Is Your Mind Too Far In The Affiliate Future? February 15th, 2008 10:23 am

I don’t think I’m the only one who’s a little bit sick of web 2.0 and all this social media networking milarky, but it does seem, judging by Matt Wood’s Innovation pays off for Affiliate Networks - A new breed of Affiliate arrives that we’re going to be seeing a few more bells, whistles, warts and all VC backed sites springing up in 2008.

Yes the likes of Osoyou and Mydeco are lovely, and no doubt have had some serious investment - but are they the future? Will users go for these sites? Do we need bells and whistles to have a quality website? You don’t need to look far to find examples of non-tarty sites providing a good service. Moneysavingexpert is arguably a social platform - yet runs purely off vBulletin. Amazon has various user options, but it isn’t exactly the flashiest of sites.

The problem these new sites face is attracting users who will interact, keeping users who will interact, maintaining the site so that it’s well managed and moderated, and then monetising them. From my experience your bread and butter loyal users don’t want anything overly complicated. Even the voices in affiliate marketing stick to a good old vBulletin forum on a4U versus the community area!

I’ll probably be totally wrong and mydeco et al will go on and be the “next big thing”!

And the “next big thing” is something that many affiliates are hoping to seek. Matt asks “would it therefore be astute to invest income generated from less stable affiliate activity into these uber projects so we can compete in the long term?”.

I guess as affiliates we should keep an eye on the future and continually build and develop - but that should never be at the expense of the here and now. Time and time again affiliates will be launching a new site or doing a new project, having left their previous one (that launched last week) to fester.

No one seems to invest time or effort in their current sites and projects making sure bugs are fixed, user experience is improved, community is encouraged, or new tools developed for that service. Little Acorns don’t become Mighty Oaks (or manageable sized trees that look nice in the garden and require just a bit of pruning without upsetting the next door neightbour) without a lot of love and attention. It’s easy to set up new projects, it’s much harder to run them long term - and I do wonder about the longevity of sites like Osoyou and MyDeco or indeed any other “uber project”.

To borrow a line from Star Wars (The Phantom Menace), affiliates need to “Be mindful of the future, but not at the expense of the moment” - and right here, right now there are still opportunities.

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