Happy Friday! While you’re here, check out my newly beefed up resources page. I’ve added links to a ton of products and services I personally use to run my creative business. I’ll be adding more resources in the coming months so that my readers can benefit from my favorite finds. Many of the vendors I recommend are the result of exhaustive searches to find suppliers with the perfect combination of best price and great products. If you need promotional items, web hosting, domains, graphic design, etc. the resources page has great suggestions.

On a personal note, I’m pleased to announce that an Ex-Boyfriend tee (my clothing company) was featured last week on an episode of ABC’s Modern Family. I’m always touting the benefits of publicity and this placement was a result of hard work from my partner and our PR assistant. (If you want to know how my partner and I do our own PR I’ve written an ebook about it.)

Now, on with my favorite reads this week:

• Quick, Easy and Almost Free Ways to Close Sales During the Holidays
• Get Elastic Serves Up a Terrific Guide for Link Building, Specifically for Ecommerce Sites
• Great Read About Keeping Your Marketing Fresh and Trying New Tactics
• Color Psychology Showcase — What The Colors We Use in Web Design Mean to People
• Can Visualizing Your Success Actually Lead to Failure? — Interesting Departure from Conventional Wisdom
• Awesome Data Mining Tips from Viper Chill — Tons of great tools for researching keywords, competitors, consumer demand, etc.
• How To: Setting Goals in Google Analytics
• 2012 Publicity Calendar

It’s no secret: the more people in your target demographic who find your online shop, the better your chances are at making sales. Most of your website visitors are going to come from links or search engines. The good news is these things go together like peas and carrots. The more good quality sites you have linking to your site, the more search engines will favor your site. Inbound links are a top ingredient for search engine optimization.

Now getting 1,000 new links sounds like a daunting task. But what if I told you you could have more than double those inbound links to your online shop by this time next year? Let’s make a new year’s resolution: this time next year you are going to have over 2,000 inbound links to your website if you’re willing to do about 15 minutes of work every day on your marketing. That’s it! 15 minutes/day = over 2,000 links!

Now to start this plan you’ll want to do a little reconnaissance. Start by making a list of sites where you could get links. Here are the categories to consider:

• Bookmarking sites (i.e. StumbleUpon, StyleHive, Digg, Delicious)
• Social Media sites (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Pinterest, Tumblr)
• Niche Directory sites (i.e. Unanimous Craft, Bust’s Girl Wide Web, Indie Collective)
• Blogs (i.e. Smaller Box, Design Sponge, etc.)

Make your list as extensive as you can, you’ll be referring back to it every day until this time next year when you have your thousands of links. It might take a few hours this week to gather your initial list, but once you’ve got it you’ve basically got your to do list.

Now here’s your regimen:

5 minutes: Posting new content to your website (i.e. a new product, a blog post, etc.). Make sure your content isn’t 100% your products. You also want to produce interesting content so people don’t feel like your site is nothing but a sales pitch. A site with good content is likely to get more attention than a site with nothing but products on it.

2 minutes: Posting a link to your new content on 2 social media sites (i.e. your Twitter account and your Facebook page)

2 minutes: Posting your link to your new content on 3 social bookmarking sites (i.e. StumbleUpon and Stylehive)

6 minutes: Adding your site to a new directory or pitching your site to a blog on your list of blogs to pitch. If you don’t have new content to pitch to a blog, pitch your services as a guest blogger, since guest posting still gets you a link.

That’s all you have to do. If you don’t have new content to share every day, go back through your archives and share an older blog post or existing product on sites that haven’t linked those pieces of content yet. This process should get you about 5 to 6 new links each day. By the end of the year you’ll have over 2,000 new links. You should see a gradual boost in your site traffic, search rank and sales as the year goes on.

ATTENTION ETSY USERS: If you’re thinking about enacting this plan for your Etsy shop, my advice is don’t. If you spend 15 minutes/day marketing, you’ll have dedicated over 90 hours of labor to your marketing by year’s end. All that link juice is benefiting Etsy.com. Do you want to work an extra 90 hours this year to help Etsy be more successful?

I think 100% of your marketing efforts should 100% benefit YOU and only YOU. If you’re going to invest 90 hours of your precious time marketing, do it with your own website so that 100% of the benefits are yours alone. Don’t just take my word for it, leading marketing blog Copyblogger would say the same thing.

