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Ok I’m thinking about my New Year’s resolutions for 2005 ecommerce efforts. What are they? Well, lets think about 2004 first.

My goals were to double up sales for our ecommerce efforts. How? Via a “touch-point assault”.

We wanted to use virtual postcards to increase “Viral” marketing - we did, and it worked - over 3500 email post cards sent in 4 months… That’s is 29 free ads a day… The ROI is huge. Figure it cost about .55 to touch a new user - that’s $1925 at least… But a virtual post card is even better. It entertains a user into learning about your company. It is a “push pull” marketing effort in one free motion… it is Free because you did not buy a keyword to get a click from another visitor (the person who recieved the card).

We used email to our advantage, too. Using contests and many other email (non-spam) tactics… Over 20% of revenues are attributed to our email efforts.

Affiliate marketing came to life late in the year for us. We pushed hard to get it up by the holiday season and met that goal. Just in case you don’t know - affiliate marketing is when someone runs a banner or ad for your site, and they receive a commission for any sales it generates.

Affiliate marketing is just a baby in a blanket at this time, but already has had a turbulent beginning. Industry wise, many affiliates are spammers and handle their promotions poorly and half heartedly. We see that 10% of our affiliates make up 85% of our sales. That means that out of about 200, 20 of them are performers. They make part or all of their living from online promotions. JuniperResearch reports that almost 80% of the merchants polled grew their affiliate programs in 2004.

What’s in for 2005? I think that affiliate marketing is going to be huge. The stats are in for us and here is what we plan on looking forward to.

-Text Banners BLOW AWAY GRAPHIC BANNERS, 6 TO 1. Our top affiliates use text based banners to pull in sales. They are using google style text ads and making the most money.

- Allowing people to have product for sale on their own site is going to really gain popularity. We are seeing that happen already with some companies creating product feeds for affiliates to use. All orders will still come to your shopping cart - but be generated via the affiliates site.

- PPC affiliate programs? DONE and GONE. Google is about to change their policy to not allow other people to buy keywords for URL’s they don’t own… This will cause a slump in the traffic for some sites. We see tons and tons of sites buying keywords and pushing the traffic to other companies for commissions. We see people doing that for our own sites. Good for us now, bad for us later.

- Blogs are going to grow up. Blogging is getting HUGE and much more sophisticated. There are search engines for blogs now. Creating and adding your content and promotions into peoples related blogs will get your traffic and increase your revenues.