The Future of Affiliate Marketing Pt.2

The age of anonymity and privacy are done. Facebook, Google+ and social media have pretty much seen to that. It’s easy now to track down who and what a person is all about. This can be an advantage for business and for affiliates.

Now is the time for publishers to really focus on building quality content for their visitors, and building a community with their visitors. This was the TRUE purpose that affiliate marketing was developed for. Building content/community and sharing products or services with that community and giving them a means to support a publisher’s endeavor.

Consider:

• People love to get recommendations. Despite how much advertising you throw at someone, a recommendation will always trump brand / advertising / anything else.
• We support each other. If your audience believes in your content / product / service, they WILL want to support you. Look at the rabid fanbase Apple or even Google has been able to built. Go to a Nascar race and you’ll see dedicated Ford, or Chevy supporters (and customers). 

If a Publisher builds community through valuable content, people WILL support that publisher and value the publisher’s recommendations on products. However, this is doubly difficult if you are “anonymous” or generic. I believe publishers must build a personality and personal connection with their readership. Trust is critical on the web, and especially in regard to transactions. Knowing who you are allows contributes to building trust.

Google punishes outright paid links. In the past there have been services that have reached a modicum of success where a site/merchant could pay a blogger or publisher for a link or a post. How effective were these services? Well, they are mainly used for SEO and “link juice” purposes, and very rarely used for generating real sales and attention. These service seem most attractive to the decreasing sub-set of folks that still believe “page rank” is important. However most of the publishers grabbing these paid link opportunities generally had very thin content sites, and very little community built up around them.

There’s a gap here just waiting for “affiliate marketing” to step in. Publishers producing valued content that pick and chose products to promote (if they have an affiliate program). Publishers can recommend the products THEY use or they believe in to their audience. If an honest relationship has been built, and the publishers let’s his or her audience know this is how they are able to support themselves to keep producing content, distrust, pettiness and hesitation over clicking a referral link evaporates.

Bam! Win-win! So, how can we get there? It’ll take commitment to the program from the merchant and dedication and a “long tail view” from the affiliate program manager. We at AMWSO take very seriously this commitment to quality Affiliate Program Management.

In a couple days I’ll discuss more why we as an industry sometimes have trouble reaching this ideal.

The Future for Affiliate Marketing Pt.1

We are approaching the beginning of a huge potential disruption in performance/affiliate marketing. Now, as with any disruption, there is tremendous opportunity for those that recognize the shift early, and are able to react and adapt to it.

Consider that more and more people are shifting to online/digital means to get their content, be it video content, audio content (podcasts), or written content. Advertising spending and revenue is growing for digital, but perhaps not as fast as it could be growing.

People dislike advertising. There are far too many scams and also we've persisted far too long with low quality, spammy "shotgun" style tactics. If you read the pundits, you'll frequently see discussions about how to make advertising more interesting and engaging. Sounds challenging and sounds like we have to come up with really creative and innovate ways now to get ads in front of people. Bologne! It really doesn't need to be very challenging or difficult.

The future problem faced by display advertisers, and we're just seeing hints of it now, are services like Flipboard, Instapaper, Adblock, etc., stripping out advertising from sites. People are able to easily consume content without enduring a bombardement from online ads. The display advertising world hasn't really started panicking about this yet, since these anti-ad/pro-reader services haven't hit a point of wide adoption....but these services are growing.

Of course, this doesn't even touch the point that people just don't like to click banner advertising. Here's a nice info-graphic illustrating this phenomena: http://www.getelastic.com/why-web-users-don%e2%80%99t-click-on-banner-ads-infographic/

This provides a platinum opportunity for performance marketing to provide salvation for publishers. How? Discussion, engagement, embedding. Well, I'll leave you to consider it, and I'll offer details on my ideas in a couple days.

Affiliate (....Blog) Revenue

One of the longest ongoing debates in the affiliate industry is "how much can a person make", and there are lots of sites made by people claiming to have made millions, presenting fake checks while they attempt to suck money and life blood from unfortunate web marketeers who are looking for ways to kick start their revenue. Ask any serious affiliate how much money they make and you'll likely get one of two answers "Not Enough" and "Could be more", no dollar figures. Yes we're all capitalists and looking for ways to get beyond earning "enough". There are also many many ways for people to earn money on line now a days, the advent of blogs making it even easier for more people to try to make money too.

Being as we see a lot of the checks we issue to affiliates we have a good idea of what affiliates of all sizes can and do earn, but no I'm not going to be publishing those numbers. What I did come across and found interesting and something I'm going to follow, was the revenue post by the folks who own General Marketing Blog where they are posting their on going monthly revenue for everyone to see and follow, along with related traffic and ranking reports. Here's a slice of the revenue info :

Blog Income

• Pepperjam: $123.00 (Up $26.00)
• Adsense: $26.51 (Down $10.81)
• Bannermall: $0.00 (Down $20.00)
• Banner ads: $172.00 (Up $40.00)
• Paid Posts: $245.00 (Up $115.00)

The blog has been live 6 months and the owners made just over $550 in April. I don't believe that's a bad number for just 6 months live. They also list their site data, rankings and traffic reports. What I found interesting though is that the revenue has not come from any traditional affiliate networks, other than PJN, or even PPC, but more from the growing business of paid posts.

For people looking to launch a new site and earn some money, this certainly shows, that with effort and focus you can start to get a reasonable income within a few months, and that Pay Per Post Marketing is becoming a large factor in making that possible.