I get sponsorship requests in my inbox almost daily, and they are usually a variation on the following themes:

1. Buy ad space from me! I get 100 visitors/day and have a page rank of 2.

2. I want to review your products on my blog. I get 1,000 visitors per month.

3. I want to host a giveaway for your products. I have 500 Facebook friends.

DELETE DELETE DELETE!!! I don’t mean to sound like a jerk, but I am trying to run a business and these “offers” suck! They’re money losers for me and I can’t just give away free money all day.

If you’ve been sending out solicitations like this, let me explain the brand owner’s perspective. (If you’re a product-based brand owner, this should be your perspective too, so listen up.)

When I make a decision to advertise or donate free products to something, those decisions cost me money. My advertising budget is hard-earned. My products and postage are not free. So when I am presented with an opportunity to part with my money, I’m going to make that decision on statistical probabilities. Here’s what I mean:

Let’s say an ad costs me $50.00 for 10,000 impressions. If I expect a 1% click-through and a 1% conversion that means I can expect 100 clicks on my ad and one conversion. So the statistical probability is that one sale would cost me $50.00. If I sell a $500.00 product, I might be cool with that. If I sell a $10.00 product this ad is clearly a bad idea.

I might play with the numbers depending on the situation. For example, I know when I do co-op ads, I get a 4% click through rate and a 3% conversion rate. When I get an editorial placement, maybe I average a 3% click-through and a 2% conversion. I can make these estimates based on past performance of other ads or other editorial placements. This information gives me numbers to run different scenarios with so I can make an educated guess about how much a conversion is going to cost me.

So, getting back to those unsolicited sponsorship requests. If I give you a free product to “review” I am paying about $5 in postage and losing about $25.00 of inventory, so this placement is going to cost me $30.00. If your blog receives 5,000 visitors per month, that’s less than 200 visitors per day. Even if your review of my product stays on your home page for 5 days, I’m probably getting less than 1,000 impressions. Even if the placement garnered an unheard of 5% click-through and a 2% conversion rate (again, double the average conversion rate for most ecommerce sites), I’d still be paying $30.00 per conversion. So you can see why, in all statistical probability, your “review” offer is a money-loser for me.

How to get brand owners to say yes to your requests
If you’re running a truly successful blog, you won’t need to spend your days begging brand owners for free stuff. They’ll come to you with offers because you have something to trade. I offer free product for review and giveaways all the time. But I make those offers to publications with millions of readers, because those are odds that are statistically favorable for me.

If you want my products for your contests or just as free swag, you’ve got to have something to offer me that’s worthwhile, and that means a sizeable targeted audience. Spend your time building your readership instead of asking for freebies. The freebies will come when your publication is worthy of them.

Want to figure out the probable results of a sponsorship?
I’ve created a handy conversion calculator that computes the probable results of an ad or sponsorship. If you’re considering buying an ad or giving away a free product, use the tool to determine the probable results of the sponsorship.

If you’ve been trolling for free stuff from brands, you should test out my calculator too. You can supply the calculator with your site traffic info and the average value of the goods you’ve been asking for. My calculator will tell you what sponsoring brands are probably paying per conversion when they accept your offer. Really think about whether you’re actually offering them a valuable opportunity before you keep requesting freebies.

What about secondary conversions?
I harp on secondary conversions a lot on this blog. I am constantly saying that marketing is about more than just sales. I absolutely mean this. That said, it’s a little about sales. If a marketing opportunity is statistically likely to cost a lot more than the value of my sales (i.e. the marketing opportunity costs me $500 and I only expect $50 in sales), then the chances of that opportunity delivering a lot of secondary conversions aren’t great either.

If I’m on the fence about a placement, meaning I feel it’s well-targeted, but the statistics say I will pay $8.00 per conversion when I typically try to pay $6.00 per conversion, I might go for that placement expecting secondary conversions to make the placement worthwhile, but it has to be close to my targeted cost per sale for secondary conversions to tip the scales in favor of a placement.

