As the adult Internet can tell you readily enough, affiliate marketing became a handy way for the cyber-Davids to drive traffic to the e-tail Goliaths, as E-Commerce Times phrases it. Trouble was, enough Davids discovered the affiliate programs might have been stacked to let Goliath win. The good news: Affiliate marketing can survive with a little beefing up and expansion, with a lot of e-commerce companies looking to do just that, according to an E-Commerce Times report.
The Internet journal which tracks cyberbusiness says plenty of smaller e-tailers wouldn't mind giving affiliate programming another crack and the big boys aren't exactly shrinking from it, either. Not with Amazon.com expanding its services to Britain; or, though E-Commerce Times doesn't say it, the continuing presence and successes of adult Internet affiliation programs.
But affiliate marketing took an image beating because of the way in which many were set up, E-Commerce Times says: smaller sites getting commissions on the traffic they drove to the bigger sites, but the stacked decks making it difficult to make money.
The image problem isn't insurmountable, LinkShare chief executive officer Steven messner told E-Commerce Times, even if cybermarketing is a little disarrayed for now. But he added that affiliate marketing probably stumbled because it was seen as something too new to be understood wholly, and that one of the keys is not to think you can just make money from buying keywords or just pumping up the traffic. And once affiliate marketers get past those, he said, affiliate programs will make a comeback. "Affiliate marketing is the backbone of the Web," he told E-Commerce Times. "It's the unsung hero of e-commerce."
