Sccope works the same way as The Find does in regards to getting information from the retailers.  They use web crawlers to scrape each site and gather the information that they need for their comparison engine.  While this is easier for the retailers, it can be difficult to accomplish and could provide wrong information to the consumer.  Large ecommerce sites change prices and quantities daily, some hourly.  They need to have a way to provide this information to the comparison shopping engine so it can be reflected to the consumer.  Sccope does not offer this as they do not accept direct feeds.  The main issue I see with crawling sites for price data is that most retailers do not want their sites crawled like that.  It takes up bandwidth and puts drain on the site as a whole.  Most retailers will actually block the crawler from coming if it starts to provide performance issues.  I am sure that Sccope is aware of this, but US retailers and UK retailers do different things and think a little differently.  Just because it works in the UK, doesn’t mean it is going to work in the US.

In either case, I would like to welcome Sccope to the US market, and hope that their beta goes well.  It can be hard to bring a new engine into this marketplace, but at least they have experience with running a successful CSE.  Retailers can sign up for Sccope and have someone contact them to get set up.  At this time, their website appears to have a sign up form that is still asking UK based questions.  I hope they will change this soon, as most of the questions do not apply to US-based retailers.

If you have a Google account, then all you need to do is click on the Google Places in your account to get started, or you can create a new Google account to setup Google Places.  All you need to do is create your listing with the appropriate information like company name, address, website, hours, services, category, etc.  You want to be truthful with all of your information.  After entering the information, Google will provide you with two options for verifying your listing.  Either they will call you at the number included in your listing or they will send a postcard to the address provided.  Both forms are going to give you a PIN number that must be entered in order to activate the listing.  I would recommend just having Google call to provide the PIN.  This will give you the opportunity to list your business quickly without waiting.  The postcard option is slow and you will have to wait up to 2 weeks for the card.

Google Places now offers a new service with tagging that can provide your business listing with a little extra power.  The tagging ability provides business owners with the ability to highlight features that make your business unique.  This can be good for local competition and hopefully will bring more visitors to your listing.  Google charges $25/month for the service and I believe it is per tag.  Currently, Google is offering 30 days Free for this service when you sign up for Google Places.  Why not try it out to see if it is any better than the regular listing.  The free trial will tell you if it helps or not with no money wasted.  With this feature and the ability to provide your business with a free listing, you should take the time to create a Google Places listing.  Every company loves free advertising and Google is a great place to get it from.

High cost keywords can destroy a well developed campaign in a matter of hours, fully depleting the daily spend and leaving your campaign paralyzed until the next day comes around.  I tell everyone that I consult for to make sure and take a few extra steps to ensure that there are no high cost keywords hiding in their keyword builds.  It is a simple thing to fix, but not many actually do it.  There are many keyword estimation tools out there that can help you decide which keywords are right for you, but one of my favorite and easiest to use it the Google Keyword Estimator.  This tool is free to use and can estimate cost and clicks for up to 5000 keywords per batch.  Google has introduced a new beta for this tool, but I prefer to use the old legacy platform.  After running a simple search, you can find out if the keywords that you want to use will be searched on and how much they will cost.  Simple, effective, and will save you a lot of money.

I understand that most that use PPC advertising want to get visitors and conversions, but just because you put a high cost keyword in, doesn’t mean you will get what you want.  In most cases, high cost keywords will bring you traffic, but rarely bring the conversions.  This is a big no-no in paid search advertising.  You have to justify your ad spend with conversions, so unless you have thousands to spend and are just looking for visitors, leave the high cost keywords out.  How much do you think the word apple will cost you in a day?  Take a look at a few of the top apple terms…..

I did this search on the basis of just $0.50 per click and no budget to show the potential of what these type of keywords would bring.  Does your advertising budget have this much per day?  You might ask why anyone would put these terms in their search ad groups, but I have seen companies that just sell aftermarket ipod, iphone, and ipad accessories have these terms in their account.  They never could understand why they were wasting so much money and never getting any conversions.  The data speaks for itself I believe.  Most people that search for these broad terms are notorious for not purchasing.  They are in the research stage of the buying cycle.  People that search for terms that usually contain 3-5 terms have a better chance of purchasing than broad searchers do.  If you don’t sell these items, then you never need to be bidding on them.   You will never win and you will end up broke.  Do yourself and your company a favor and take an extra 5 minutes to put all your keywords through a traffic estimator and strip out all the high cost keywords.  You will be happy that you did.

If you are interested in learning how to get your search and content campaigns running right, then join Yahoo on Thursday, August 5th at 11:00 am Pacific Standard time.  This webinar will probably run around an hour with questions.  Sign up for free and make sure you are ready for the back-to-school rush.

Check the site to make sure that you website it not listed.  It is a simple search that you can do by going to their Approved Store page and then clicking on the alphabetical letters at the top of the page.

If you find that your store is not included, then they have an easy submission form that will allow you to give your store url and the Shopwiki spider will start to crawl your pages.  This can take some time, so if you want to see some traffic for the holiday, then you better submit today.  If you have an affiliate program, you can contact them to see if they can list you faster, and they might be able to assist.

