The Achilles’ Heel of Affiliate Marketing
posted in Affiliate Marketing |
“An Achilles’ heel is a fatal weakness in spite of overall strength, actually or potentially leading to downfall. While the mythological origin refers to a physical vulnerability, metaphorical references to other attributes or qualities that can lead to their downfall are common.” – Wikipedia
There are probably several common factors we could roll of the tongue which sometimes seem like an eternal ground hog day from a general lack of innovation, only a few decent api product feeds, problematic tracking, occasional payment problems, zero notification on policy changes causing friction, programs closing without due & proper notice.
… but one surpasses them all.
This is the affiliate marketing industry’s dependency on search engines whether it be Google, Yahoo or MSN. Quite obvious you may think, it doesn’t matter if you do PPC or SEO, it’s the common factor most rely on to a great extent, take that source away and the industry goes into freefall.
I often come across merchants who foolishly think they have some divine right to appear number one or organically for their own brand. Even affiliates maybe sometimes take this source of traffic for granted. But really though what divine right has anyone to appear well or at all in search engines. None what so ever !!! It’s the search engines which own them, not you, me, nor anyone else has any jurisdiction to what does & doesn’t appear on that & the sooner we all stop taking these things for granted the better & make the necessary contingency plans to at least off-set the potential impact of being shot in the Achilles Heel
Nobody has any Divine Right to list well in organic search engines, because quite simply none of us own the search engine.
So what are the solutions? What’s our fallback biatch apart from going for 5 stars working in MacDonald’s or stacking shelves in Tesco & thus losing our quality of life as scruffy bedroom affiliates.
I don’t know the full answer & perhaps we need to discuss this openly to safeguard our own futures, because there are some Goldmines search engines, like Google’s Embedded Site Search, haven’t exploited yet which could seriously put a dent in all our incomes but prolifically increase theirs more than any loss affiliates might incur. It’s simple stuff we have been doing to some mediocre success which I’ll elaborate on in my next blog. Though this turn-off the traffic tap may not be imminent, the safeguard solution / plan may need to adopted sooner rather than later.
One simple part of the solution, note not the whole solution, is to aggregate the knowledge of affiliates we know or trust to create our own search engine. Not to go head to head with the majors as that is just foolish, but gain incremental traffic by outflanking. It’s like a military operation, to defeat any nemesis / enemy you go for the supply line. As mentioned before this is partly why Google introduced automatic matching because the quality of other sites was getting better i.e. more sticky & users were returning to the search engines less & less.
Hence, if on all our existing sites we can incorporate a half decent search engine for web search utilizing free & paid for sources out there, or better still aggregate the plethora of affiliate skills out there to develop one selves, then the more of us that do this, then the less likelihood or need there is for visitors to return to the main search engines. A way of monetising this I will come into on another blog.
All very obvious … but we do need to think about it & actually develope something as the business model of “affiliate marketing” needs to secure it’s own future.
