As the economic situation appears to continue to worsen (at least according to the popular press), even online businesses haven’t escaped scott-free. Most of you cannot have failed to notice the “close of programme” messages coming through from the affiliate networks as some poor old merchant or other bites the dust. Here at Lammo.net we have been trying to bring you as many tips and tricks as we can to help off-set the effects of the slowdown / credit crunch / economic tsunami or whatever today’s favourite term is in an effort to help you beat the recession and stay ahead of the game with your sites. We hope some of the ideas in this piece may help to boost your visitor numbers and drive those all-important commissions.

As consumers become ever more price conscious, they are starting to hunt around that little bit harder before making a final purchasing decision. As with most things online, this is all about small percentages: those extra one or two checks multiplied by hundreds of thousands of purchase decisions made on a daily basis represent an opportunity. Our latest tip – given not entirely unselfishly as you will see below – but heartfelt nevertheless, is to use price comparison on your sites where possible.

There are a number of reasons why online trade hasn’t been hit quite as hard as its high-street counterpart, and indeed the self same are the reasons the Internet has seen such explosive growth in recent years. Firstly, the merchant, the intermediary (affiliate in our world) and the end consumer all enjoy significant cost advantages because of the absence of expensive premises and increasingly through the absence of expensive offline marketing. Secondly, still on the subject of cost, the consumer isn’t having to drive all the way into town, paying for petrol, parking and the lunch time snack that they need to keep them going during a busy shopping day or the 74 toys that the kids “pester power” them into buying along the way. Thirdly, there is the sheer number of options available online that the consumer simply won’t be able to find in a single high street. Finally, there are now a number of ranking factors which are determined by consumer behaviour and site “stickiness” which need to be addressed.

It is these last two elements that we are emphasising here. Price Comparison can take you one step further by putting similar products and services in the same place. Although estate agents and banks have a habit of clustering together in the high street, you will rarely find two car parts shops right next to each other. Indeed few retailers would welcome a neighbour stocking largely the same lines: it is a recipe for an endless and bitter price war. This is where the themes all come together nicely: greater consumer price pressure in the current climate combined with much improved confidence in online purchases. As a result you should expect price comparison sites of all types, from those dealing to specific needs to those catering for a wider audience, to see their traffic jump.

Now we all know that price comparison doesn’t operate in a vacuum and that there are a number of large, established price comparison sites that operate effectively across a number of sectors. Indeed, some of these sites are owned by Lammo readers! We are not for a minute suggesting that anyone rushes out and starts yet another cross-sector price comparison site. The search engines, particularly Google, clearly feel that there are enough pure-play price comparators already ranked and indexed.

What we ARE suggesting is that those of you with established or planned sites in specific sectors and niches should ensure that you maximise consumer confidence and conversion rates and minimise visible losses by presenting your visitors with what is obviously a comprehensive set of choices. Let’s face it, there are a ton of good looking affiliate sites out there that have worked hard to add value through the addition of good content; that have employed good link building and social media techniques and, as a result are enjoying good rankings and traffic levels. The challenge, however – and let’s face it, we have all had this experience – is that you search for something, see one of these sites in the results and click on it because the snippet and title are highly relevant, only to be presented with a couple of text links or a banner or some feeble network widget.

Not exactly confidence inspiring is it? And this scenario occurs tens of thousands of times a day.

Worse than this, as many of you are probably aware, Google in particular attributes quite a bit of weight not only to the click-through-ratio (CTR) from your hard-won search engine results pages (SERPs) presence but because so many people use the Google tool bar and now Chrome, the mighty G is also able to track time on site. From a search engine perspective, this is a fantastic measure of quality. For those of you with thin product offerings, it is also potentially the kiss of death for those hard-won rankings over time. If too many people click through and back straight out, your rankings are likely to suffer in the longer term.

So, clearly from both a monetising and from a long term ranking perspective you want to maximise time on site (plus hopefully improve the number of people bookmarking you and returning directly). Offering a strong, relevant and clearly comprehensive set of products from a range of merchants therefore makes more sense now than ever before. If you create sufficient confidence in the minds of your consumers they will not need to go elsewhere. More of them will bookmark you; more of them will buy and more of them will return, all spending longer on site and contributing to a better behavioural score.

Some of you will no doubt be comfortable using data feeds from merchants and networks, containing hundreds or event thousands of products. Others, however, will have realised just how much work this can really involve – more on that another time. So if data feeds require a huge amount of work to maintain, what about the content widgets from the networks? Some of these are pretty good but of course the issue here is that no one network really covers all of the merchants or sectors. The more niche-focused your site, the worse this is. And some of the content widgets are not particularly search engine friendly.

Based on this feedback and lots of other input from friends and colleagues in the industry, we have therefore created Easy Content Units (ECU) which, for many affiliates, could well be an ideal solution. OK end of sales pitch – promise!! The details are on the ECU site.

However you ultimately decide to add price comparison, you still cannot afford to be complacent, because of course there will be competition from other sites in your niche or sector, so you still need to ensure the you are suitably differentiated, perhaps through consumer offers such as voucher codes; or other deals and offers including any you can negotiate with the merchant or network. Perhaps you are able to offer deeper, richer advisory content than the rest. Maybe you are a whizz at creating online tools and widgets that can help your visitors in some way.

With consumer confidence under ever more pressure, now may also be a good time to move further into the mainstream than you may have historically been willing to venture, placing the big brand names with which everyone is familiar in more prominent areas of your site. This is well worth factoring into your price comparison strategy: despite the lower commission rates offered by the big boys, you’re more likely to generate revenue and returning traffic in these ‘interesting times’ with them than with lesser known, smaller brands. In the coming months you should expect to see a positive increase in the stats relating to these big names as more and more business is generated in this way. Finally, if you don’t do this already, keep an eye on the papers and news sources both on and offline as the financial sections may sometimes provide useful information as to the stability of a particular merchant: forewarned is forearmed as the saying goes.

Us online folks have the kind of agility that most businesses can only dream of. We can conceive and take a new business proposition to market in a matter of literally minutes and hours. This puts us in a very good position indeed and there’s absolutely no reason with a little innovation and a lot of hard work why the online market shouldn’t stay robust even during trying times elsewhere.

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