Making E-Commerce Work

So, you've got traffic, now what do you do?

If you have web traffic, your site has value to advertisers.

The first problem that you've got to overcome is putting banner advertising somewhere on your site. Obviously this requires some thought so that the advertising doesn't look like it wasn't planned.

In order to do this, there are some basic rules of thumb. Most banner solutions are 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. Most services don't allow text below the advertisement, so you can pretty easily develop a nice table to center above your page.

Want to make your advertising work better? Put your advertising in its own table that loads at the very top of the page. If its the only thing in the table, it will load before anything else, and will give the person surfing your site instant results when they hit your page.

Since you don't have advertisers knocking at your door, consider becoming an affiliate for some companies that have product that is related to your web site.

Here are a few companies that allow you to become an affilate for multiple programs:

Reporting.Net - Some of the companies represented include Barnes and Noble, Travelocity, Priceline, Staples, and many others. You choose which companies you want to advertise and put link code on your pages. So far, customer service with Reporting.Net has been very good.

LinkShare - I've had a few problems with LinkShare with clicks that aren't counted, sales that were not credited and very poor customer service. Recently they've fixed a lot of the problems, but still have some ulresolved issues. I hesitated to mention LinkShare, but recently they have improved, so they're worth a closer look.

Commission Junction - I've had good luck with Commission Junction. I've not sent enough traffic to their affiliates mostly because I've just started working with them. They do have the ability to create virtual stores with products represented by the merchants that they represent. This feature in its own right is worth a lot of evaluation.

- Microsoft's Commission program. A number of merchant's are listed and joining is fairly easy.

Refer-It - a very good search engine to find affiliate programs.

Some Caveats:

Recently I dedicated full banner runs on my site to Cnet.com -- presumably a reputable Internet Advertiser. They use Reporting.Net for their stats and advertised a .02/click 'button'. I ran it, checked my stats, everything seemed fine. The beauty of this was that they would run different campaigns without me having to change anything. There are two issues here. One, their banners are not designed to draw clicks, they are brand awareness campaigns. Two, they changed the program payout without even a hint on Reporting.Net's site. No Email notification that they were changing the payout, no message in the FAQ or news posted on their site. None.

Lesson learned. CHECK YOUR STATS AND PAYOUT REPORTS REGULARLY.

Its a shame that Cnet would stoop to such a level especially considering they almost invented Internet advertising.