Homebased Business Part 6- Tweaking Your Affiliate Store
Your affiliate store should be working fine right now and if you want to leave it as it is, you can, but tweaking your store to make it a little leaner should be good. I really can’t say much about the General Settings as each of you have your own preferences on what you want shown in your store. You can do your own experiment by checking and un-checking all the options and settle for something which you think is most suitable to your visitors. Remember it is what your visitors wants to see and not you. My opinion, keep the featured product, even if you want to remove everything else in your affiliate store.
The next thing you should do is to upload a logo for your store. Design an image according to the size specified and upload it. This will make your store a lot more legitimate. It is like your business signboard. Imagine seeing a shop without a signboard. Would feel comfortable enough you walk in?
The most important section that you should tweak is the Build/Manage Custom Navigation section. I’ll go a little detail on this. This section will let you categorize your store into proper categories so shoppers have an easier time finding what they want. Most people has the wrong conception about online stores as being a hypermarket which stocks up 1001 products so they can attract all quarters. That is a big misconception. For online business, we should concentrate on preferably one single item. If you sell shoes, sell shoes. Don’t anything else. Just shoes alone will fill up your store to the brink what with all the different brands, looks and sizes.
You might argue, isn’t it the more the better? Visitors will have more choices. Wrong, because the people who comes to our stores are people who searched for that specific product. They are not here to do window shopping. They want to buy a pair of shoes, if that is what you are selling.
So head over to Build/Manage Custom Navigation. Under Add Navigation Category, type in the category of goods you want shown. For this example I am selling Outdoor Furniture and Decorations, and the merchant I signed up with carries lots of different out door furniture and decorations, so I have to split all the different items into categories of their own, like Mailboxes, Garden Fountains and so on. Choose No Parent in the second drop down option as this category will be the parent category. You can check or un-check the following two options. I leave it checked.
The Choose Link Group lets you specify which group you want the category to appear under. The default is Affiliate Store and you do not want that. So type in the name of your New Link Group. Outdoor Decoration and Outdoor Furniture will be quite appropriate for the example I am using here. Now I have a group called Outdoor Decorations and under that group I will have Mailboxes, Fountains and so on.
Keywords To Search. This option will let you specify what exactly you want appearing under that category. So if I want only mailboxes to appear when people click on the Mailboxes category, I will use the keyword, “Mailboxes” At this point, you can click on the Add Category button at the bottom, go to your store and check if you now have your group and your category. Click on the category link and see if indeed all the products you specified are appearing. Browse through to see if any other unrelated products have made their way into this category. If there is, note down the keywords. For example, I have Door Knockers appearing in my Mailbox category because the product descriptions under the Door Knockers somehow contained the word Mailboxes. We want to remove those irrelevant items.
Head back to your Add Navigation Category Section. Go to Negative Keywords, and type in those keywords you do not want appearing in your specified category. In my case, I will type “Door Knockers”. Click again on Add Category to update your settings, refresh your Store Homepage, click on that category again and you should see all references to irrelevant products removed.
Go about it the same way for all your products until you have a nicely categorized store. Keep the Price From and Price Limit empty. The program will use the default settings. You can also experiment with the Columns to Search options. It’s not very important. When you have finally got everything set up, you will see whatever groups and categories you have configured under that section. If you feel you need to edit anything, you can do so here.
Manage Pages lets you edit the Home Page, the About Page and add additional articles so you have some keyword related contents for Search Engines. Just Edit or add away. No problem as you can edit them whenever you like.
Manage News is almost similar. Like if you are selling Shoes and will like to add the latest news about the latest shoes, you can add them here. With images and all.
Manage Comments can be left alone as I doubt anyone will be commenting.
Manage Reciprocal Links Directory. As Google do not like reciprocal links too much, I left that out too.
Create Content Links. Now this is the part where you can add some product images and links to your Homepage under your opening Welcome message. Key in the keywords of the products you want appearing in your home page. I used Fountains, and I have fountains showing in my homepage. Leave the prices blank. The Content Unit Width should be 480, else it will overlap your right sidebar. The rest of the settings you can leave it as default or change it to suit your fancy.
After you are satisfied with your configurations, Click on “Create Content Link” Affilistore will generate 3 different sets of codes. I used javascript. Copy those codes, go back to Manage Pages, Edit Homepage. Open it in html by clicking on the “Source” button on the top left hand corner of the editor. This will open up your existing post in html. Paste the codes you have copied under your article and save it by clicking “Add Page” Like magic, the items you have specified will appear below your Welcoming message.
Okay,that about wraps up my series on setting up your first Affiliate Store using the free program Affilistore. There are two more areas that I am still stuck with but has no time to dig deeper for information. It is the sitemap and how to insert a tracker to track my stats. The program generates a sitemap, but when I submitted it to Google, there was an error. I will try to solve these 2 problems when I get the time. In the meantime, if you have found a way, do share it here.
The best thing we do now is to do the normal optimization process of getting the site indexed, get lots of backlinks so it has a good chance of being found by Search Engines and so on. I’ll post a couple of free programs for this in my upcoming posts. Meanwhile we wait for our Affiliate Store to ripen. It might take a couple of months, maybe longer, before we see actual sales, so be patient. That’s the way it is with Affiliate Stores and I really do not know if there are any shortcuts to that.
It has been a fun journey for me and I hope it was for you too. I am still grappling with the screencasting software and have yet to master it enough to do a proper screencast. Anyway, I think I sound funny when I speak in real time. LOL. but I’ll definitely do it one day. Screencasting and Videos are the biggest thing in the Blogosphere now and I think everyone should learn how to do it.
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Hi Ah Pek,
I’ve been following your series of home based business, you share with us on buying domain, creating affiliate stores, that’s all great stuff…but again, i’ve some doubts.
Where do our targeted customers come from? Search Engine? How to do that? Will you cover that in another post?
Thanks
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Costa Reply:
August 12th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Hi newopps,
Yes we target only those from search engines as unlike blogs, we do not want social traffic. We also do not want hundreds of casual traffic. What we need is about 20 to 50 visits a day from those who have sort of already made up their minds to buy.
Believe me, when you get that kind of targetted traffic, you do not need many. Out of the 20 or 30 people, one or two will find the things they need and they will buy.
I’ll share some of my insights in upcoming posts.
[Reply]
Hi, Costa,
The store is online now. Thanks for your help…;D
Since I had set up 2 blogs targeting the same niche and submitted some articles to article directories, so I decided to set up one same niche store.
Next time when I submit articles for those 2 blogs, I can add the affiliate store link in the Resource box. Haha..one stone kills two birds.
Again,thanks…Ah Pek.
Waiting for more free programs introduced by you.
Vediss last blog post..6 Reasons Why Work From Home Moms Make Money From Affiliate Niche Blogs
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