Get Higher Ranking in Google
A week or so ago, Peter Sewell of Zlio emailed me, asking if I would like to review the services offered at Zlio.com. He let me know that they had a new version in the works, too, but it won’t be ready until after the new year, and I was anxious to review something other than a blog. Today, I jumped in and started playing.
I started by signing up for a new account. I must admit that I got a little worried when I saw the second step in the process (shown below), but I laid the whole process out so you can see what I quickly learned: it’s relatively quick and painless. Honestly, I hate signing up for affiliate programs. It seems like it takes forever and there’s not a lot there to help me make the sale. Zlio, on the other hand, was actually not too bad. I was able to get my store running pretty quickly. Too bad it starts out without any products, but that’s a good thing, actually.
Next, I needed to select products to sell. Obviously, being a tech blog, I wanted some computers and electronics and cool stuff like that. This, however, is where Zlio has a lot of room for improvement. Finding the specific products I had in mind was not an easy task. The good news is that there’s hundreds of products to choose from for many categories. The bad news is that they’re not organized very well. The search is helpful, but only if you have a very specific result in mind. For example, I wanted to list products I would buy myself or that I already own, so decided to start with the laptop I bought earlier this year. When I viewed the Computers and Software category, I didn’t see any laptops at all. I then searched for “laptop” which returned 300 results. “sony” returned 300 results, as well, which means there’s probably a maximum of 300 results returned for any query. Still, I’m not about to poke through all 300, so I searched for “sony vaio” and got back 138 results. I finally found my laptop on page 8. On the other hand, when I searched for “apple ipod touch”, the first item was what I sought. Ultimately, though, the drill-down category method should be better organized, leaving search as a secondary option, or they should fine-tune the search. Within about 10 minutes, I had 9 products live in my store. This part of the setup was my only sore spot.
Once my store was filled with some products, I decided to poke around the rest of my control panel to see what they had to offer me. I half expected to be done, but I found a few more goodies. One of these is the ability to choose my revenue model. The choices are Pay Per Sale revenue model (A commission is earned for every successful sale that you contribute to), Pay Per Click revenue model (A commission is earned for every click on a merchant link from your ZlioShop – Not available yet), and Mixed remuneration (You earn commission per sale + per click). I chose the mixed. There’s also a section to fill out more details about yourself and include an image, internal blogs, commissions reports, alerts (so I get an email when I sell a product), community tools (this IS supposed to be “social shopping”, after all), ZlioLive (I have NO clue), and ZlioZone (as seen at right).
Clearly, these guys have put a lot of effort into their service and aside from the product discovery issues noted above, I think it’s very clean and easy to get rolling in a hurry. Something else I noticed is that they seem pretty active with their product offering and their interaction with members. Peter was good with his communication with me and they help promote members on their blog to keep people more involved. Will it make you money? I imagine anyone with enough traffic can make a few bucks with it and even more with the referral program, but I won’t know until I give it a little time. If I make any money with Zlio, you’ll likely see a follow-up post in January.
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on December 20th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Hi Joe,
Great info, I will check it out tomorrow or after xmas.
You should have linked to your store in that post, http://joetech.zliostore.com/ took awhile before I found it.
Quick question (which I can probably answer when I get around to sign up). Is it possible to use your own domain name instead of having *.zilostore.com having JoeTechStore.com would have been nice for you!!
I also see you have some products in the sidebar, you didn’t mention that either. Any other cool things ?
Anyway, thanks (first time I hear about Zilo).
Cheers,
Sam
on December 20th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
To answer some of my own questions :-) as I already signed up.
Yes, it is possible to use your own domain name, I might consider this at some stage.
One thing about Zilo, it all seems VERY slow to me. Selecting products and sometimes they don’t show up in the store.
Anyway, all very interesting
on December 20th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Sam: I was going to answer that for you. As for the slowness, I hadn’t experienced that, but I’m still playing.
on December 21st, 2007 at 2:44 am
Joe: Oh, hope you didn’t misunderstand my ‘reply to myself’ I decided to answer as I signed up already. So I was not like ‘Oh, why is Joe not answering within 5 minutes’ :-)
I will add more products to my mini store later today and see what I think about it, might also do a blog entry about it.
on December 21st, 2007 at 9:05 am
LOL. No, I understood it fine.
on December 22nd, 2007 at 3:43 am
[...] Have you ever come across Joe Tech’s blog before? I discovered his blog very recently. He reviews your site, blog, or product for free. I already requested him to review my blog. While reading his blog this week, i found an interesting review. Making Money Online bloggers, this is especially for you: Review: Earn More Money With Zlio [...]
on December 24th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Hi Joe,
I too signed up with Zlio and created a few stores. I’m working on blogs/sites to go with them. I clicked through your Zliozone to the first product that you have featured.
I clicked on see offer and went to Newegg.com, below was the message: Clicked on Buy and received the same message.
We apologize for the inconvenience, but the item you are looking for has been deactivated. Here are some similar products that you may wish to consider:
I just learned from Zlio that I can’t put links to other useful sites on MY blog that is linked to my Zliostore.
This seems to limit my ability to backlink and network with others offering content that might be useful to my readers. Yet you have links on your blog to other sites.
Below are my questions to them and their answers to me:
Q.2. If > I host a blog and a store at my own domain. Can I link with and have
widgets > for other sites, such a organizing experts etc.. on my blog page?
A. NO! This would be a violation of Zlio’s Terms of Agreement and can be cause
for immediate termination of your account.
Q. 3. Back links > section in FAQ is confusing. I thought we couldn’t have
links to other sites in our stores?
A. It can be confusing. Try to avoid it.
I find their FAQ limited and must wait several days to hear back from them with answers. I agree that their site is VERY slow and their search engine frustrating.
I can’t get their new version to work.
Thanks for the info on your blog!
Nwwriter
unclutterdaclutter.com/blog
on January 1st, 2008 at 8:34 am
Tried out Zlio. It looks quite good but impossible to make money from other than in very small quantities. Would certainly attract clickfraud.
on August 2nd, 2009 at 11:03 pm
I also have an store with Zlio :)
http://nstock1.zlio.net/
If they are not in stock, we’re N stock!
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