David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

It's the future!

In this modern age, users are now used to tagging and sharing. They are used to having their own mark on the Internet.

But how can we take advantage of this?
 
Affiliate links are easy to spot. they are predominantly text links or banners.

The way forward is 'persuading' visitors that these are bone fide. The Web 2.0 generation can smell marketing a mile off.

And we all try to market quite obviously (e.g. buy this book because it is really really great). That's fine. It sometimes works. Or at least it did.

But as technology changes, the way we market will change too.

We used to have static content sites. Now, many are database driven. Some are blogs.

We used to use banners, now we tend to use text links.

We have yet, however, to take advantage of Web 2.0 in all it's glory. The second generation of the Internet is a user centric world. Users have become publishers.

So why haven't we abused that?!

We are sitting in front of our computers typing out fresh content when visitors will quite happily do it in the right settings.

Ah, you want examples do you?

MySpace is user centric. Users post their own content. MySpace grows every day. The same can be said about Blogger and Wordpress.

YouTube is the video version. It grows with every video posted.

All that is involved is moderation. Ensuring terms and conditions aren't broken.

So what can we do?

A forum is the most obvious choice. Take A4U Forum for example. It's highly addictive for affiliates. In a couple of months, it has stolen a lot of my time. But at the end of the day, I am helping A4U Forum grow. Every contribution I make extends the reach of the site. Each new thread is a new page in Google's eyes. It bumps A4U Forum up in the rankings.

What does it do for my sites? Relatively nothing. It doesn't add content nor does it bring targeted visitors. It brings interested affiliates but not qualified visitors.

But I post because I enjoy it. I learn new things every day and I help other people learn.

That's the principle behind the second generation of the Internet. Visitors publish content on websites because they enjoy it. It's fun.

Our challenge, as affiliate marketers, is to harness this and to develop solutions that become user centric platforms for our discreet advertising.

And as much as we hope the networks will help us with this, they won't. They can't. If they came up with a solution, they wouldn't need affiliates like us!

Look at it like this.

The networks use us to promote their programs. We publish content to promote these.

What we need to do now is become virtual networks and get our visitors to do the hard work of publishing content.

A forum isn't the solution, however. It needs more innovation than that.

And whoever can develop that technology first, will prosper.