Affiliate Marketing - The Good, Bad, and the Ugly

Many sites are choosing to focus a lot of online marketing energy on what is called "affiliate marketing". This tye of marketing generally involves the use of numerous third party sites in helping you sell or market your own site and itsproducts or services. In many cases the relationship is symbiotic, and muh like a link change, with the affiliate site asking for a recipricol link in exchange for posting your own link and products on their site. Others require no link and simply benefit from the traffic your content provides, selling advertising spots. Others make money by selling advertising to you, its vendor for better traffic. And still others ask for a straight commission on sales of your product. When a visitor chooses to buy your product on the affiliates website, they are taken to your shopping cart link, but pass a querystring or cookie that makes sure the affiliate gets credit for the sale. When the sales i made, the affiliate gets a percentage of the sale. This is usualy pretty high, and ranges from 30% traditionally to 50% or more. This is the price paid for someone selling your product for free.

One of the immediate advantages to selling or marketing your site on affiliate sites is the fact its free, in most cases. In theory, it also expands your reach online to many new customers, simply due to the fact you have posted your links or products on someone elses site. If the site is high volume, it can really expand your reach and in theory increase sales. It also, in theory should enhance your search engine rankings, as so many sites are now exchanging link juice back to your site. All these have spawned a large volume of affiliate sites who specialize in selling or marketing vendor products and sites, since there appears so much to gain by both vendor and affiliate alike. Affiliates, in many cases are drawn to the concept that if they get enough vendors in their sites, that enough original content will increase traffic and search rankings, and this increase customers and purchases. Vendors see more affiliates as a way of expanding their own sales using this new network of "partners" online.

But many people do not look at the "dark side" of affiliate marketing. Its important to look at the reality of this type of marketing and the downsides, since there are some real pitfalls few people are willing to discuss.The main issue with affiliate marketing is the fact that in reality, most of not nearly all affiliate deliver zero (0) sales or customers to your site. Even mass submission into large collections and libraries of online affiliate sites, can lead almost zero link backs from customers online. Many vendors spend a lot of time and money submitting their products to large volumes of affilaites over many years with the promise that as volume increases, so will the benefits and traffic. In reality, 90-99% of affiliate sites get vey little trafic online. This is due to the fact there are so many affiliate sites now that include duplicate content online. Many of these also are punished by the search engines simply because they do not provide unique content, nor provide a stable page content url system that search engines can benefit from. In addition, many affilate sites do not update or write original content about you or your product. This ad the wide spread PAD content effects means large volumes of your duplicate content is spread around the web. Such content in many cases is seen as spam or lowered in value, so provides affiliate farms very little benefit in their attempts to draw traffic online. The biggest drawback to affiliates, is the fact that nearly all affiliates do not provide the necessary niche market focus necessary to provide you, the vendor with specific typesof customers, which are specific to your service, site or product.The result is more bounce backs, and more visitors who come to you out of curiosty rather than a targetd interest specific to your focus online. The end result of these negative affiliate affects can be a negative impact on your search rankings, as well. Its hard to measure the overall effect of duplicate online content and bad affiliate link farms. We know Google warns users of posting and participating with spammers and bad sites. But it makes sense that sooner or later, as these affiliate farms replicate your content and links online, that the overall affect could be a neative one at some point. We have seen thatin one affiliate that created thousands of hml pages linking back to our product site, many with duplicate content and obvious spamming strategies. We were luck as we alerted the affiliate an asked tey remove our site and the result was better in Google WebMaster Tools. But many sites are not so lucky. As we see more of these larger automated affiliate farmed out sites, the problem will get worse.

Lets talk about how you can avoid this bad side of affiliate marketing and benefit from it. For one, there are many very populare sites that may be considered affiliates but are really well run niche sites are designed to carefully manage user content, provide tools for vendors to add original content, and provide portals that draw valuable focused cutomers to you. For example, we sell website photo gallery and media scripts at www.GiantIsland.com. We have found site like HotScripts.com, Aspin.com, and Scripts.com to be very valuable partners for us. Unlike many of our generic affiliates, these sites do not ask for commission or attempt to sell our products. They simply giv their customers high quality focused script vendor links. The customers coming from these sites are also targeted to our niche, which in turn, means very few bounces and very good customer reach. In addition, we get regular and effective link into our sites from people looking for specific scripts. This lowers our bounce rate. Because these sites also rank high on Google and other engines for their respective niches, they in turn have a positive effect on our rankings an keyword focus. Because these sites dont participate in commissions or sales, it also means we keep 100% of the sale from customers coming from these sites. All great things, right!

What does this say? In the end, having just a handful of these high quality affiliates out performs hundreds of other affiliates that host our product information online. This tells us that you can save yourself hundreds of dollars and hours managing large volumes of affiliates that underperform and even punish your own sites rankings anyway. Instead, stick to a few valuable high ranking niche affiliates, tracking their progress in terms of links back to you via Google Analytics. In the end you wil see much higher and better results over time.

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