I’ve been playing with a service called LotusJump. Basically what LotusJump does is analyses your site based on the key phrases you are trying to rank for (you provide these), and gives you a collection of specific, actionable recommendations. Often small business people kind of understand SEO but don’t know where to start. LotusJump overcomes this barrier by providing the actual specifics you need – “go to this URL and do this” type of things. The recommendations focus almost exclusively on link building, which is the cornerstone of competing for tough keywords.

It doesn’t provide deep recommendations on how to change your site (although gives some basic content information). That is pretty tricky to automate.

While the recommendations aren’t going to get you to the number one spot for an ultra competitive term, there’s no doubt that if you follow them you’ll see a substantial increase in rankings, and could easily achieve a number 1 spot for a term of medium competitiveness. Given it’s aimed at small businesses (as far as I can tell anyway) this is perfect. Following all the recommendations will be a substantial amount of work – we’re talking days here, not hours. Still, SEO is a tough game and that’s what it takes.

With the basic service at a reasonable $24.99, those with little SEO experience would find it a great spend. I’m impressed.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Apr 27th, 2010 | Author: Mark | No Comments

There are now a huge range of shopping cart and ecommerce platforms available to business owners who wish to sell product online. One factor or feature that might be a useful addition to a shopping cart is an affiliate tool.

An affiliate management program allows you to pay affiliates for introduced business. Affiliate marketing is a great way to add more sales and revenue to your business at very low risk – you only pay the affiliate when the product has been sold.

Affiliate shopping cart tools also fully integrate with your ecommerce processes so it can simply be a case of activating it in your admin panel and then filling in some details of the program and then simply promote it.

Having a shopping cart with an affiliate program tool also means that your program can be scalable. What do I mean by that? Well if you had a manual process to track and pay affiliates you would get stuck after say 5 or 10 affiliates. It would be a lot of work. With a web based tool, you can have hundred s of affiliates and depending on the platform you can even auto pay then each month via PayPal.

Things to think about

• Does the shopping cart have an affiliate module?
• Does the affiliate module have a means of electronically paying the affiliates?
• Does the affiliate module have a real time tracking facility for affiliates to login and get their stats
• If you are considering a standalone affiliate programme to bolt on to your existing shopping cart, is it compatible?

An affiliate marketing tool is a great feature of any shopping cart system. It might be worth investigating affiliate marketing options before choosing a shopping cart. You could save yourself time and money in the long run.

This guest post is by Jason Hulott is a 14 year veteran of affiliate marketing and Internet marketing. SpeedieAffiliates can help affiliate marketers and affiliate managers with a range of affiliate marketing services.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: Apr 24th, 2010 | Author: Mark | No Comments