I started out in affiliate marketing in May of 2003. I had a website, hosted by Yahoo (!!!), and the Yahoo SiteBuilder. (!!!!!!)
Since that time, I’ve learned some code, discovered Wordpress and Joomla, and can get my way around a SQL database, at least in the PhpMyAdmin environment. Also in that time, I’ve identified the 3 biggest issues that are affecting affiliate marketing, as I see it.
1.) The “What I do is my own business and no one elses” attitude from affiliates.
What’s great about being an affiliate is the freedom. You can work when you want, on what you want, and to a degree, how you want. And that’s great. It’s a dream career really, if you can pull it off. With that though comes a grave responsibility that I think a lot of affiliates fail to see. The lack of transparency, on the affiliate side, is beginning to cause issues. And what they think they are hiding from other affiliates, in many cases, they are hiding from smaller merchants without the funding and staffing to watch every click that comes through. That will be bad for the industry, long term. Which is Number 2.
2.) Higher Cost of Entry than it had been.
You might think I’m crazy for saying that, given how easily you can set up a program at places like Shareasale or other smaller networks.
But that’s just a fee. The real costs are now monitoring your protected keywords, should you choose to have them, keeping the true poachers out, and watching all of the other bad actors that “slip” into the networks. Getting an OPM isn’t cheap, and it takes some serious commitment, knowing that your program might not gain real traction for months. You can easily be $20,000 or $50,000 into an OPM alone before you see the affiliates really driving you qualified traffic.
That doesn’t even take into account other promotional costs.
And I can hear some affiliates scoffing now, saying, “Well, if they don’t have $50k+ to throw at a marketing effort, are they serious about doing it?”
My response to that would be: Then why do places like Shareasale exist?
Wasn’t it to lower the cost of entry, so that more companies could get involved? That brings us to number 3.
3.) The Networks
On paper, the idea of an affiliate network is a great thing. Consolidated payments, a layer of protection between affiliates and merchants (and merchants and affiliates), and a way to manage your links, etc.
I’m not sure though that they were meant to simply be a conduit, were they? Is that how they bill themselves to prospective affiliates and merchants? (”Yeah, we’re just a pipeline between the two sides”).
All of the networks that you can name off the top of your head are now mature enough as organizations to be going the extra step in keeping affiliate marketing a high ROI proposition for a merchant, and protecting their affiliates from bad merchant partners as well.
I’ll get more into what I think they should be doing in the coming weeks.
So that’s the Big 3 as I see it. I had a hard time keeping OPMs out of the list, as I believe in some cases we’re being sold a bill of goods there as well. But they didn’t make the list because there are still a lot of good ones.
Tags:
affiliate marketing,
affiliate networks,
new affiliate programs,
trademark poaching 