Affiliate Marketing Blog

People don't want to hear about you until they desperately need what you have to offer. Yet they don't really know what they want until somebody tells them. So here is the catch-22. You need to be relevant but people don't tell you in advance what they are looking for.

The tyranny of the internet is that your good content goes to waste for lack of exposure. The person who suffers the most is the small business proprietor trying to gain a critical mass of backlinks for their website to receive the traffic it deserves.

The person who spoils it all for everybody else is the sleek operator who manipulates keywords to be seen ahead of everyone else. They use a crash and burn technique where by the time the search engines have figured out their scheme they have moved to another target to repeat the process.

Email is no longer a reliable form of communication because you never know if some keyword in the subject or even the body of your text has been intercepted by some zealous anti-spam filter. We now live in a world where machines are telling us what we can and can't do!

Affiliate programs are a stench to most blogging platforms. Again the concept is sound but the application has ruined it for all. After the blatant cheating for pay-per-click advertising it was thought that a better reward was to pay a commission for each sale a third party would refer to your website. But suddenly we were inundated with poor articles planting links to some other dubious offers.

There are three favourite fields for marketing exploits: health, wealth and lifestyle. Besides wondrous slimming pills, crazy eat-all-you-want diets we are now to deal with get-rich-quick schemes and New Age connect-with-your-inner-guide wizards.

Another method which had its days was link exchange. A website A would promote a website B and B would somehow return the compliment. Again, a good idea which was soon to be abused. People never bothered to carry links that would be relevant to their visitors. Instead they had a rebirth as a link farm, channelling ever diminishing traffic to all manners of people. If you were involved, you reputation would soon take a hit because of your website being seen in a bad neighbourhood.

Next bookmarking was the go. Unless you belong to an unseen clique of conspirators you will never make it to the front page of Digg or Stumbleupon or Reddit You desperately need people to retweet your story, quote your blog and write (good) reviews about you.

So it seems the spin doctors are still very much active online and their clients don't care how it's done as long as they get the results.