Don’t Mention The Virgins December 15th, 2005 11:12 pm

With ever changing algos on Google many affiliates have discussed the way forward to sustain their business and not reply on SEO for their traffic. Ideas discussed have included branding, community, good content, and a decent website. By creating a site along those lines it should be feasible to promote affiliate programs to users and generate income.

It should be… unless of course you’re not allowed to promote certain affiliate programs to your users because a brand wishes to protect their “integrity” or “brand awareness”. Or in other words, “we only want to work with a few people now so sod off the rest of you”!

Yes, we’re no longer allowed to promote a broadband program. Our policy with this as with other programs - few sales over many programs rather than many sales over few! We know we’re never going to generate huge volumes - but should that matter as we’re working legitimately and not doing anything wrong?

Now ok - I can see why they’d want to work closely with their big hitters - probably the bog standard enclosed groups of PPCers - but why chuck out the affiliates who are running sites along the lines of - yes you’ve guessed it - not trying to rely on SEO, get branding, community etc! If this format is the way forward for many affiliates, why is that merchants and networks are then happy to boot off these affiliates because they don’t do bulk order sales?

Unfortunately I don’t have the benefit of being able to see the bigger picture from a network or merchant point of view … I just have the benefit of seeing things in black and white and from an affiliate who works his butt off playing by the rules point of view. As I see it we’ve been hoyed off an affiliate program because we don’t reach a certain level - a level we know we’ll never reach. Fair enough.. can’t do a figgy pudding about that now!

But what really concerns me is what happens when the next merchant implements this idea? And the next? And the next? It’s all well and good rolling over and accepting this as “one of those things” - the one’s who say this probably aren’t the one’s whos income is being medddled with - but it’s a worrying development, especially as it does feel the networks have been happy to cast affiliates out to dry.

If you’re not a bulk affiliate but are developing a community/brand/content to avoid SEO and aiming to promote many offers to users - where do these rulings leave you? As I see it, quite possibly with a site that whilst not relying on SEO algo changes, unable to promote many affiliate programs via some of the networks and potentially working with independents where you’re much highly valued.

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