The Marketing Wire

Affiliate marketing. Love it of hate it it’s here to stay and it will continue to evolve no matter what the search engines, Antivirus tools and popup blockers do.

Ooops, rewind! What’s affiliate marketing?

OK, for the PROs and B2B marcomms persons (how pc) who justifiably haven’t a clue what it means I’m talking about online marketing techniques with the primary aim direct return on investment generate sales or leads. Such instant gratification is something that many a marcomms team can only dream of, so how’s it done?

Consumer goods retailers such as PC World, Amazon.co.uk, eBay and lingerie retailer Figleaves.com rely on their affiliate marketers to drive traffic to their sites and stimulate sales. Entrepeneurial marketers can literally create marketing campaigns for the retailers by publishing special (hyper)links on their websites and email newsletters which track the origin of the traffic and pay a commission of 2-15% to the referrer in the event of a successful sale.

The marketer or “affiliate” of the retailer will sometimes deal directly with the retailer (Amazon), but will more often operate on behalf of the retailer through a 3rd party affiliate service such as Tradedoubler, Affiliate Window or Webgains.

Which leads me to the beginning. A good place to start. Many large sites, particularly in the IT / Technology sector rely on banners and product features to generate income. These sites and the Affiliate services are frequently challenged by tools that stop advertisements (ad blockers), stop popups (Popup blockers, browser toolbars) and Antivirus / Internet security software that stop advertisements from being displayed or even the referrals from changing the web page viewed to that of the retailer. Ironically, Antivirus and Popup blockers themselves rely heavily on affiliate marketing.

And that’s the big boys. What you might call the real publishers. There are smaller sites, such as my appalling Cheap Laptops website or Bra Selector (following the Valentines Day inspired Figleaves theme) that are set up purely as marketing platforms. These smaller entrepreneurial sites can be penalised by search engines such as Google because they are seen as offering little of interest to the knowledge-seeking surfer.

This isn’t all bad - we have all searched for products and information an ended up on a “phony” affiliate site. One industry in particular floods the Internet with errrm… affilaite content… yes you guessed it. Just try searching for various species of bird and you’re in the porn-zone. Not a pleasant experience at all. All salute. Google ho!

But what about the humble Internet entrepreneur earning a crust off the pumpernickebrot of online technology sales? Why should they be treated unfairly? Well, some sites are poor. They re-use retailer’s content leading to a sea of rather sad and uninspiring sites in a knee-jerk effort to make a quick buck. These sites are unlikely to stick around for the duration, so there’s no real issue here - except for perhaps an issue of scale. One goes, the next pops up. The best sites have a clear purpose (again unlike mine… gimme a chance!), a brand and a driving force behind their development.

Modern search engines look for unique, varied content. What? Like blogs? Well yes - blogs can make highly effective affiliate marketing tools. Marketers who really know their chips from their Apples can make a living by publishing informative - if quirky and opinionated- posts and creating a bot of a buzz. It’s a one-man (”mun”) publishing extravaganza.

Other sites such as moneysupermarket.com or Pricerunner have evolved from basic price comparison sites. At the most basic level, these sites offer a price comparison between several retailers - not just between brands like in a Supermarket - putting the consumer in control. Great. Nice…

Jazz it up and you have a surfer’s best friend. Surely something they would like to find on Google. To those in the know, affiliate sites elicit the basic human instinct : why should they get a cut? Well, why not? Those affiliate marketers have probably worked alot harder for that referral than Google does for its paid ad clicks from their free product search and comparison service Froogle / Google product search. Fair enough I say.

Where was I? Ah, yes. Google is fine - it’s just a rant. Hope it was an interesting intro to the ins-and-outs of affiliate marketing. Search engines often punish the affiliates so we don’t have to, when they do it’s up to the marketer to find a way round it - and so the cycle continues. The best sites have a clear purpose, brand and all that - they’re smart - and they help consumers find what they want whether it’s information or a product. Support your local shops favorite sites, share them with your friends and join the web 2.0 revolution (more on that later).