6 Comments

Saving an Industry

May 1, 2006
by

On Friday April 28, the kick-off conference call for “The Affiliate Advisory Board” was held. Top affiliates were represented and I was fortunate enough to be among them. The purpose of this call to discuss important issues that affiliate marketing as whole is facing.

The Affiliate Advisory Board has been assembled to address pressing issues in the affiliate marketing industry. At the forefront of the discussion is the need to eliminate parasites and adware.

There is no need to go into any great depth on of the issues surrounding parasites or adware, just go read some of Wayne Porter’s posts on the topic.

My personal pet peeve goes beyond the commission thefts and into the sustainability issues pertaining to affiliate marketing as a whole and the limitations of driving traffic.

Let’s review what has been happening on the search engine front:

1. Google eliminates search marketers from bidding on keywords (2005)

While this was needed to make for a “less biased” looking advisement pool, it is still something that reduces the ability of an affiliate to earn an income. I do not disagree with this move. What I do disagree with is the limitations that are in place even with a quality landing page.

2. Yahoo eliminates affiliate bidding on brand name bidding (2006)

Here is a definite shot at affiliate marketing. If you are an affiliate you can not bid on product brand names. However, if you are a merchant selling these items you may. Hold on – What’s the difference here? As an affiliate I too am selling the item. Aren’t I a member of the merchants sales force?

3. Did anyone notice that fewer and fewer affiliate sites appearing are in the natural search results?

I have noticed a greater tendency of only merchant sites to appear in the SERP’s at Google and Yahoo in particular. This does lead to frustration for the visitor who is looking not for a “hard sell” but rather an honest to goodness third party perspective that might be more objective.

I understand the need to cleanse the SERP’s of spam and I also understand that the typical spammer is an affiliate. But should all affiliates be penalized because of the evil doers?

What if there were standards put in place in the industry? What if affiliates had to adhere to certain guidelines similar to the guidelines and ethics that a realtor or similar profession would have to follow? Adhere to the guidelines or lose your license to practice.

A clean-up of the industry is near and dear to me. I am an affiliate and I do provide quality information and excellence in visitor support. I am passionate about removing “the black sheep of the industry”.

While this posting is editorial in nature, I am sure there are many who agree with what I am saying:

The perception certainly seems to be “Affiliates are evil” and there is an adage that says “Perception is reality”

It is time to change the perception and create a new reality!

The new reality will be good for merchants, affiliates and search engines.

The days of innocence are gone forever from the net. It is now all about business but we can all work together to deliver what the end user is looking for and grow our respective businesses at the same time – There is a win-win-win to be had here.

I am putting a call out to all worlds to come and join in some open and honest discussion about pressing issues in the affiliate marketing arena. More to come soon.

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing
  • http://www.thoughtshapers.com Jeff Molander

    Colin:
    Once again, hitting nail squarely on head at risk of being criticized for being a half-glass-full kind of guy. You’re a realist who is clearly in tune with what affiliates *should* be concerned about and taking action on.

    Writing is on the wall with regard to clusters of products and traditional forms of SEO… from the value perceived by advertisers to the results delivered to them. Sites like http://www.costumes-for-kids.com would seem to be falling out of fashion. Affiliates owning and/or sharing the customer — that’s where it’s heading; where there is maximum value for the affiliate (not to mention being able to run a sustainable business).

  • http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/?p=563 5 Star Affiliate Blogs, SEO, Google, Internet Marketing Blog

    New Affiliate Advisory Board Launches – No More Adware!

    The group’s goal is to discuss all issues of importance to the affiliate marketing industry and of course, one of the most pressing issues is parasites and Adware. Adware hurts our ENTIRE industry and EVERYONE’S income! Not just affiliat…

  • http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/ Linda Buquet

    Great blog Colin and the advisory board is long overdue IMHO. Good to see some consolidated effort on this front. I like the fact that you are looking at the bigger picture on adware too and agree we need to clean up our industry. I just blogged about your blog and talked about another important reason we need to clean up the adware mess.

    “I have said this a millions times and I know I am preaching to the choir, but on a bigger and even more important note, Adware hurts our ENTIRE industry and EVERYONE’S income! Not just affiliates – but also the networks that allow the adware, suffer from lower revenues due to their own actions.

    Consumers are bombarded with pops and don’t like them. Many of the pops are served by adware and spyware, therefore creating more consumers that buy anti-spyware, internet security and firewall software. Most of this software blocks CJ and other major network ads. MANY of these programs also delete affiliate cookies, which means the merchant will still get the sale, but NO affiliate or network will be paid. The more Adware is used the more cookies will be deleted.

