I frequently review various products added into Click2Sell Marketplace and quite often i see that some products could be set-up better. Questions that we get to our support mail confirm that sometimes people misunderstand some product management aspects or just miss important mini features for managing products at Click2Sell.

So let me just guide you through all the parts related to product management and addition to the system.

At first, you should read step-by-step guide How to Start Selling Products on Click2Sell which outlines basic steps what you need to do in order to be successful with Click2Sell. It is especially useful for those people who have just created their own Click2Sell account.

In this article I want to expand second part of that article. I want to go through all the options of adding a new product and explain each of the step with more details. There is a good chance to discover something new.

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Click2Sell service was launched just a bit more than a year ago. Believe me, I still remember the day we decided to finally go public very clearly. I remember every month of the first year. They passed extremely quickly. The year was full of expectations, new people, feedbacks, tweakings and so on.

Even though Click2Sell system was being developed and tested for two full years, even though it seemed that everything was laid out and polished in the best possible way, the first year of service showed and teached us a lot. Of course, that’s very natural, you can’t perfectly foresee the needs of your future customers.

We always said that every feedback about Click2Sell system was very welcome. We are happy that people heard that and provided us with a lot of suggestions. The whole first year was dedicated to adding new features, improving the performace of the system, tweaking minor functions or completely reworking some pages.

Let us just review what additions and changes were made in the first year of Click2Sell’s life.

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One of the most powerful features of Click2Sell system is – Tracking channels. Briefly put, this feature allows you to measure your various promotion campaigns with surgical accuracy.

So, what exactly are those magic "tracking channels"? Technically speaking, it is just an upgraded link which leads your customer to your product’s sales-page. It works exactly in the same way as a normal Buy or Affiliate link for your customer. However, it is "upgraded" in that way that all visitors through the link are calculated in separate statistics. This allows you to divide your bulk traffic into many separate "channels" and thus you can see how many visitors, views and sales you get from each of channels.

Using just one tracking channel won’t give you much benefits. The strength of tracking channels lie in quantity: the more you have, the better analysis you can do. So, what you can do with them?

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Time for a new feature again!

This is yet another step to make Click2Sell system friendlier to 3rd party software, scripts, automated services and so on. Perhaps the first major step in this area was an introduction of Click2Sell API service which allowed merchants to automate important parts of their business or just make them more flexible.

Now let’s talk about the fresh feature which definately will help you to increase your sales – Click2Sell Marketplace XML feed! Click2Sell marketplace already has about one thousand products. We are very pleased that there are more and more products. However, quite many people asked for some way which would allow them to easily take the content of the marketplace. Being able to get such information easily let various 3rd party software, scripts or services to make various things. Just some examples of what they can do:

• Deep analysis of the marketplace. Using such service allows affiliates easily find out the best affiliate programs;
• Remote usage of the marketplace in any 3rd party software. This let users quickly do their things without browsing the marketplace in their browsers.
• "Adsense-style" text ads. Some scripts can automatically create text ads with embedded affiliate link according to webpage content (thus making an ad very relevant).
• Lots of other things…

As you already see, all such products/services essentially need easily accessible summary of marketplace.

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Lately we’ve been talking about new Click2Sell features/tweaks and general affiliate marketing. So it’s a good time to talk about already existing things in Click2Sell system. Let me tell you some things about one of the core things of the system: Click2Sell Buy-Now Buttons! There are some tricks and tips about them and you might find them useful.

1. Custom Click2Sell Buy-Now buttons image.
   This is one of several different default images:

   

   Of course, it is perfectly fine to add such image into your product’s sales-page. Many merchants are using such default image and don’t face any problem in their sales. However, we strongly recommend you to use your own custom image. Your own "buy-now" button (created specifically for your product’s website) increases the integrity of your sales-page. You know, our default image might just not suit your sales-page style.

   So how could you use your custom image instead of ours?
   Let’s take a look on "buy-now" button code. There is an example one (code lines are very long, so they are breaking in the middle):

   <a id="c2s_bn_lnk_3692" href="https://www.click2sell.eu/buy?testerespa" ><img src="http://www.click2sell.eu/images/paynow_v3_5.png" border="0" title="Buy now!" alt="Buy now!" ></a>

   [script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.click2sell.eu/js/buy_now_butt_v2.js"></script>
   [script type="text/javascript">c2s_bn_initializeBuyNowLink(‘www.click2sell.eu’, ‘3692’);</script>
    

