LinkShare (LinkShare.com)

 Google Affiliate Network (http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/)

• the “+” sign next to your Adwords ad (+ Show Products from…)-this is generated from your Adwords and Google Product Search integration
• above the right column Sponsored Links section, which is generated from the Google Affiliate Network (see: http://www.google.com/support/affiliatenetwork/advertiser/) and Google Product Search integration
• Shopping Results display within the organic listings, which is generated from Google Product Search

Google is slowly changing the landscape of product searches with feeds from their Shopping system. Google Products optimization requires a strategy and time for implementation. Develop a strategy for getting your products indexed in Google Product Search, and continually optimize your feeds to help supplement your SEO/Adwords efforts.

Google Search Results "samsonite luggage"

Why Google Shopping
The Google Shopping platform has been around for years, first labeled as Google Base, it had a slow start as it wasn’t fully adopted by users. Initially being featured on the homepage for Google, it didn’t gain the traction Google expected, and it was removed from their homepage real estate. Google recently re-added the Shopping link to the new fade-in navigation bar, and more so, has been making major updates to how the products in the Shopping site display within search engine results.

The top benefits of submitting to Google Shopping and Google Shopping search optimization are:

1. Your products will be listed within their Product Search site at http://www.google.com/products?hl=en, which is now linked to on the Google homepage
2. Your products can be syndicated to other websites, applications, and systems through Google’s Data API-which means you could receive more exposure as other web entities adopt this system
3. If you have high ranking on the Product Search site, your product images, name and price will be listed within the SERP’s (see image above-Google Search Results “samsonite luggage”)
4. If you are running Google Adwords, your products will be attached to your Adwords campaign (see image below) 
5. If you are a part of the Google Affiliate Network, your products can show up on the right column Sponsored Links section

Google Search Results; Adwords and Product Feeds

Right now, setting up and submitting your ecommerce site’s products to the Shopping site is free. However, it will only be a matter of time before Google starts to integrate the Shopping feed within Adwords so users can develop product image ads. Google is tracking the results of this roll-out to gauge the effectiveness of the implementation-hopefully, they will open up the system in the near future for Adwords users, rather than just Google Affiliate users. Now is the perfect time to setup your Google Products optimization strategy!

To learn more about the Google Affiliate program check out http://www.google.com/support/affiliatenetwork/advertiser/ 

Getting Started
I put together a short list to help setup the Google Merchant account, which controls the products feeds. You will still need to develop the system that provides the actual product feed to Google Merchant, which is a different process. The Google Products optimization plan is going to be unique to each industry, as different product have different competitive advantages, attributes, etc…

Experiment with different attributes for your products to see which yield the better rankings.

• Browse to http://www.google.com/merchants to setup your Google Merchant account
  • Configure/Optimize General Settings
    • Name, description, URL, address, contact information, display preferences
  • Setup Tax and Shipping summary
  • Share account with Adwords (if applicable)
  • Setup Google Checkout (if applicable)
• Product Data Analysis and Optimisation
  • The required fields are: condition, description, id, link, price and title
  • Invest extra time to ensure the following required fields are properly defined:
    • title – product name – suggested maximum length of 70 characters
      Structure the title so it includes the product name, but also the keywords you want to rank for.
    • description – product text, up to a maximum length of 10,000 characters
      Again, make sure the keywords you want to rank for are included within the description.
  • Invest time on a few of the optional fields:
    • brand – if applicable list the brand of the product; this helps Google organized the same products for better comparison shopping.
    • image link – be sure to include the full-sized images, Google will re-size accordingly. You can add multiple product images to your listing which may boost ranking. Make sure you link to a http link of the image, not https!
    • isbn or mpn – the manufacturers part number; another method for Google to organize the same products
    • upc – unique product code or SKU number (http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160161)
    • product type – the category in where your product should be listed (http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=160081&hl=en)
    • See a full list of all the available Google attributes at http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=160085&hl=en
    • In case you need to define your own custom attributes, check out http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=160602&hl=en
  • Encourage customers to create ratings at the following sites; Resellerratings.com, Pricegrabber.com, Rateitall.com, Bizrate.com, Reviewcenter.com, Shopping.com, Epinions.com – positive ratings may help boost your ranking
  • Add a tag to each product so Google Analytics can track it; e.g., &utm_source=GoogleBase&utm_medium=ComparisonShopping&utm_campaign=[product name]
• Testing Feed
  • Check Google Merchant account to ensure the feed was submitted
    • Check Active, Inactive, Data Quality, and Performance reports
  • Edit/update content based upon errors in report
  • Verify products show up on Google Shopping (with Google Checkout icon, if applicable)
  • Verify stats are being logged in Google Analytics
• Optimize
  • Experiment with adding optional attributes, custom attributes, and description text. Since Google cant factor in back links to the product listings, it will probably heavily consider click-through data for its ranking.

It is also important to strip out html/code characters. Try using htmlentities, but define all the possible characters that need to be converted (including CSS/HTML) as Google will disapprove the product if it includes HTML markup. Make sure to meet the content length, image, and data quality requirements/policy, or your products will be disapproved.

Google Product Search is extremely flexible-try submitting a few of your products manually to start experimenting without investing the time needed to develop a full-on dynamic product feed system. Remember that Google Products optimization is just like search engine optimization; it takes time and effort to achieve success!

SportKilt - SERP Dominance