Today I want to talk about the difference between modeling your business around transactions versus relationships. This ties into what I talked about earlier this week with regard to customer lifetime value. First, my post Monday was mostly geared to business models that focus on customer relationships. Not all business models have this as a focus. Here’s are some characteristics that make these models different:

Transactional Business Models

• Focus is on getting the sale, not getting repeat customers
• Business offers no remarkable brand experience
• Business sells mainly utilitarian items that people seek out when the items are needed
• Customers are motivated primarily by price
• Marketing efforts rely heavily on SEO and programs like Google Adwords, tools that drive customers to the business when customers are shopping for the products they sell.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Last summer we decided it would be nice to string some white Christmas lights around our backyard for evening lighting. We googled “outdoor white christmas lights” and visited sites like Novely Lights and Christmas Lights Etc. I can’t even remember which one I ordered from, probably whoever had the best price. They sold pretty much the same product, and it was the product I wanted. It was also a product I wasn’t going to form a real emotional attachment to or shop for regularly. Trying to form a relationship with me as a customer was probably going to be useless for these businesses and their lack of remarkable branding had no influence on my purchase decision.

If you sell a product like Christmas lights or car batteries, it might make sense for you to focus your marketing on transactions vs. relationship building. You might have some chance of building a relationship as a supplier for a landscaper or mechanic, but probably not with the average retail buyer.

Relationship-Based Business Models

• Focus is on getting repeat customers, emphasis on lifetime value of customers, not individual transactions
• Business is heavily focused on creating a unique brand experience
• Business sells items that people want (instead of need), and shopping behavior can be motivated by new offers or desire for product (i.e. if you sell jewelry, customer is equally likely to buy because they love a new bracelet that was just released vs. needing to get a gift for a friend’s birthday)
• Customers are motivated to buy based on uniqueness of product and brand experience (i.e. they can buy a bra any place, but they choose a Victoria’s Secret bra because it looks sexiest.)
• Marketing efforts rely heavily on advertising, PR, social media, email marketing, branding
• Business may sell a type of product many competitors sell, but have a unique spin on the product either via the products themselves or the shopping experience (consider brands like Banana Republic, Nordstrom, Pottery Barn, Hot Topic, etc.)

In contrast with my Christmas lights example, consider a brand like Tiffany & Co. On the face of things they sell jewelry, but that’s not all. What they sell is an experience. They sell the idea of a classic, the ultimate good taste, luxury. Everything about shopping with Tiffanys is an experience from the unique yet timeless aesthetic of their products to the famous little blue box with the white satin ribbon your jewelry is presented in.

My wedding band is from Tiffanys and it does have a different look and feel compared to other jewelry I own.  The designer’s name is inscribed inside the band, along with the famous Tiffanys logo. The ring has a heavier weight to it and it doesn’t look like a ring I’ve seen any place else. You can say a ring is a ring and tons of places sell them, but this one is distinct and it’s associated with a distinct brand, which caused me to favor this ring over the alternatives.

When I have a really special occasion that calls for jewelry, something that I want to be remembered, Tiffany’s is the first place on my shopping list because of the brand experience and products they offer.

What this has to do with you
As a business owner, you really have to think about what kind of business model makes sense for you. The kind of model you choose dictates everything from your marketing strategies to your website copy to your products and product presentation. If your focus is transactional, you want to devote your resources to acquiring sales. You need the best SEO and the best Adwords campaigns.

If your focus is relationship based, you need to really think about crafting every aspect of your brand in a way that’s remarkable.

Select a model that is appropriate for products you sell and the kind of business you want to build, and focus your attention on the strategies that are most suitable for your business model.

Have you downloaded my FREE SEO guide yet? If not, get your copy now!

A few personal notes before I get onto the link love goodness this week.

1. Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I switched to a new web hosting company and that was kind of a hectic time-consuming process. Hopefully things will be a little more reliable with the new host, but we’ll see what happens.

2. My online shop is doing a special fundraiser for homeless animals. If you enjoy this blog and want to do me a favor please please tell your friends about my fundraiser (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and/or order one of our fundraising items. We’ve designed keychain bottle openers and magnets featuring super cute original illustrations and 100% of the money goes to homeless animals. These items are only $6.50 and there’s no shipping charge! Probably cheaper than your average lunch out. So please please help us support this great cause.

3. I’m de-stashing some craft supplies I’ve amassed over the years and the prices are CHEAP. Help me out with my spring cleaning efforts? All items ship for free within the US. If you’re outside the US and want something let me know and I can check into how much shipping will be.

