There is so much BS out there about the bad aspects of affiliate marketing and hating on the pactices of black hat affiliates (ie Keynote from Affiliate Summit), but anyone that knows anything about the search engines knows that every year the big 3 search engines get better and better and weeding out the spammy sites/posts and value better, more original content and sites. Google is of course futher ahead of the pack with the way they rank sites, but over all affiliate marketing is stronger than ever. A few years ago, and I have been doing this for 8 years, there were maybe a couple hundred good SEO affiliates out there killing it for merchants. Over time, the practices of black hat affiliates have been devalued by the search engines and it's no where near as effective as it was a few yers ago. There is nothing that beats good quality built sites and blogs with valuable, well-written content. I am pleasantly suprised everyday when DP members new to affiliate marketing contact me for guidance and knowledge. There are still thousands of good webmasters that are not making money from affiliate marketing. With adsense revenues continuing to disappoint webmasters, affiliate marketing provides excellent opportunities to create good, niche sites and capitalize on the thousands of good converting affiliate programs out there in CJ, Linkshare, and Shareasale. I am very optimistic about the future of affiliate marketing for webmasters and affiliates. This is just my opinion, but I am seeing great indications from new blood getting into affiliate marketing and starting to produce sales. Let me know your thoughts! Thanks for reading...
New blood. Yes! What I loathe are the ridiculous ads from clowns throwing photos of ridiculous homes and cars and touting them as "theirs". If anyone purchases a program from someone like that, you've just let your BS meter down and your greed factor up. Pay attention. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
I agree with you completely...there can be things to learn from ebooks and "programs" on how to make money online, but it ultimately comes down to building out good, valuable content on the web to generate organic traffic. Nothing has changed with good SEO priniciples really...have a well-optimized (metas) site with lots of pages of unique content/articles, and add to it frequently (daily) to keep the spiders coming back for new content to index. Its really not rocket science, but it does take great effort to get there with a long-term organic strategy...
Yes, it takes efforts and hardwork to generate substantial incomes from affiliate marketing (or any other means). Create some thing useful (contents, tools, etc.) to attract visiotrs and it give it away for free. Tap into all the marketing channels without spamming. Do it consistently and you will be rewarded.
And its sites like these that help the noobs sort through the hype and trash to find the real content and ideas to get started with.
Your article is nice but I a little bit disagree with this. Over the last few years, only Google who has changed its algorithm significantly. Live and Yahoo are still crap, even until now. Google's algorithm update is quite slow either. You can see many websites which obviously buy links but still get the first rank in competitive keywords (those links should be filtered). Duplicate content issue is also not as perfect as I thought because some web pages still get good ranks although they duplicated someone else's content. However, I can say that affiliate programs is growing and it won't die unless e-commerce dies. Adsense can go to hell until there are serious competitors to this silly PPC program.
i agree. the affiliate industry is still in it's infancy and as it matures there should be some great opportunities ahead.
I think it was best said in another forum post that I read which alluded to the fact that any industry will have it's fraud and "black hat" practices. It is not something that is exclusive to affiliate marketing and affiliate practices. Good quality content sites (I agree) Google being less than perfect in their practices (I agree), but these things all come with the territory and as experienced and tenacious affiliate marketers grow to their full potential. While it doesn't always work - the one piece of advice that I've read in many forums, e-books, etc. , especially when I read this same question in DP all the time regarding what products to promote, is blog or promote products or services that you are knowlegeable about. Obviously, you'll want to be diverse as you expand your business, but the initial venture should have you promoting something you are passionate about. That will come across and equal quality and unique content. My two-cents, for what it is worth.
Pam, I agree with you that you should get into affiliate programs that you know something about that topic or its a hobby or interested of yours. That makes it easier to write about the various aspects of the product or service you are promoting.
exactly - things you know something about and have personally invested time and experience into are much easier to promote and write content about. I think affiliate marketing is just in it's beginning stages as well, but in a way the nature of "blogging" and how it began has "grown into" affiliate marketing for some of us because we've learned how to monetize our blogs in the last year or more and make money from it - even though we may have been "blogging" for 5-8 years or more...
Ya blogs are great ways to promote affilite merchants. I mean, people are charging per post but if you have a good ranking blog you can more per year with affiliate offers that continue to generate sales than you do by charging a 1 time per post fee...
Aspire you should shirt your focus to affiliate marketing because IMO its a better longterm strategy than anything else online. If you continue to build out your sites/blogs with unique content and product reviews, over time you will achieve high rankings with frequently updating sites.