What Are Easy Content Units?
Easy Content Units or ECU are small content units that display products with product image, description and price. It can save retail affiliates substantial time by allowing you to easily combine multiple products together while prices and everything else is kept up-to-update. No messing around updating prices.
So far so good.
Attack of The Really Bad HTML – Font Tags, Inline CSS and More!
Below is an example of an HTML output from ECU. Not pretty. It’s hard to maintain and NOT GOOD for SEO.
In fact, you’d be lucky to even get this. ECU by default uses javascript to fetch content so Google won’t even see it. So if you had a page of Easy Content Units, as far as SEO is concerned, you might as well have a blank page.
No Special Offers Units = Lower Conversions
Another inflexibility I found with ECU was that it wouldn’t handle special offers, or any products from a merchants that’s not in their product datafeed.
While creating CheapProtein.org.uk, I found that several merchants had special offers pages with mouthwatering offers. Naturally I wanted to promote them to set myself apart and increase conversions. ECU wouldn’t let me.
Truth Be Told, I Wasn’t Making Money From Retail
That’s right. As an affiliate I wasn’t doing my ‘job’. I wasn’t making any money to speak of promoting retail goods, using ECU or otherwise. And this might explain my resentment at ECU – now having made decent money from the classic AM niches like weight loss – is really masking my feelings toward retail affiliate marketing in general. I rambled along those lines to an unsuspecting but receptive affiliate marketing blogger.
Said affiliate marketing blogger and his fellow darlings of my RSS reader (Shane Brown, Kirsty’s and Note Worthy Tips) have motivated me to blog again. That Advanced Web Ranking review I promised is coming right up!
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Darling of your RSS feed eh?? Why your flattery pleases this affiliate lady on a chilly Australian morning!
Why not turn the inflexibility of a tool lots of your competitors are using to your advantage? You’ve said here that you couldn’t use ECU to highlight special offers. That means lots of other people are in the same boat. Ergo if you take a bit of time out to find an easy way to manually feature them – you’ll be more than a few steps ahead and well placed to win that cookie race to be “last past the post”
Don’t give up on retail either, but once you’ve worked out how people are buying through your sites that are working – maybe think about how you could apply that to other niches.
Good luck
I meant it! And I really liked the affiliate stats Excel you provided which I’m using. Thanks!
With the special offers, what I did was code a Mac tool which converts the different merchants’ offers into content units of the same format so they can be used on my site.
I couldn’t get them to convert very well even with ongoing trickles of traffic.
I may come back to retail for the big gadgety-type of products – iphone 4 et al – but I find myself gravitating towards CPA. The big boys at WarriorForum are making a mint from these!