Now onto some linky goodness…

• 5 Common Rookie Marketer Mistakes – A guest post I wrote this week for Craft MBA on common mistakes people make when trying to market their business or website.
• Excellent Tips for Producing Skimmable Content – This is a must-read if you blog. Shows you how to make your posts easy for readers to quickly absorb.
• 57 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your Website
• A Link Building Blueprint – great tips on building links to your site (Link building is one of the key components of search engine optimization. If you want Google traffic to come calling, get some links!)
• Email Marketing Observations from a Shopaholic
• Critique Your Own Website in Less Than 15 Seconds
• How to Steal Like an Artist
• SEO Commandments from Biggie Smalls – 10 truths about search engine optimization as explained by Biggie Smalls

A popular question I hear is “How can I get more traffic to my website?” This is the wrong question. The question you want to ask is “How can I drive qualified targeted traffic to my website?” Targeted traffic is traffic that’s most likely to convert. These are the people who are most likely to give you money. You don’t need tons of visitors if you’re getting the right visitors.

To give you an example, imagine you sell cat collars. Would you rather advertise in a biker newsletter with 300,000 subscribers for $100 or Feline Wellness Magazine, with a readership of 80,000 for $300.00? On the face of it, you might think biker newsletter, more people and less money. The better option is the cat magazine though. It’s more targeted so you’re more likely to actually sell product.

While the example I’ve given is a pretty easy one to understand, my point is to get you to think critically about where and how you market. You can have 1,000 fans on Facebook, but if you sell jewelry on Etsy and so do your 1,000 Facebook fans, your chances of selling to those people are pretty slim. You can buy an ad on a site that’s read by thousands of Etsy sellers for $10, but unless you sell supplies or educational materials for Etsy sellers, there are probably better places for you to advertise.

It’s nice to feel liked. It’s nice to see traffic coming to your site and get praise from friends on Twitter. All those warm fuzzies can fuel your confidence, but they won’t pay the bills. Marketing a business properly is too much of an expensive venture, both in terms of time and cost, so you want to choose the marketing activities that are going to make you the most money.

Not sure if your marketing activities are making you money? Check out my new book on Google Analytics.

The key to succeeding in business is being a true expert on your business. You need to know everything there is to know about it. While many creative entrepreneurs are experts at their craft, when it comes to marketing and selling online, they’re still in the dark. Below are 21 questions you should be able to answer about your online retail business.

1. How many orders do you receive each month?
2. Where do the orders come from (SEO, ads, PR, branding, etc.)?
3. What is your average order value?
4. What referring sites are making you the most money?
5. What keywords are making you the most money via SEO?
6. What keywords could make you money via Adwords?
7. What products are people trying to find on your website today, that you currently don’t offer?
8. How strong is your brand and what percentage of your sales and site traffic come from people going directly to your site or searching for your brand name?
9. What percentage of your visitors are return visitors and what percentage are new?
10. Are you doing a good job of attracting return visits?
11. Do you have a high bounce rate?
12. Do people like your website? Is it user-friendly? Attractive? Loaded with great content?
13. How does your site compare to other sites like it in terms of bouce rate, visits, page views, and return visitors?
14. What pages on your site get the most views?
15. What pages on your site get the least views and what should you do about them?
16. How many people are downloading your PDFs, clicking your Facebook “like” button , Twitter links, etc? Do you know where visitors who take these actions came from (search, banner ads, etc.)?
17. What percentage of people abandon their shopping cart on your site?
18. What portion of the checkout process are people abandoning on? Do they bail on view cart or right before entering payment?
19. How many visits does it take before customers buy?
20. How many days pass before a customer places an order? Do they buy the first day they visit or come back weeks later to spend money?
21. How much do you spend to earn $1.00?

So how’d you do? If you don’t know the answers to all of these, don’t worry. I just finished writing an ebook that can get you the answers to every single one of them! “Harnessing Google Analytics to Make More Money, Grow Your Brand and Be a Better Marketer (Even if Technology Scares The Pants Off of You)” was written for small business owners who need answers to these questions and don’t know how to use Google Analytics to get them.

The book was designed to help you market more effectively and make more money! It will help you:

• Grow your brand.
• Improve your SEO and Adwords campaigns.
• Make better ad buying decisions.
• Get new product ideas.
• Improve your shopping cart and overall content and site design.
• Measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
• Track everything that happens on your website.