  • http://www.schaafco.com Brook Schaaf

    Not to forget, affiliate marketing is only one way to monetize a site. You can also post Ad Sense, as I see on many spam sites in Google. You can sell ad impressions on adbrite or such. Finally, you can sell the traffic directly, though a savvy in-house SEO expert might balk at that prospect.

  • http://www.revenews.com/jimkukral/archives/001772.html ReveNews – Jim Kukral

    Zibus Creates Another Unhappy Customer

    A while back I wrote about a company called Zibus.com that caused some stir to say the least. Today I got an email from someone who was not too happy with their Zibus experience. Dear Jim – I am embarrassed to tell you that I joined with Zibus about 2 …

  • http://cashnsave.linkscout.com Dave

    Hi Colin,

    First I’d like to say I have learned a lot from your site comments, I never knew adware deletes cookies, I don’t use adware, but now I think I have figured most of my problems of why I don’t get very many commissions, I have been doing affiliate programs for the last 4 years and to be honest about, I’m ready to just throw in the towel, I have been frauded by many ppc advertising systems, I feel clickbank is the biggest fraud affiliate commission paying system, and c j and many others, I have been an affiliate with clickbanks system for about 3 years now and have recieved only $35 so far, and I have 1,000′s daily coming to my personal advertising site and I have real live vistor stats, yet nothing in commissions, I’ve advertised many different products and services from the clickbank marketing center and yet to get any decent commissions for all my hard work, When clickbank states that it would be impossible because there are way too many affiliates in the program to have live stats and there cookie tracking system is the best on the internet, I’m getting to believe the only tracking system they have is the tracking of the affiliate commissions there robbing from the affiliates cookie jar!

    I have found during the years there are many well know websites that have affiliate programs, that they could careless if there affiliates even make a dime in commissions, they only want the visitors to there sites we send them and collect all the money off the sales, there’s no way in hell us affiliates can ever prove in fact there was a sale or not, I feel some new affiliate protection laws need to be put in place that if (any website) Has an affiliate program, that the the buying, purchasing button is to be programed with affiliates ID first, then the website owners, and that the product buyers never leave the affiliates site! Instead of being redirected to the main owners website!

    We affiliates are the onces that bring in the visitors, and we get scammed on commissions, not only is unfair that website owner don’t care about all the commissions were being robbed out of, but they don’t do a dam thing about it either!, I believe website owners that have affiliate programs really don’t know what’s ahead of them if all of affiliates just got fed up and all quit! The website owners advertising costs would fly through the roof, putting many website owners out of business, but yet they do nothing to stop it either!

    Well I’m in the process of building a website that will actually be a nightmare to almost all website owner that in fact has an affiliate program to make all there big money off of! I won’t go into details of all it will be about, but affiliate programs will soon be a thing of the past as soon as I can get it finished and up live on the internet, I have over 650+ affiliates in all my down lines and they all know what I am going to do and to be honest! There all excited and all want to be involved when it’s up and running, What I will be doing is destroying the most dishonest commission sytem that has robbed 100′s of thousands affiliates from getting there commissions they earned! Like you said the affiliate sytem needs to have somethings done to it! Well my intentions is to make it a thing of the past! for good!,the only ones who made the big bucks off affiliate programs are the website owners, Well I’m stating this to you now, affiliate programs will be the thing of the past and a new way for honest hard working independant advertisers for website owners will be the new website owners advertising system, but there will be no commissions to be paid out, Website owners will have to pay in advance, weekly, bi weekly or monthly and all through Palpay so all my 100′s of thousands of website owners ex-affiliates will actually be paid for all the hard work they do! and up front write through there paypal accounts!

    I have over 8 blogs now and over 400,000 thousand affiliates and growing waiting for the new way pay coming soon! I feel website owners have had plenty of time to come up with a 100% protection for all there affiliates, to make sure they never got robbed of there commissions do, but not a single website that I know of has made any attempts to do so, so I decided because of being a victim too! I would be, You could call an affiliate protector! And the funniest part about the day I open up the new website, website owners will be going nuts, because all plans are out in place, where as the minute I give the go head! website owners will be losing so many affiliates all at one time! all the 400,000 I have waiting and all they have told will be closing up all there affiliate accounts they have joined all at once! Tell me that won’t be a huge blow to all the websites owners across the world, it will be bigger then the biggest virus that ever hit the internet system! Even some very, very big people know it’s coming, and it won’t be advertised it’s coming, it will be opened for business as a huge surprise to all the commission systems that are on the internet! And the huge hosting business that will be hosting the new site is even excited about my new site coming out that there giving me unlimited everthing for half the cost!even unlimited domain names thanks to B.G, there’s a few very big websites who say my website is needed badly!
    So change is coming real soon!

    Love your site Colin!