Chitika is not only a multi-award winning 'impulse merchandising' advertising platform, it's also one of the most adventurous affiliate programs, continually updating its marketing formats to suit a constantly evolving marketplace.

However, we've found that some of the most interesting innovations take a little bit of discovering, so here to help you is an overview of Chitika's cleverest formats.

No website needed

Few realize that it's perfectly possible to offer Chitika's merchandising ads even if you don't actually have a website or blog in place.

The ShopLincs feature provides Chitika affiliates with a ready made, co-branded storefront which can be filled with products of your choice. In theory, this could be promoted via free websites such as Squidoo, email marketing or even offline campaigns - all techniques that have been used extensively by many affiliate marketers

What's more, the appearance of the store can be formatted to suit. Several preset designs are available at the click of a button, while publishers with advanced coding skills can carry out extensive customization using CSS.

Combine this with the fact that Chitika also provides powerful extras such as interactive search facilities, and ShopLincs becomes an affiliate marketing tool that's certainly worth investigating.

Domain Parking

For anyone about to set up a site, Chitika's 'Parked Domains' product offers a shopping environment very similar to ShopLincs, except that it's formatted especially with a parking page in mind.

For anyone confused by the terminology, a parked domain page is one that appears when a domain name has been registered, but before the website itself is in place.

For example, if you had typed www.clickspiration.com into a browser before this site was online, you would have seen a page saying something like "this domain has been acquired - website coming soon".

Since it's perfectly possible to replace this 'default' page with one containing ads, the marketing opportunities offered by domain name parking are sometimes seen as an alternative to actually creating a fully functioning website - especially if the domain is likely to attract plenty of traffic.

While the practice of retaining a parking page indefinitely is dubious (though perfectly legal) using it as a marketing vehicle while preparing a site actually makes a lot of sense. It's quite common these days to circulate details of new sites well before publication to boost their search engine presence. A parking page store might actually bring you income before you're online!

Shopping Tag Clouds

Tag clouds are used to display commonly visited links, with the most popular shown in larger text sizes to graphically depict their importance.

Chitika's take on this is the 'shopping cloud' a really neat little advertising vehicle that manages to intrigue yet remain fairly discrete at the same time. Once again, it's completely customizable - change text colors, fonts and even text sizes right in the Chitika ad creation window.

White space advertising

Ever-increasing screen resolution is a problematic situation that's well known to web designers - create a site for a particular screen size, and at anything much higher your pages are going to be surrounded by awkward looking areas of space.

There's not much that can be done about this (other than creating 'fluid' layouts that stretch as required), but Chitika have come up with a fantastic solution in their innovative (and as far as we know, unique) white space advertising format.

The graphic below (from the Chitika site) is pretty self explanatory - the ad code will detect if space is available, and if so fill it with a product mini-mall like that shown above. At the moment the functionality is only viewable by US traffic, but it's a great idea and will almost certainly be rolled out to international audiences as the widest screens become ever more popular.

(If you're looking to create ads specifically for larger screens, Oxado is another company that provides suitably sized formats).

Behavioral targeting

And finally - the buzz surrounding behavioral targeting, which serves different ads to different visitors based on their online surfing behavior - hasn't been lost on Chitika, who have recently introduced a behaviorally targeted contextual format known as Premium.

In fact, this is two developments rolled into one - not only does it employ behavioral technology, it also expands Chitika's offering to include services such as finance, travel and similar offerings as well as the company's familiar product ranges.

It's a move we've been waiting for, making Chitika's advertising far more flexible and able to target users for whom traditional mall products simply aren't suitable.

Once again, this newest format is currently limited to US surfers - but it's possible to add an alternative url for a program such as AdSense to ensure that your advertising space doesn't go wasted. And if what you've read has convinced you that Chitika is definitely a company worth investigating further, you'll find more information about their affiliate program here.

 

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