Other benefits of the book:

• Breaks down the “techie speak” into easy-to-understand plain English.
• Helpful screen shots guide you along the way so you always know you’re looking at just the right thing and clicking in just the right place.
• Real world examples of how to apply what you’re seeing to make more money and grow your brand.
• The easy-to-digest, skimmable writing format you’ve come to know and love on Smaller Box. Each section of the book is broken out with headlines and bullet points, so making your way through the book is a breeze.
• Instant delivery via email. Read the book on your computer, ipad, or other mobile device and start taking control of Google Analytics today!

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER FOR ETSY, ARTFIRE, ETC.:
This book will be most effective for people who have their own websites. If you depend entirely on a service like Artfire or Etsy to sell online, many of the cool stuff this book can teach you to do won’t work for you. The reason is that in order to make Google Analytics work to it’s fullest potential, you need access to your website’s source code. If you sell on Artfire, Etsy, etc. you can’t access this so you won’t be able to implement some of Google Analytics’ most useful functionality. I have written many articles here about why you should have your own website; harnessing Google Analytics effectively is just one more reason. If you need others, check out my rants on reputation management, re-marketing, SEO, losing sales, secondary conversions, affiliate programs and my personal reasons for having my own website.

Even though the Christmas tree might still be in your living room, it’s time to start thinking Valentine’s Day, at least if you have an online retail business. Marketing and merchandising for seasonal occasions is an essential part of boosting sales, and doing it effectively means planning ahead. That’s why it’s important to take stock of all the events throughout the year you could market for and set a schedule for when you’ll start doing your marketing for each.

Here are some popular ones:

Valentine’s Day:
At the latest you should begin your marketing by mid-January. If you are hoping for some print press remember that monthly publications work months in advance and you can start pitching them as early as November. Weekly, online and daily publications need less lead time, but you still want to get on their radar by early January.

If you plan to do a coupon, giveaway, or other promotion, you’ll want to start drumming up interest with your customers by mid to late January.

Graduation
People start shopping for grad gifts as early as April, so if you have products that make good graduation gifts, come up with a plan to market them by early March and start pitching those products to monthly media outlets. Weeklies, dailies and online outlets can be pitched throughout April and into early May.

By late April you’ll want to make sure your website is updated with graduation gift suggestions. This includes optimizing for keywords related to searches for graduation gifts and updating online ad campaigns to encourage graduation gift purchases.

Weddings
Although people get married all year, a lot of weddings happen in June. If you have products that are suitable for bridesmaid gifts, groomsmen gifts or wedding gifts, prepare to market them this way as early as April. Pitch print outlets first and remember monthly outlets work 2 months in advance. Select appropriate online media outlets to pitch and plan to update your website with a wedding gift guide area.

Having your website up to date for wedding shoppers by early May is ideal, since people start shopping for wedding gifts early.

Back to School
Back to school is a major shopping occasion and it starts as early as August. To take advantage, start getting ready by late June. Again, you’ll want to pitch monthly print press early and then move on to weeklies, dailies and online media.

Have your website updated with back to school related keywords and shopping guides by mid-August at the latest. If you plan to do promotions with customers, you’ll want to get that started around mid-August also.

Halloween
Even before the back to school rush dies down, it’s time to plan for Halloween. Get product placement pitches out in early August to print outlets and start updating your website in late September.

Christmas
Since Christmas is the #1 largest shopping occasion, you’ll want to give this the most lead time. Plan your Christmas marketing campaigns before the end of October. Remember to have your website merchandised by mid-November because people do online shopping early.

Other Events
You can incorporate a ton of other events into your marketing plan throughout the year. Think about charitable fund raising promotions (i.e. you can do promotions tied to breast cancer in October or help raise funds to an AIDS related charity in early December — World AIDS Day is December 1). You can even celebrate something fun or silly like Talk Like a Pirate Day. The key is to know what events you want to make part of your marketing plan and be prepared for them early.

Think about other businesses or organizations you can partner with, products you can promote, ways you can attract media attention, things you can do to merchandise your website and optimize your keywords and ad campaigns.

