Epik Will Be OK, and Current Clients Will Win Big Tomorrow
Epik clients will get a free upgrade to full eCommerce stores.
You might think that today would be a dark day for Epik.com clients following a number of Epik Product Portals were de-indexed from Google. But following talking to Epik founder Rob Monster moments ago, it’s not the nightmare scenario you might imagine.
First things first, here’s what happened: a number of Epik-produced “Product Portals”, which include affiliate and CPC links to products, were de-indexed by Google within the past 24 hours. Not all of the sites were cut; I checked my three portals and two of them are still indexed. Traffic to the Epik network has fallen over the past day, but not by catastrophic numbers.
This is obviously bad news for anyone who’s product portal suddenly lost a great source of traffic. It’s unclear if this is temporary and if the portals will be added back into the index. But regardless, owners of these stores are regarding to get a nice gift: their product portals will be upgraded to full eCommerce stores at no charge. Epik will announce this tomorrow morning.
Epik has by now created some of these stores, and planned to roll them out officially next quarter. But today’s events just moved that date up, and anyone who bought a $249 Product Portal may upgrade it to an eCommerce site for free rather than the standard $2500 price tag.
Besides the great features in the eCommerce platform, there are a couple things that will ensure they don’t meet the same fate with Google:
1. The content is richer and adds more value, making it more worthy of Google’s search engine love
2. The economics change. With a full store where you make a high margin on a $20 sale rather than get a modest affiliate payment, you can make profitable media buys. You won’t rely just on Google for traffic.
Yes, today couldn’t have been a happy day for Epik. But I get the feeling Rob Monster had planned for the possibility. He planned for ways to depend less on search traffic.
And the firm has plenty of capital — meaning something like this won’t bring the firm to its knees.
