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I recently signed up to Share A Sale as an advertiser for an ecommerce website running on magento. Now, I am not a web developer or anything like that. I know how to install tracking codes on confirmation pages but having to enter proper dynamic variables to populate the dynamic order information  is a bit to complex for me.

But as I was working on installing the code I found out that it was fairly simple to install share a sales’s the code, since shareasale.com did all the heavy lifting for me. They provided me with magento’s variables.

Before they provide you with the code to add to the confirmation page you need to select from a drop down what platform you are using for the website, once you select it, they generate the code for you and give you exact instructions of as to where on the page you should add your code.

Tracking code details for Magento

You will be marking changes to the following file:

/app/design/frontend/defualt//template/checkout/success.phtml

Find the line that reads:

<p><strong><?php echo $this->__('Thank you for your purchase!') ?></strong></p>

and just below that line, add the following code:

<?php
$_customerId = Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->getCustomerId();
$lastOrderId = Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->getLastOrderId();
$order = Mage::getSingleton('sales/order');
$order->load($lastOrderId);
$_totalData =$order->getData();
$_sub = $_totalData['subtotal'];
?>
<img src="https://shareasale.com/sale.cfm?tracking=<?php echo $this->getOrderId() ?>&amount=<?php echo $_sub ?>&transtype=sale&merchantID=XXXX" width="1" height="1">

As you can see its as easy as 1, 2, 3. The only thing which you need to do is replace the XXXX with your account #.

Before adding your code please note the following “disclaimer” from magento

* DISCLAIMER
*
* Do not edit or add to this file if you wish to upgrade Magento to newer
* versions in the future. If you wish to customize Magento for your
* needs please refer to http://www.magentocommerce.com for more information.

Kudos to shareasale.com for providing its users with the exact code and variables so that their advertisers can easily install the tracking code on to their websites.

Most people are always looking for ways to drive traffic to their ecommerce website. Many times people tend to overlook the basics of ecommerce marketing. I would like to review the 7 basic ways to drive traffic to an ecommerce website.

1. Pay Per Click (PPC) - In most cases PPC can run you a very high bill in a short period of time, you need to be very careful when you first start out with it. You should always make sure that if you are bidding on keyword on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing Or Microsoft AdCenter, you should maker sure that the keyword that you are bidding on is aligned with your ad copy and the landing page. To Achieve that you should keep your ad groups small with a limited amount of keywords. So that every keyword can be in the ad copy and on the landing page. Putting the big 3 aside there are some second tier search engines which can drive some PPC traffic your way as well such as 7search.com but keep in mind that you won’t get good enough quality traffic to make significant conversions. In light of that there are cheaper PPC programs out there, which allow you to target your visitors more precisely such as MySpace Ads and Facebook Ads, I have already reviewed Facebook ads a few weeks ago so go ahead and read it.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Optimizing for ecommerce can be a bit hard since you won’t get to many links, but the same goes for your competitors. Make sure you have the proper title tags, h1 tags, atl tags for your images as well as unique product descriptions for your products. Don’t use the same product description as your competitors. Creating a blog for your site will add a lot of unique content and can be very useful to link to your products.  Optimizing your site and getting ranked well can take some time but its well worth it. Don’t just try to rank for the generic terms, your goal should be to optimize your product pages so that they rank well when people are searching for the specific products.
3. Affiliate Program is a very cost effective way to drive traffic to your site, you are able to select the % of the sale which you are willing to give away to the affiliates imagine if you were able to do that with Google Adwords. If you start an affiliate program don’t start off with a high commission because you won’t be able to lower it in the future, in addition don’t start to low because no one will want to try and market it. Two other things you should consider is, try to find an affiliate program that uses 301 redirect so that it can help your SEO efforts, in addition you should create a product data feed to give out to your affiliates so that your affiliates have easy access to all of your products.
4. Email Marketing - Instead of only looking for new customers bring back your existing visitors and existing customers. Make sure you have a newsletter sign up form on your home page and offer something in return for signing up. Email your customers on a regular steady basis so that they remember you and come back to your site for their future purchases. The emails you send them should not only be about self promotional, instead offer something useful.
5. Social Media Marketing (SMM) - Be involved within your niche weather it is a forum or other blogs. Use twitter.com and facebook.com as a tool to drive traffic to your site. Don’t always write about your self share information about the community and spread the word…… Get people to follow you and occasionally post a link to your site.
6. Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) -There are many comparisons shopping sites out there that can drive traffic to your site. Each CSE has a different “advertising” structure some work on a PPC basis while others work on CPA basis, and google.com/base is completely free.
7. Banner Placement -  find websites which pertain to your niche and get purchase a banner ad directly, you should look for sites which get decent traffic and don’t lock yourself in. Make sure that these sites are worth while and that the traffic actually converts in to customers.

