I was talking with a new search engine employee and they were having a hard time understanding affiliates. The person did not understand why affiliates would ever do aggressive SEO if the search engines hate it so much.
People also hate direct mail but it is legal and it is profitable. I don’t understand why affiliate marketing has received a blanket label of being dirty and sleazy. I have been thanked from countless users for the information they find on my affiliate sites. I even have several people praying for me because (well I am not going to get into that in this post). There are some affiliates that are not good for the online community but let’s also say affiliate marketing is not all bad and can be very useful to online consumers.
Here are some reasons of why I think fellow affiliates do what they do…
- The cost is rising for aggressive SEO but it is still very profitable
- Aggressive SEO breaks search engine guidelines not government laws, it is legal
- If conversion rates are signs of quality, good affiliate sites are higher quality than most merchant sites
- Merchants normally only talk about their products, affiliate sites can compare multiple merchants
- Smart affiliates expose better information to the public than the merchants offer
- Affiliates accept the fact that these sites have limited life spans, after all it is breaking the search engine guidelines, but by the time a site is dead it has made more than enough to cover its cost and another site has been built to replace it
- Some people just like to work in their pajamas
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Affiliate Marketing and spamming have become synonymous. As you mentioned there is good money to be made but I think we will see this change in the near future as search engines become more sophisticated thus reducing the monetary incentives.
“Affiliate Marketing and spamming have become synonymous. As you mentioned there is good money to be made but I think we will see this change in the near future as search engines become more sophisticated thus reducing the monetary incentives.”
All the more reason for affiliates to diversify by creating sites w/ quality content and lasting value. You “can” abide by the rules and still be quite profitable.
hard core affiliates do not care about “guidelines”, they are business people and make decisions based on cost/benefit ratio and the profitability. as the search engines improve their algorithms it is necessary to also improve the seo techniques. i have been seeing the number of affilaites drop over the years because they could just not keep up.
Greg,
I think the SEM and SEO vendors and consultants went after affiliates when they first saw them as competition for merchants and said it was bad. Not sure affiliate marketing has recovered yet, but we are getting there.
Cheers,
Beth
to greg’s point, affiliates do aggressive SEO because the ROI is good (no pun intended). speaking from personal experience, when the overall margin decreases significantly – due to algorithmic or other market conditions – so does my willingness to invest time and dollars on that site.
i’ve abandonded many an affiliate site that was on a downward slide simply because it didn’t make sense to re-invest. similarly, i’ve purchased affiliate sites that were on a downward slide because the owner wasn’t interested in maintaining / developing the site, and i was. do what makes sense for your business.