Moose on the Loose

One may say be a fat affiliate for longevity & survivability another may say be a thin affiliate to milk the cow whilst it is fat. Why is it one or the other?

Simply do both at the same time & it’s a potential win win situation.

At the moment we hear these buzz words like … “thin” … “fat” … “length” … “girth”, take your pick on whatever grabs your fancy, but realistically in 5 years time, 10 at most, what is affiliate marketing going to look like? Is it going to be recognisable?

Some folk might reference to the classification of that current buzzwords “Web 2.0” & “Social Media”, where we could point to a few individual sites which may possess sustainability qualities, or do they? U-Tube (I still like) which might have a longer slow burn than Facebook (the novelty factor wore off quickly for me) & very much like an evolved version of Friends Reunited or Classmates. Where if you refer to predecessors like Friends Reunited & My Space, which with hindsight are maybe now considered as passing fads, but these are successes for only a few.

Please note using “Web 2.0” for monetisation is a different conversation and it’s worthwhile checking out Lee’s Blog … Guide: Social Media & Affiliate Marketing (Speaker’s Notes) which is from his excellent presentation at A4UExpo.

Hypothetically speaking, assume a network cuts 4000 cheques a month for those meeting the minimum payment threshold. Maybe a quarter of those do affiliate marketing full time, I haven’t checked the census.

However, you can’t have 4000 Facebooks or U-Tubes, so what will happen to those 4000 cheques cut or 1000 affiliate who are full time businesses. Will it evolve or evaporate down to a concentrated few hundred fat cat affiliates, if that even, who have the resources to recoup a healthy income.

Hold on though … Facebook, MySpace, U Tube, Friends Reunited are NOT affiliate sites, so why are they even referred too by affiliates?

What are good examples of “fat” affiliate sites? I don’t go around checking what affiliate sites are out there, so I admit that is ignorance on my behalf, unless someone wants me to offer an opinion of their site. I am only familiar with a few friends sites, who are as long in the tooth as me, and yes they are certainly top notch.

However, could we partially, not wholly, blame networks in not providing the tools over the past 5 – 10 years to expedite affiliates into developing fatter sites, or should this lay at the doorstep of the affiliates for not taking more initiative.

Google may have inadvertently revealed another one of its underbellies, and there are few to be exploited. If you read Shane’s Blog … Google Embedded Site Search – Brand Abuse ? Apart from the valid points on there like a bigger wedge of cash derived from advertisers, and brand losing their brand status cos of the search capabilities, thus levelling the playing field a little. Yet, Google keeps advocating spin about “content rich” sites and so forth, but hang on if these so called “content rich” sites become too “sticky” then it means less users going back to Google to search & less advertising revenue for them. So would they want to list sites which are too sticky, well in theory no, but they want decent search results thus thin ones are thrown into the mix. Thus Google’s Embedded Site Search may have been the compromise, illustrating that Google is keen to keep search on it’s own site for revenue driven purposes. That’s the clue, the philosphy of keeping search on your own site.

A couple of years ago I suggested that if most affiliate sites had search functionality on their site i.e. organic search, I don’t mean just for products on their site. Then it will give less reason for visitors to leave & use other search engines. It won’t be much of a dent initially, but will depend how well you market it, how good the results are & how many affiliates embrace it.

Thus we have the following pointers for Survival of the Fattest

• Affiliates develop their own search engine & market themselves? I hear affiliates are quite good at this thing called marketing.

• Affiliates start having web search on their sites to keep users within site.

• Affiliates in different niches combine content or different verticals for one super site.

• Affiliates start planting the seed to users of other search engines apart from Google.

I am a little more optimistic, that with the right consolidation of skill-sets within this industry, affiliates can make a significant dent in the monoliths monopolisation, not go head to head, but out flank them. Affiliates know how to manipulate traffic & inform users, they just need to be more shrewd in how they do it.

i.e. Do you add content to Wikipedia or do you add content to your own sites or better still get users to add it to yours on various niches instead of Wikipedia. On the whole I find this whole content discussion thing viewed as too black & white with buzzwords used too liberally once again.

Crib Notes: Google Adwords

One thing I will say, Google looks for a shopping cart, with some direct to merchant paid search we have done has in the past, the ads have been affected for those merchants where the secure transaction went off site, it was something Google mentioned to us in passing as they were also looking for an on-site shopping basket, and even though the sites had decent enough content, they considered it a bridging page.

Maybe you should trial having ALL external links from your site going via redirects & https (note https !!!) & rel=”nofollow”. Fake the basket.

When using adwords, treat your sites as disposable & don’t get emotional about them, like SEO I guess you never know when you might get hit & are no longer the teachers pet, simply play kiss chase. They hit you by kissing your proverbial backside goodbye, you run (copied content over to another domain), they chase, rinse & repeat.

Just because you get spanked it doesn’t necessarily mean your content was bad, make a few modifications & whack up a new one. This maybe “thin” & “narrow” minded, but it’s no reason why you cannot operate as a “fat” & “thin” affiliate concurrently, why should it be one or the other?

Your “fat” site can then be your fallback biatch.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 11:17 PM and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.