It’s even a good idea to chart out a calendar now, for the next 12 months, with all the different marketing tasks you’ll need to set in motion on certain dates, in order to make the most of upcoming occasions.

Don’t forget, I’m doing a special Valentine’s Day marketing co-op for indie designers. If you want to join us, here are the details.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• A Beginners Guide to SEO – I realize I post a lot of these, but it’s a pithy subject that’s not well-understood by a lot of people new to online marketing, so whenever I run across a decent article on this I like to share it.




• Why You Need a Business Plan (This Means YOU)
• Biggest Keyword Research Mistakes
• How to Report Content Theives
• Link Building for SEO Beginners
• How to Evaluate the SEO Effectiveness of Your Shopping Cart
• Marketing for Start Ups – The title may not sound riveting, but if you read nothing else this week READ THIS ARTICLE! I think it’s the best one on the list this week. It explains why your marketing ideas aren’t going to cut it. It also has a good section on customer Cost per Acquisition, which echoes my articles last week about having to properly capitalize your business. I like this article because it pays more than lip service to the notion that your marketing has to be remarkable.

Navigating the world of online advertising is tricky; there are so many options and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Two important distinctions to consider are SEM and placement targeted ads. Below is a breakdown of the benefits and drawbacks of these two ad types:

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Although many things fall under the header of “SEM”, I am referring specifically to the  ads that appear through search engines. The program you’re probably most familiar with is Google Adwords. The premise is that your ad appears when people are searching for what you sell. For example, you sell vegan cosmetics. I search for “vegan cosmetics”, your ad appears, I click, I go to your site and I buy.

Pros:

• These ads are typically paid for on a cost-per-click basis. You only pay when you get traffic. If no one clicks, you pay nothing.
• You are getting visitors that are looking for exactly what you sell. In theory, this should yield a good number of purchases if your site is optimized for conversions.
• You can control your costs easily, since you choose what you’re willing to pay per click and what your ad budget is for the day.

Cons:

• This advertising method isn’t for beginners. There’s some technical know-how that’s required. You need to understand phrase matching and broad matching, negative keywords and keyword research. You need to understand click fraud and how to spot it. There are professionals who do just CPC advertising for clients because there’s so much technical know-how involved. You can learn to do your own CPC ads, but be prepared to educate yourself.
• This advertising method doesn’t really provide branding benefits. Your target market probably isn’t seeing your brand name over and over every time they visit their favorite website.

Placement Targeted Ads/Banners:
These are ads that you usually see on your favorite blogs. They tend to be standard sizes like 160×600 pixels. The idea with these ads is that your target market gets frequent exposure to your brand, and this creates brand awareness, which in turn increases traffic and sales.

Pros:

• Your brand is being seen by your target market every day. Even if they do not click today and buy, they will be so aware of your brand that they may seek out your website when they have to buy a holiday gift, etc. These ads can also yield a large number of newsletter sign ups or social media followers, which means you can market to these people over and over now that they’ve expressed an interest in your brand.
• These ads can be less expensive that other CPC ads, if you happen to get a good deal and have an ad that’s generating  a high click-through rate. Sometimes you end up only paying a few cents per click, whereas SEM ads are usually over 10 cents/click.
• These ads are somewhat less complicated than SEM ads;  they do not require tons of technical know-how, although design skills are necessary.

Cons:

• Although some placement targeted ads are CPC (Google has a CPC program for placement targeted ads), they are more often paid on a CPM or flat rate basis; this means you pay whether you get clicks or not.
• Unlike SEM, you may be advertising to people when they aren’t in the market to buy stuff, which means no matter how great your ad/products are, you may not see tons of sales immediately. Some people will make impulses purchases, but a lot of people may take weeks or months to actually come make a purchase.
• You need great design skills — not everyone knows how to design nice looking ads, and if your ad design isn’t up to par, it may not get you any clicks.

So which type of advertising should you do? Personally, I do both, and wouldn’t say that one form is right or wrong.  It’s important to understand what to expect from both so you can plan accordingly.

Co-op advertising, through sites like ishopindie.com, has been a nice middle ground for me because they have the expense of placement targeted ads shared among several businesses, but the benefits of brand visibility and impulse purchases are still there. Since I am able to track all the conversions on my site over time, I can see all the traffic from co-op placements that converts right away, and the visitors who convert weeks or months later.