Smart devices are driving up online sales
If you plan to offer an affiliate scheme, have you considered how to differentiate your content from that you offer to affiliates? And have you considered how to expand into mobile?
By Nichola Stott at theMediaFlow
In part two of this series we’ll examine:
• Affiliate strategies that complement, not compete
• Mobile best-practise
Affiliate Strategies
An affiliate will help you sell your product by promoting it on their website in exchange for a cut of the deal. Using affiliates to help sell your product can be a great way to get your business moving from the outset as you only pay when a sale is made. Many affiliates specialise in being affiliates!
They are very web-savvy, tend to be quite knowledgeable about SEO and will already have established websites that may have good authority built up. Just like in any business sector on or offline there will be some people who use unethical tactics to promote their business and in some cases in past years, this meant that some affiliate websites that offered little value or originality to end users began to dominate search results.
Search engines have done quite a lot in past years to discourage these kinds of tactics and successful affiliates nowadays may tend to have good, original content and functionality that may add value. In the past this wasn’t always the case and one of the main ways in which this could cause problems would be if an affiliate website had little to no content outside of your product content.
Search engines hate duplicate content as it creates difficulty in determining which source is the originator and which the imitator. Pages that are algorithmically determined to be copying another sites’ content are often ranked very low or may not rank at all.
The danger for you in launching a new website, which from birth will have little history or authority; is that if an affiliate website uses all your content as-is, they may be seen as the authoritative source for your content. In such situations, at best you will be struggling to compete with your own affiliates for your own product. At worst (and I’ve actually worked on a site where they had this problem) you may not rank at all!
To take advantage of affiliate websites without putting your own website at risk think about the following:
• Do not allow affiliates to copy your content
• Create different content specifically for affiliates (either in a product database spreadsheet or data feed)
• Ensure the running order of your product name is a little different to the format you will use
• If possible try not to provide every single feature and specification in the feed but rather a functional amount
• Provide a different short description than the one you will use
• Save your most detailed product information for your site
• Re-name image files
• Provide enough images to help them sell the product but save the best images and widest range for your site
Mobile Best Practise
When launching a new website you have the chance to get it right from the outset. We’ve all seen the figures about the rise of mobile transactions and how smart devices are powering the huge rise in people becoming more used to buying online through their portable devices.
It’s almost becoming an expectation now that any website I’m familiar with, should work well if I try to access it on my iPad or iPhone. You may have experienced yourself how frustrating it can be to be redirected to “our mobile site” which is on a different domain or sub-domain (m.whatever.com) and generally has reduced content and functionality.
Not only does duplicating your site on another domain in a slightly different format cause duplicate content risks of the type mentioned above; but this can also dilute your link equity and cause users to go elsewhere i.e. to a site that works well on their phone and gives them the same experience they would get from the desktop.
Instead, make sure your site design and build is responsive using adaptive CSS, which allows for relative sizing according to the user-device. That way you don’t need to duplicate your own content on another domain and the content will be optimised according to whoever visits it. Do consider the following in your site design so that it can be as broadly accommodating as possible.
• Keep your navigation as simple as possible
• Make sure your basket and check-out is clearly visible and accessible from any page
• Avoid flash as it won’t render on iOS devices (try HTML5 for video instead)
• Don’t fear white spaces on form pages – make sure these fields can be easily hit accurately by fingers as well as for mouse users
Getting this right from the start means that attracting visits and sales from people using their mobile devices is a non-issue. You won’t then have to think about “mobile SEO” or a mobile marketing strategy – it’s a total online marketing strategy.
Best of luck with your new website and business! Working on a start-up e-commerce website is a fantastic chance to do things right from the get-go, maximising your future potential and making sure your future spend on marketing solutions like SEO is all about growth and not repair.
More information at theMediaFlow
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