This sums up the basics, I would like to go through each of these in detail with in-depth info and detail on how to get inexpensive but great traffic to your ecommerce website.

How do you generate traffic to your site? Let everyone know in the comments below.

Facebook Advertisement

Most ecommerce website owners when they think about ppc they think google adwords. Which is a great way to drive a lot of traffic to your website, but most webmasters tend to overlook different options. One such option is Facebook Ads is a much cheaper solution, its also  easier to manage, and more targeted. You may not get as many visitors to your site, as you would if you were to advertise on adwords but the ROI can be much greater since your CPC will be much cheaper.

What Targeting Options Does Facebook Offer?

Facebook allows you to segment your ads, here are some of the options, I will only list the options that you should use. As you can see in the image below, as you segment your targeted audience the estimate # of people goes down.

Facebook Targeting Options

• Location
  • Country - If you select the US you can further break it down to
  • State
  • City
• Age
  • Select an age range
• Sex - Male/Female
• Keyword - As you type in the keyword you want Facebook will suggest some keyword, similar to google suggest.

Suggestions By Facebook As You Type

• Education
  • College Grad
  • In College
  • In High School

How Do I Know Who To Target?

Ok, so you know of the different targeting options but how do you know how to segment your ads and who to target? Well, if you are running a few ads for your ecommerce website and linking to the home page in general and not to a specific item then you can simply go to quantcast.com enter your website or your competitors website and find out your visitors demographics.

For your first campaign you should target, the groups which are the most. For example if most of your visitors are female, even though its not by much just 60/4o then select female option when you create your facebook ads. The same goes for age and location. Quantcast breaks down your demographics by more details than the options available from facebook but they make a good combination and it gives you a good idea as to who your customer is.

Facebook Ads For Affiliate Marketers

If you are an affiliate marketer, you can use the same strategy by finding out a websites demographics and then segmenting your facebook ads to those specific demographics. Most advertisers don’t rely on Facebook Ads to generate traffic to their site, they use the big 3 (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live) so you won’t encounter to much competition and the Cost Per Click is still cheap. But it wont stay that wasy forever.

Start your Facebook Ads today.

Don’t solely rely on Facebook Ads to drive traffic to your site, this is just another PPC option which is available at a discounter price.

Are you already using facebook ads for your site?

Being that my blog is fairly new, I don’t expect to rank in google when you search for David Rosenberg just yet. It is fairly understandable being that I don’t have any links yet either. With time that will all change and hopefully I will rank for my full name when you do a search in google. For those of you out there which don’t yet have a personal website or if you are in the same predicament as me there is still hope.

Google launched google profiles, a few weeks ago you can read a detailed over view at search engine land. So I completed my profile, I filled in my information added a photo and  some links to my social media accounts, such as twitter and delicious and 5 minutes later when I did a search for David Rosenberg there I was. Under all the listings with 3 other David Rosenbergs.

Google Profile Results For David Rosenberg

Last Friday google posted (no longer valid) that they are giving away 25 free business cards to the first 10,000 for their google profile. Well I ordered mine and they will look like this.

David Rosenbergs Google Profile Business Card

This is a very easy way to rank for your name so what are you waiting for, go ahead and complete your google profile.

Update: For those that are looking for my profile on google here it is. David Rosenberg ’s Google Profile.

New websites are launched ever day with newbies on yahoo answers asking why when they do a search for their website they don’t show up at all. The typcial response that they get is, add your website to google’s index over here http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl. But this is not the best solution as you can see google clearly states.

We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web, and we invite you to submit your URL here. We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

This is actually a newbies best bet, but if you already have a blog or a website and you have the ability to add a link from there to the new site chances are you will get indexed faster. But in most cases newbies don’t have other websites which they can use to add a link to the new site.

There was a period of time that I used to use digital point forums to get my new sites indexed. Being that I was very active and had a lot of fresh posts I would add the links in my signature and within a matter of days my new site would be indexed in google. You have to make sure that the link does not have a rel=”nofollow” tag on it (rel=”nofollow” tells a search engine not to follow the link - more about this some other time.). This again is a luxury that I had being that I had an active account at a forum which allowed me to have links in my signature.

With all of the above options put aside there are still other options available to everyone which will help you get your site get indexed faster. Submit your website to digg.com google bots are practically there all day everyday indexed all the new pages and new links that they find. When their crawlers are there they look at all the new links and crawl them and in turn your new website is now put into  googles index.

What do you do in order to get your sites indexed in google?

When doing on site optimization on a website, one of the fist things to look at are the title tags.  For my friends and family which are new to SEO, and want to learn about SEO I send them to webconfs “15 minutes to seo” tutorial. For each factor that one can use for doing SEO webconfs gives it a score between +3 to - 3. As you can see the first item on the list is title tags with a +3 score.

