Affiliate Marketing

It is as if affiliates have no originality what so ever. There are so many blogs by affiliates that are called something affiliate. affiliateblog.co.uk, affiliatestuff.co.uk, affiliatemarketingblog.co.uk, affiliate-my-cat-ate-my-homework blah blah.

The 80/20 rule is an important one in business. Also know as the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule states that 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers.

This rule can be applied to any manor of businesses. In the affiliate marketing world, 80% of your profit might come from 20% of your merchants, or 20% of your websites. In freelance web development, 80% of your revenue might come from 20% of your clients.

There has been a lot of talk in affiliate circles lately about Google slapping affiliates. It has become pretty clear in the last year that Google does not like affiliates and intends to be a "super affiliate" itself. It is also clear that Google will continue to take money from the big spenders - the likes of uSwitch, MoneySupermarket, GoCompare - even if they are just super affiliates themselves.

There have been a few blog posts in the UK Affiliate Marketing world about Commission Junction being a rather rubbish network. So I thought I had might as well join the bandwagon and express my dislike for good old Commission Junction!

There have been numerous times when I have tried to contact them about various issues. They always took weeks to get back to me, if they got back to me at all. And the times that they did get back to me, their attitude always stunk to high heaven. They treated me like I was just a pain, and a nuisance.

Another UK affiliate has made it onto Dragons' Den. Last session we had Ling Valentine gracing us with her presence in Den, who famously said "I eat Dragon's for breakfast" while turning down the Dragon's investment. Last night we witnessed Emmie Matthews and Ed Stevens secure £200,000 funding for a 30% stake in their gaming affiliating business, Gaming Alerts.

I've been planning on doing a weekly roundup of interesting or inspiring posts from the blogsphere for sometime now.

So here it goes, a few posts that grabbed my attention in the past week

John from Lammo.net has written an excellent article on eating an elephant. Yes, thats right, learning how to eat an elephant is an essential skill in the world of affiliate marketing. How do you eat an elephant? A little bit at a time. How do you succeed at affiliate marketing? A little bit at a time.

There is an interesting post on Net Business Blog about why it is better to build one website then building multiple websites. Dee Barizo's (Net Business Blog) centres around the authority of a website and the fact that gaining more quality inbound links on a single websites leads to an exponential growth in search engine traffic. Building too many websites leads to not enough time to build quality content on each of them and not enough quality inbound links.

I know many newbies wonder whether to build a traditional website or a blog for affiliate marketing. Both have their place, but which one is more likely to succeed? I have a strong feeling that a blog is more likely to and I am conducting a few experiments to try and prove my hunch. These experiments are blogs in highly niched areas.

A friend sent me this site and I was so impressed that I felt compelled to blog about it. So that is my first point about this site, it is great link bait!

The first thing that grabbed me about the site is the unique and stunning design. It is interesting, different and fits in perfectly with the product itself. It is essentially a one page niche mini site that is promoting one single product, a Laser Cosmos.