November 20, 2006

How to Optimize a Shoplinc Store

In my last post I wrote a series of tips on how to use Chitika’s eMiniMalls and RPU ads. Today I want to turn my attention to their Shoplinc product (aff).

I’ve had reasonable (and increasing) success with Shoplinc since it launched a few months back. Once you have people in the Shop it converts very well (high CTR as there is limited other options to click on). The challenge however is getting people INTO your shop in the first place. This is not as simple as adding a ’shop’ link to your menu (although this is one thing you should do).

One single link into your shop is not enough - consider adding other ‘doorways’ in including:

Deep Linking Strategies - the way that I’ve found works best to get people into my Shoplinc is through deep linking from individual posts on my blog to individual products in the Shoplinc.

Each product in Shoplinc has it’s own URL which means that if you link to it that you’ll have a permanent doorway into the shop.

When I first signed up for Shoplinc I spent a few days going through thousands of my old posts setting up such links in my posts. Typically they look like this:

Compare prices on the Canon EOS 30D

Of course this link works best if it’s from a page (or pages) that are about the Canon EOS 30D digital camera as people are much more willing to click a link on that topic if they are in fact looking for prices on such a camera.

This deep linking strategy took me considerable time to do. I could possibly have found a more automatic way to do it via my templates but the couple of days that it took me to do this has been well worth my effort.

Each one of these links is a doorway into your shop (the more doorways you have the more potential visitors).

The flow on effect of setting up these deep links is that they provide your Shoplinc with a little Google Juice - which in time means your Shoplinc will begin to get indexed and ranked higher in Google (and other search engines). As a result you can end up not only with traffic from your blog but from search engines.

Search Our Shop Tool - Chitika has a ’search tool’ that lets your readers search for information in your Shoplinc directly from your blog. Place this in a prominent position on your blog and you have yet another gateway into your shop.

Promote your Shoplinc - Anyway you can promote your shoplinc and direct visitors to it is a bonus. For a few months on my blogs I had a spare banner position that other sponsors were not using - at that time I ran ads for my own shop. I’ve taken out blogads and even run AdWords campaigns. Perhaps buying some ads on Performancing’s new ad system would be something to experiment with.

Other Shop Options

Of course Shoplinc is not the only type of shop that you can add to your blog. Amazon recently introduced aStore and there are numerous options to building your own (using Amazon, eBay and other programs).

The key with all of these is of course to provide your readers with doorways into your blogs (using some of the above strategies).

It does take work - but if you have a blog with decent traffic you’ll end up with an extra revenue stream for your blog this Christmas (and beyond).

Tomorrow we’ll move on from Chitika and look at Affiliate Programs.

This post has been a part of the How to Fine Tune your Blog for Christmas Series.

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