The Past, Present, and Future of Affiliate Marketing

The Past, Present, and Future of Affiliate Marketing

By: Marissa Ranello

The Good Old Days
Remember the good old days? You’d purchase a domain name, set up your site (with a few swear words here and there), and place some banner ads (while crossing your fingers for the best banner ad click-through results). This all worked great–for a while; until people managed to avoid our banner ads like the plague. Life got more complex. What were us internet marketers to do? We had to become more savvy. Fortunately for us, the affiliate model was introduced.

Ah, the affiliate marketing model. It never hurts to get a little help from your friends, right? Affiliate marketing networks offer a wide range of advantages to businesses. In short: it’s a booming business with dollar signs all around it. Sure, affiliate marketing can be a profitable business, but it can also be very aggravating, time consuming, and antisocial. So here’s the big question: Why the heck do we keep putting ourselves through all of this pain? The answer, although seemingly complex, is quite simple: easy money.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The average person thinks of affiliate marketing as a “get rich quick” scheme for geeks and nerds. Actually, it’s the farthest thing from the truth. Nowadays, you’re just as likely to find a High School dropout behind an affiliate marketing operation; as you are to find a computer science major.

Despite the revenue advantages, many successful affiliate managers are weary of transparent affiliates. After all, there’s a lot of trickery out there. You have to be on the lookout for the ‘Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.’ That’s right folk, if you’re the good guy, beware of the bad and the ugly affiliates. They’re out there right now placing infectious adware on an unsuspecting consumer’s computer.

As a marketer, it’s your responsibility to investigate your affiliates use of adware. Don’t turn your head and look the other way. It’s OUR consumers that may receive unwanted and/or destructive ads. Can you blame them for becoming angry at the marketer who (perhaps inadvertently) funds adware infections? Of course not. Destructive ads shouldn’t even be considered a marketing strategy. It’s completely unethical.

The New Guy
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is a great starting point. If you experience success–run with the ball. Explore additional performance compensation structures. But before you even consider jumping into the game, you should ask yourself the following questions (to avoid business pitfalls):

1). Will affiliate marketing assist you in reaching all of your business targets?

2). Will affiliate marketing have advantages over other types of online marketing?

3). Do you have the time and commitment to run a developing affiliate operation (which will require time to flourish and succeed?

4). How flexible is your budget for affiliate marketing?

Here’s some background information for the ‘new guy’: Time and commitment are essential to your success. While running a network of affiliates doesn’t require a college degree, it does require your attention for details. Perhaps this is why merchants find outsourced providers offer a very appealing solution. In addition, the new guy should realize:

  • Not everyone will make five figures a month with affiliate marketing. There’s a lot of marketers out there. You’re the new guy, remember? Find some successful companies that use affiliate marketing. Research them. What did they do to become such a success? Can you duplicate that plan?
  • You’re not going to make any money eating potato chips in front of the television. If it were that easy–I’d be doing that instead of writing this article on affiliate marketing. Be prepared to devote a lot of time to your business and your affiliate relations.
  • Don’t take blind referrals from anyone! You’ll discover the best affiliate opportunities through your own research.

The Future
In just the last few years, affiliate marketing has become a very powerful force on ecommerce. Every day thousands, if not millions, of merchants rely on affiliate marketing to drive their businesses. But is affiliate marketing all just a big hype? What ever happened to customer service? What strange times we live in; as the value of business is no longer placed on the customer, but on the relationship with whoever facilitated the connection.

This just goes to prove that affiliate marketing is only as good as the people who run it. Remember, there are ways to get your affiliate program noticed; just make sure that you get it noticed for the right reasons. If you value internet based businesses and you’d like more job leads, educational information, and tools to aid your internet entrepreunership, then visit: www.ebyro.com (a Vertical Portal for Internet Entrepreneurs).

Author Bio
Marissa Ranello is an independent marketing consultant with clients in the United States and Canada. As an employee of eByro, a Vertical Portal for Internet Entrepreneurs, Marissa devotes her time to internet business, performance-based marketing, and affilate programs. Visit: www.ebyro.com

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Winning! – With SEO Pressor

Well I’ve got to tell you. Here’s a plugin that nots free but its like having a SEO professional with you every time you enter a blog post. You just can’t afford to hire someone to coach you every step of the way.

The plugin is SEOPressor, and it automatically optimizes your on page SEO…

SEOPressor-WordPress SEO

I’m sure have heard at some time or another that keeping the search engines happy and giving them what they want is the real secret to traffic and higher rankings. If you haven’t heard of SEOPressor. you’re in for a real treat. Google is the most popular and number one search engine so if you’re running an online business, you know it makes sense to give the search engines what they want. When you master that your internet business is pretty much presented to you on a silver platter.

What does Google want to rank your website?

The truth is that no matter what you may have heard in the past, Google’s main focus is on the quality of your on page SEO and this is where SEOPressor comes into play.

How Can SEOPressor Save Your Optimization Time?

Google’s algorithms consists of an enormus number of factors (maybe even more) when it comes to deciding on your websites placement. There’s no need to try to figure them out as they are changing constantly and you would probably spend a life time on that puzzle.

Although there rating factors remain a secret, there are some of them that we know. Such common factors such as keyword density, the different keyword variations, title tags, html tags, H1 and H2 codes for titles, images, image labels..etc the list goes on an on. Now you can see why it would be pointless trying to master them all. Leave that up to the pros. at SEOPressor. They are amazing.

SEO Directory

Hiring someone to maintain your website with all these important on page SEO factors and tweak them to fine-tuned perfection would be a real pain in the back-side. It would be great to have people individually tend to your website and deal with all tactics for you but lets be reasonable, will you be able to get 10, 20, 50 or even 200 people to work for you on this on your budgit? Not a chance.

What’s New about This WordPress SEO Product – SEOPressor?

SEOPressor is a perfect example of a program that is equal to having your own special forces team of SEO experts working 24 hours a day. This plugin monitors your websites content and lets you know if those all important on on-page SEO factors are in place..and if they are not, it will let you know exactly what course of action you need to take to fix the problem.

SEOPressor optimizes your website content as you work. You will become an expert.

It might not be possible to adhere to everything the search engines are wanting on a manual basis but you could so very easily pass the manual option and opt for a more automated approach. SEOPressor does exactly that and optimizes your website content with maximum effect to give your rankings the push to the top of Google’s Rankings in a short space of time.

SEOPressor

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