Inside Affiliate

Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

In 2010, I believe we are going to see some serious changes in the online world, and the affiliate industry.  There were definitely some changes brewing throughout 2009, both on the Affiliate side of the game (see the Oprah lawsuits) and the Advertiser side of the game (merchant account madness).  Neither of these are the death knell of Affiliate Marketing, but they certainly gave the impression that business would not just continue as usual in 2010.  Will Affiliates be looking for new offers to promote when all the rebills suddenly dry up?  Will the FTC be cracking down on Affiliate Bloggers for littering their posts with unmarked Affiliate links? Doubtful.  Every time this industry and its denizens have to comply or die, they find a way to do it and still make money, if not even more than before.  They are a very resourceful bunch.

Another big shakeup that is coming (in my opinion) is in the world of Traffic Sources.  Affiliates have complained for years now about Google’s terrible practices of banning its own Advertisers with no notice, killing profitable campaigns with Quality Score changes, and just flat pushing people around.  A viable alternative became very popular in 2009 with Facebook Ads, but that opened up a whole new can of worms.  Facebook has been just as fickle as Google about what types of offers they allow, and the approval process is bad enough to give full time Affiliates recurring nightmares of the DENIED status.

So what’s next? One word: mobile.  AdMob has been busy building the biggest mobile advertising network over the last couple of years, and although some Affiliates have tested it, there aren’t a whole lot of mobile-targeted offers to promote just yet.  But don’t worry, that is on the horizon and approaching fast.  Especially since Google just snapped up AdMob, easily taking a big piece of the mobile pie for themselves.  Also, in an interesting move, Apple has put it in a bid to buy Quattro Wireless.  Apparently they were interested in AdMob too, since many of the ads are served on the iPhone, but Google beat them to the punch.  It will be interesting to see how Apple handles the responsibility of running an ad network, especially in the tumultuous new field of mobile.

Will it be more of the same, just on a smaller device?  Will it be a revolution in marketing akin to the initial launch of Google AdWords and Facebook Ads?  Or perhaps it will open up new and expansive opportunities that our feeble marketing brains haven’t even thought of yet.  Whatever the case, 2010 is going to be an interesting year, and a brilliant start to the new decade.

Oh yeah, and Facebook is going down. That’s my doomsday prediction.

In the affiliate marketing game, you get thrown some major curve balls.  Usually these only happen once or twice a year, sometimes more in a really bad year.  It’s when the status quo gets shaken up.  Things that you took for granted are either gone or severely changed, and suddenly your income is taking a major hit.  Usually the curve ball happens when a traffic source dries up or gets wise to the ways that you have been exploiting it.

Google loves to throw curve balls in the form of “quality score updates” that destroy your campaigns and take up a bunch of your time.  The latest one was thrown by Facebook after the Techcrunch Scamville Post (sorry Arrington, no link love here) and the follow ups that have been the talk of the industry this entire month.  It’s one thing to hear about it on a blog, and it’s another thing entirely to have it affect your business in a very real way.  As a network owner, the Facebook shakeup certainly put a large dent in our bottom line.

But that’s where my favorite part of the affiliate marketing business comes in: adapting to change. The people in this industry have an uncanny ability to adapt and update their business models to deal with the ever-changing online landscape, and this is no different.  Sure things will be slow for a while, but unlike your Average Joe in a 9 to 5 job, we have power to do something about it.  When Average Joe gets sent a curve ball, like getting laid off for example, it is devastating.  Suddenly his income is gone and he is completely at the mercy of somebody else to get it back.  He has to find another company to hire him and demonstrate to them that he is worth the risk.  All affiliates have to do is reach inside themselves, grab the motivation it takes to get things going again, and get back to work.

That’s why I love this business.  Sometimes it takes a curve ball to realize that there is a whole new opportunity right around the corner, or an income stream that you may have overlooked when your steady campaign was rolling.  At the end of the day, you are in control.  It’s your business and you are the boss.  Even if you are working 80 hours a week for yourself, that’s better than working 40 for someone else.  Next time you are thrown a curve ball, remember the alternative.

As more and more affiliates are trying to figure out how to monetize Twitter, one of the largest affiliate programs on earth has decided against it.  Amazon is refusing to pay affiliate commissions on clicks generated from Twitter, citing a clause in the TOS that states that the clicks have to be generated from “your site”.  Since Twitter is not your site, the clicks are invalid (at least according to Amazon).

This seems like an odd move to me, and it’’s an even odder move if it becomes a precedent for other websites that will no longer be accepted as legitimate traffic sources.  What does this mean for affiliates that use 3rd party adservers or tracking software so that all the clicks appear to come from a different site than their own?  Will Amazon only be allowing affiliates to place banners on their websites instead of the RSS methods that we have enjoyed up until this point?

I”m assuming that Amazon must have received a bunch of complaints about the links in Twitter as people were tricked into clicking by their “friends”.  This is not really any different then when CPA advertisers declared that they would not accept traffic from MySpace or Facebook messages, bulletins, updates, friend spamming, etc.  There were major lawsuits filed against several companies including Media Breakaway, parent company of affiliate.com.  I suppose it is best if Amazon pulls the plug now instead of waiting for things to get ugly and bringing out the lawyers.

So bottom line, if you have a nice auto blog setup with an RSS feed to your Twitter account, you better pull the Amazon links from it ASAP or you are just burning money.  As far as I know, you can still post eBay Partner Network links, RevTwt links, and CPA links.

It’’s not quite back-to-the-drawing-board yet, but it is definitely a sign of things to come.

In case you were considering using a Botnet or an army of outsourced data entry workers to farm Facebook and/or Myspace accounts, don’t do it.  Today Facebook sent a sturn message to spammers everywhere by winning an $873 million judgement against a user named Adam Guerbuez that sent 4 million spam messages promoting marijuana, male enhancement projects, and other junk offers.

It wasn’t that long ago that the legendary Sanford Wallace pulled a similar stunt on Myspace, illiciting a $230 million judgement against him.  That figure seemed ridiculously high at the time, but here we are not more than six months later with a judgement almost four times higher.

Let’s look at the risk vs. rewards here.  According to recent studies, spam isn’t as profitable as it was thought.  People have wised up.  After all, how many ads for “Viagkra” have you clicked on when they show up in your inbox?  As fun as it seems to have a network of computers working for you 24/7 to beat the system and fill up your bank account with untold riches is, it just doesn’t happen that way.  With a response rate of 0.00001%, it would be hard to turn any profits, let alone bank it big.

Then you have the Terms & Conditions to worry about.  There are all sorts of Terms & Conditions involved with internet marketing.  The Terms of the ad networks, the Terms of the search engines, the Terms of the social media networks, etc.  If you violate any of these Terms & Conditions, then you are not going to get paid, and you might risk legal action.

How would you like to wake up with an $873 million dollar debt hanging over your head?  I didn’t think so.  So play it safe, there is plenty of money to be made in the legitimate world of internet marketing.  Trust me.