   I won’t waste your time with analyzing the whole content of the code, let’s just see which part is responsible for showing button’s image. As you might already sensed, that’s the bolded part. As you see, that part is just a simple URL to image’s location in the Internet. So if your custom image is located in http://www.someserver.com/mycustomimage.jpg, you just need to replace that bolded URL with your own picture’s URL (just be careful not to remove any other symbol accidentally).
   The result of your modification would look like:

   <a id="c2s_bn_lnk_3692" href="https://www.click2sell.eu/buy?testerespa" ><img src="http://www.someserver.com/mycustomimage.jpg" border="0" title="Buy now!" alt="Buy now!" ></a>

   [script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.click2sell.eu/js/buy_now_butt_v2.js"></script>
   [script type="text/javascript">c2s_bn_initializeBuyNowLink(‘www.click2sell.eu’, ‘3692’);</script>

    
   After this change you will have a fully working "buy-now" button with your own custom image.
   Let me caution you not to make any single other modification in the code (like altering spacing to make it look more "compact").
    

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Affiliates help you to sell your product or service to your customers all over the world. Hence it is very important that you increase the number of affiliates and also retain the existing ones. Its very important to know how to manage affiliates successfully and implement this knowledge in your daily job. This article gives you seven great tips to manage affiliates successfully.

• Reward your affiliates in a way so they would feel that your product is worth being promoted! The most difficult decision to take in affiliate program is choosing correct amount of commissions for the affiliates. If you pay very little then your affiliates will lose interest in promoting your business. On the other hand if you pay more you might end up in loss. So, the ideal condition is to pay varying commission rates to different affiliates depending on their performance. In most cases you can have a test and see yourself. Offer your affiliates for example 50% of affiliate commissions if you sell digital products online. Run such affiliate program for a few months and see the response. Then increase your affiliate commission more – to 75% and see if that attracts more affiliates or makes them more ‘loyal’. Always test and see for yourself. The thing is that you have to offer your affiliates as much affiliate commissions as possible, this way they will reward you with more sales.
   
• As a general rule set a default commission rate which you can afford to pay on your profits for your affiliates. From time to time give some offers, promotions and bonus and distribute around 25% more of the allotted sum. You can bump another 25% during holidays or when your sales go down. Using Click2Sell affiliate marketing network you can set default commission rate (for example 50%) for products you sell and then run advertising campaign to recruit affiliates with "Special offer" – for example "Members who sign up to promote my products will get 75% commission instead of 50%!" This or similar message may attract attention of very good and active affiliates. From your Click2Sell acocunt you will be able to manage affiliates successfully by contacting them, changing affiliate commissions, banning unwanted affiliates (for example spammers), etc. Believe me, it is really very effective. This technique will encourage the affiliates to great extent, it is better than giving the entire money as general affiliate commission.
   
• You should have an affiliate approval and banning mechanisms. It should be one of the basic features of your used affiliate marketing system because if an affiliate has been using unethical means to drive traffic to your site it will not help you to enhance your sales and moreover it can damage your reputation. You should be able to ban such unwanted affiliates.
   
• Always be in contact with your affiliate, it will make them feel that you are friendly, cooperative and will work for you happily. Being in contact with your affiliate would help you to receive feedback from them both good and bad, which can help you improve your affiliate program and the product or service that you offer because affiliates usually provide good tips that help you make your affiliate program more attractive and successful. So, why not to ask them?
   
• It will be very useful if you trace out from where your affiliates are bringing in traffic to your site. If a particular affiliate is performing well then make sure that you trace out the traffic source. Your affiliate network (such as Click2Sell.EU) should allow you to trace all the traffic that comes to your products sales page and try to find where all the buyers are coming from. This information can help you to focus on those areas and get more profit out of it.
   
• Training the affiliates can produce better results for you. No matter how best your affiliates were, providing regular trainings can improve their performance to significant level. Provide them the training materials and educate about your product or service. Also, tell them how to improve sales in order to gain more commission, what are the benefits offered to them, etc. If possible try to give them support and needed help.
   
• There are lots of tools and promotion methods available. It is recommended that you try to offer many methods and tips to promote your business. For this you can use attractive banners, articles, examples of selling letters, blogs and lots more. Good promotion tool and method will definitely drive quality traffic to your site and this will convert into sales.

These seven tips will really boost your site’s traffic and product sales. You can try all these tips with slight modification according to your business needs and performance to gain the cutting edge over your competitors. But remember – only knowing how to manage affiliates successfully but doing nothing will drive you nowhere. So, log in to Click2Sell account (or Sign up if you don’t have one) and upload all tools for affiliates which you have. Start to manage affiliates!

Affiliates work hard to promote a product or service, thinking that they will earn commission for that. But it is a soar fact that part of the money can be easily lost by affiliates, so it’s very important to know how to protect affiliate commissions?