The service is called VigLink.  It is not open to everyone as of yet due to it working out some kinks in its software, but you can get a report for your site and they will contact you when their software is available.   All a webmaster has to do is install a  simple piece of code on your website or blog and VigLink will do the rest.  Before, if you were part of affiliate programs, you would link certain words to the affiliate program in hopes to get clicks and sales.  The hard thing is that if you a lot of content, it can be hard to remember all your affiliate links, which in turn takes you more time to get a post up on your blog or finish new content for your website.

With VigLink, all you need to do is write your content as usual and link to your affiliates website in a normal fashion without your affiliate links installed.  Viglink is a part of every major affiliate program out there from Commission Junction to Google Affiliate Program.  If someone clicks on the link in your post or other content, then VigLink will look through the affiliate programs and see if there is one for the website you are linking to.  If there is, then it will automatically append affiliate tracking to the URL.  VigLink appends their affiliate tracking, so they are the ones that get the commission, but they share it with you, with most of it going to you.  This is kind of link sponsored posts and sponsored links that you get from some services around.  They only give you 75% of the total amount paid by the advertiser.  VigLink does something similar.  Most visitors should not see any difference on the front end as this is done in the backend.

While some of you have been doing affiliate marketing for years and you have good ways to deal with your affiliate programs, so this might not be for you, but for people that are just getting into affiliate marketing, then this could be the best way to get in and increase your profits.  If you have a new blog or website and want to get into affiliate marketing, then look into VigLink.  I would put it in your radar just to keep looking when they go live for any sites.  This service could really help boost profits without you having to sign up for all the affiliate programs on all the networks.  This alone could save you time in order to keep you on track to write great content for your website or blog.

Start with Aweber for Only $1…..Sign Up Now!

Like other solutions, Aweber has a lot of features to use in order to maximize the program, but unlike others, Aweber does it better.  You can send out email newsletters, create signup forms on your website or blog, setup autoresponders, manage unlimited email campaigns, simple and effective email templates, blog newsletters, and much more.  There is not one feature that they provide that won’t help you create and build an effective email list for your website.

Aweber provides an intuitive form creator that allows you to publish signup forms on your blog or website.  This is the first step to building a great list.  If you do not have a good signup form, then how do you expect to get readers and subscribers.  You can set it up to send your visitor to any page after they signup, so you can offer some quality CPA offers or any other webpage that you wish.  You can have the signup page be on your webpage, or in an unblockable hover popup.  They allow split testing for headlines of your form to see which one has a better conversion.

If you have a blog and you want to send your subscribers updates of your posts, then Aweber has your covered.  You can send out your updates daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever you post something new.  This is a great way to keep your active readers up to date with your posts and your blog.  While bringing in visitors with your blog newsletter, you can entice them with a nice CPA prepop offer, which might earn you some extra cash if the offer is good.

While we are not going to get into every aspect of Aweber, you can see that it is one of the best programs out there for website owners and bloggers alike.  It has a very intuitive feature set that will build your list leaps and bounds above whatever method your are currently using or thinking of using.  Remember…..The Money is in the List!

CExchange provides a simple to use web interface for customers to see if and how much their old electronics are worth.  The best part is that CExchange will pay for the return of the old electronics.  The retailer gets to choose if they want to provide their customers with just money back or gift cards to use at the retailers website.  Both can be a good option, but providing gift cards can be a better way to make sure that the retailer gets the sale in the end.  Not only can the retailer choose the payment method, but they also get a small kickback for every product that can be recycled.  CExchange provides each retailer with their own branded subdomain on cexchange.com that has their logo, so when the customer comes from the retailers website, it still has a brand to relate to.  All you have to do is provide a link from your website to your cexchange subdomain and let your recycling program start.

Mind you that not every electronic item can be recycled.  CExchange has looked into most of the major electronics products like ipods or video games and gives the consumer an amount that it is worth depending on the condition of the item.  This makes it easy for any consumer to recycle their old electronics and the incentive to do so.  CExchange gives all retailers the way to start an easy recycling program that can pay off in more ways than one.  If you are an electronics retailer, check out CExchange and submit a partnership inquiry in order to start your own recycling program

If you have thought about getting into social media, but just haven’t done it yet, 2010 looks like it is the year to start.  With more and more people jumping onto social networks and following their favorite retailers, everyone should start getting a piece of the pie.  A lot of companies have created new positions for social media in order for everything to be properly tracked and accounted for.  It is easy for customers to post negative things about your company and you want someone or a team to be on top of that and provide real time action for those negative comments.  This shows that you are dedicated to customer service and only Social Media provides that instant fire fight capability.  Without it, you resort to trying to resolve issues the old fashion way.  As more retailers and businesses join the social media ranks, it will become the mainstream way to handle customer service issues and the most cost effective.  There have been some companies that have eliminated their phone staff for social media experts.  This method does not work for everyone, but it can work for some.

If you are already participating in social media, how can you improve on it?  Does your company provide exclusive deals via twitter or facebook?  Do you offer product reviews via Youtube?  Are your company updates visible to your followers and your groups?  There are many ways to improve how you use social media, so think outside the box and use this medium as a way to improve your relationship with your customers.  If you have the capability, it would be wise to assemble a team to improve your social media usage and increase its power for your company.  2010 is the year of social media, so jump on board and control your company’s brand a little better.