Cameron Olthuis

Shoemoney has an awesome guest post over on his blog from a 13 year-old affilite marketing whiz, David Wilkinson. It’s called “Upselling - The why, the where, the how” and it talks about how upselling is a great way to increase revenues on affiliate offers.

It’s best to push your offer to someone IMMEDIATELY after they order. Not inside the members area. Not on your blog. Not through an AdWords ad, but after they click that order button, have their credit card out and their wallet in hand. It’s simple psychology - and as a 13-year old affiliate marketer, if I can manage - you certainly can too.

While David’s article focuses specifically on affiliate offers, this strategy also works wonders for ecom. By suggesting additional products, services, and ‘exclusive’ offers - I’ve personally seen some clients realize a HUGE increase in average order size. Amounts that dwarf any ROI they were getting anywhere else.

It’s not a new strategy by any means either. As David mentions we see this everywhere. How often do you see the ‘other customers also purchased these’ or the ‘this shirt would look great with those shorts’? It works, and all the big players do it. Even things as small as ‘related links’ at the bottom of blog posts. Just don’t get to pushy like some people *cough* GoDaddy.

The point is that you should always remember your ABCs - always be upselling. It’s not always about increasing traffic. Things like improving conversion rates and upselling can go a long ways and provide far better returns.

Sidenote: Where are all these young pros coming from? Harrison, I’m looking at you to one-up this post.

When Facebook launched their platform a little over a month ago I thought it was very exciting news. I said that it was going to change everything.

The Facebook Platform will basically be a mini-web in a sense and this will make it the most important portal on the web.

The platform is still very exciting and I believe it will help Facebook grow to become the biggest social network on the web. But they won’t become the most important portal or site on the web and here’s why.

As Jason Kottke points out - Facebook is a walled garden with nearly everything published under private profiles.

Facebook is an intranet for you and your friends that just happens to be accessible without a VPN. If you’re not a Facebook user, you can’t do anything with the site…nearly everything published by their users is private.

This is a huge roadblock for the majority of people on the web. It’s also a huge roadblock for Google indexing the information and making it available in their search results. It’s for this reason that Facebook won’t become the most important site on the web anytime in the near future.

I do think, however, that we’ll start to see a lot more open platforms like this one in the future. It seems to be a win-win for both users and companies (on both ends) alike and so far we’ve some pretty stellar successes.

So while Facebook may not be ‘the one’, their example will set the tone for what will be a important direction of the web. Of course, as Jason points out, if Facebook opens up in the future this argument means nothing.