The title of a page is what tells the search engines what the page is all about. Having great descriptive title tags with the keywords that you are trying to rank for will help a lot for your site to rank better in the SERP.

Even once you have the proper title tags set up on your site you need to make sure that you don’t have the same title tag for different pages. There are many websites that have limited capability with their CMS and by default they have the same title tags for all their pages. This is something that you should really try to avoid at all costs especially for your important pages on your site.

Here is what google says in their SEO Starter Guide (PDF Download) if you have not read it yet go for it.

Create unique title tags for each page - Each of your pages should ideally have a unique
title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.
Avoid:
• using a single title tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages

Duplicate Title Tags for Newegg.com web pages

There are many big websites that suffer from this problem such as newegg.com, as you can see from the image below

As you can see they have over 38,000 pages with the same title and many of the pages are unique and totally different, such as about us, product reviews, faq’s and a warrenty page. Each of these pages should have a different title.

Fortunately if you have a big website and you want to avoid this problem, google webmaster tools can help. They have a section assigned to help webmasters avoid duplicate content. In the screenshot below you can see the pages that have duplicate titles on my new website buydp.com (still in beta).

Google Webmaster Tools - Duplicate Title Dashboard

If you click on duplicate title tags it will take you to a list which links to all the pages that have duplicate content. This will help you manage and maintain your titles so that you can constantly monitor your pages and avoid the duplicate title issue.

The baseball season has just begun, being that I am a big fan of the New York Yankees, I did a quick search today for yankees in google. Here is what I got.

I am pretty sure that google has been showing sports scores in the search results. But today I noticed two new things that I have not seen in the past.

1. Google is displaying in box score during the game, which means that they are fetching the data from mlb.com, probably via API, although I am not sure.
2. Google added a link “add to iGoogle”, right next to the box score, which takes you to a sports scores gadget.

This comes to no surprise especially after this weekend when we learned that google has been talking to twitter about crawling their site better so that google can display live results from twitter. Google is into freshness and keeping their index as up to date as possible with the latest information. In addition, by keeping the score and the box score in the SERP’s, this allaws the searcher to remain on google’s site a bit longer and maybe click on an ad before leaving to a different website.

Have you seen an “add to iGoogle” link before in the google SERP’s? Is google displaying it anywhere else?

As I write this post, twitter is down. It has not been down for a long, long, long time. When twitter first started out it used to go down twice a week or more for long periods of time. Do you remember the twitter fail whale?

Twitter Fail Whale

Currently on their website they state that they should be up in an hour or so.

Twitter is currently down for unscheduled maintenance.

We expect to be back in about an hour. Thanks for your patience.

If twitter wants to grow up one day and start monetizing and maybe become a real search engine, with an ad platform they better figure out how to keep their website up at all times, google and yahoo don’t seem to have that problem.

Update: Twitter is back up.

Like I told you in my first post ever, that I will blog about SES NY, which I attended. This is my first time that I went to the SES show althought I have been to the SMX shows a few times. Being that I have been doing SEO for over 3 years, a lot of the things that which were mentioned at the show seemed repetetive and it was more for beginners but there were some good fresh ideas as well and things that I missed that I was able to pick up on. Here is a quick tip that I enjoyed from day one.

The first session that I attened was Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers.

Ray “Catfish” Comstock, had a great idea, that if you have an important  page on your site which has a very high bounce rate with little traffic and you want to figure out how to fix the page, he suggests that you set up a PPC campaign drive traffic to the page and do A/B (Google Website Optimizer) testing until you lower your bounce rate.

Please Note: You don’t need to have an adwords account in order to use Google Website Optimizer.

Go ahead use it, its a great tool for A/B and mulit variant testing.

I am sure you know this already, the Obama’s installed a playground in the WhiteHouse lawn on March, 4, 2009. Here is an image of a plaque which was put on the play system.

White House Playground Plaque

Image credits to blog.alignex.com:

A few days after the playground was installed in the White House lawn, The National Recreation and Park Association contacted the White House and advised them to implement playground safety and suggested that they install rubber mulch for the playground surface. The White House in turn contacted Rubberecycle.com to have them install the rubber mulch. Below you can see the before and after pictures of the playground with and without the rubber mulch.

Being that they are one of my clients, I wanted to take advantage of the moment and do some PR for them. I contacted Janet Thaeler aka newspapergrl, to write a press release for Rubberecycle.  You can read the press release about the rubber mulch on prweb.com.

I have used Janet’s service many times in the past, she does some great online PR, and I was very please with the success that we received from the latest press release.

As promised here are the playground before and after pics.

White House Playground Before

White House Playground After

Image credits to www.buzzfeed.com and

rubbermulch on flickr.com

Update April 2 2009 1:17 PM:

Janet did a guest post on tinychoices.com