One of the easiest way to lose an affiliate commission is to advertise plain affiliate links that have a product’s website embedded: the most simple example is the affiliate program with such link like:

http://www.products-page.com/aff.php?affiliate-name

Let’s say an affiliate promotes his/her affiliate links using an article marketing. Visitors will read the review of the article written by the affiliate and if they like the product they will try to directly buy the product from the product’s site instead of clicking the link provided by the affiliate. So, after all the hard work affiliates get nothing.

Some of the most common problems faced by the affiliates are affiliate link hijacking where another unfair affiliate could easily modify the affiliate code and buy the product via own affiliate link i.e., if a visitor decides to buy the product he will become an affiliate of that product and will purchase the product using his own affiliate link so that he can buy the product and can also get some discount in the form of commission.

Another major problem is affiliate link bypassing where visitor will delete the affiliate’s reference in the link and buy products directly, it is just because some people don’t wish to buy the product by being referred by someone.

This article will explain how to protect affiliate commissions from unfair people and maximize your affiliate profits:

• Link Cloakers can solve some of these problems. It is a special script or software program that directs the user from the entered URL to your desired page.

  For instance, if visitor clicks the link:

  www.website.com/product

  the web browser automatically redirects to:

  www.website.com/product?id=affilate_name

  So, your visitor will not know whether it is a direct link or affiliate link, hence you will be protected from the unfair affiliates.
   

• Use Html Unicode format. Instead of providing the affiliate link in the readable format you can encrypt the affiliate URL with Html Unicode like:

  www.website.com/product?id=&#45;&#109;&#116

  so your visitor can’t understand what it means, he will think that it is the code of the product. If you wish to make this even more effective you can encrypt the entire affiliate URL and place it in the anchor tag of the link and place some image or meaningfull text as the visible link. You can use the text like “Click here to order” or use the Buy Now button but always try to keep your link search engine friendly like:

  website.com/product-name-with-keyword

  as much as possible because it can help you to easily gain more visitors. This way you are assured that the visitor can’t predict the URL of your original affiliate link and you can reap the full benefits of affiliating the products.
   

• URL Redirect. Redirecting is one of the easiest and very secure ways to protect your affiliate commission. To successfully redirect your visitors you have to make some changes to the .htaccess file in the public_html or www directory on your web hosting account. Just include the following line to the .htaccess file to enable redirection:
  
  Redirect /product/ http://affiliate-name.product-id.click2sell.eu

  It is obvious that /product/ is a directory created on your web hosting account. Now, when someone tries to access:

  website.com/product/

  it automatically redirects the visitor to your affiliate link:

  http://affiliate-name.product-id.click2sell.eu .

  So, you will surely get an affiliate commission.
   

• Long Period Cookie Tracking System. Usually what happens is that the visitor may not buy the product immediately after reading about it on your site. He may take the buying decision after some hours or days. When he decides to buy he will only remember the name of the product and will not come back to your site (affiliate link) to buy the product instead he will search for the product on a search engine and buy the product directly from the seller. So, you won’t be getting anything for such purchases. To avoid this situation you can use the cookies which will store your affiliate link on the visitor’s computer and when he visits the sales page of the product your affiliate link will be activated and you will get the profit. Affiliate marketing systems such as Click2Sell.EU automatically places 180 day period cookies, so you can be sure that even if buyer doesn’t buy your promoted product immediately, you will still get an affiliate commission if he/she comes back later and orders the product.

These techniques mentioned so far, can protect affiliate commissions from the unfair affiliates successfully to great extent.

Dear Click2Sell.EU members,

All this past month we at Click2Sell.EU were working really hard to prepare a new system’s version. There were a lot of new improvements and tweaks made that makes Click2Sell.EU an even better system to sell your digital and material products online and of course – run your own affiate program and your whole affiliate marketing business. After new update we have faster Click2Sell reports!

But, let’s start from the major features and new tweaks.

As more and more new merchants and affiliates join and start using Click2Sell.EU system to sell ebooks, software or any other products online, we get higher workload on our side – especially the servers. We put a lot of development hours to make Click2Sell.EU not only a user-friendly system, but we were also constantly improving the overall website’s and member area speed.

Some of the most active Click2Sell.EU merchants noticed that the more affiliates promoted their products, the slower the reporting section became. This reporting section includes all the in-depth statistical Click2Sell reports:

• General Report;
• Daily Report;
• Conversion Report;
• Referral Report;
• Keywords Report;

and Tracking Channels report (can be found by navigating to For Merchant –> My Products –> Tracking Channels).

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