I have worked with affiliate marketers and been part of many schemes (not said in a bad way) for developing lists. In the early days of affiliate marketing, people like Tellman Knudson and Jeff Walker (famous for his sideways picture launch) and many others were all about lists and creating a stream of affiliates underneath them. It was about list building techniques.
Successful launches were about giving away thousands of dollars of value (lots of time old product bait) to gain one sale of a $99 program or something. Often times you saw that never ending copy on a web page ensuring that the only click was a purchase click. It was used in book launches and it is still today used to gain that first-day sale advantage on amazon to catapult to first stage page ranking of your desired genre. Often using old content, Michael Porter launched his last book in this method utilizing a 3-year old $1K program as the primary giveaway to sell a $9.99 book. In fairness, he had another offer if you took up the program at the end of the program for further conversion.
Another older method is using banner ads and being placed on the affiliate’s website. Though this still works, it is not a process that yields superior results. For example, Facebook had trouble monetizing their own product until they started utilizing in-line advertising. Google realized that for their advertising to be effective they had to put their ads at the top of search and make them look like search results. Amazon moved to text links many years ago. The reason is that banners ads are relatively ineffective.
Many people believe these systems still work and look at the more current thoughts of Dan Kennedy, Ryan Deiss, Ryan Levesque, Salim Ismail, Verne Harnish, and others. I am not saying any of this is wrong because just by the actual application of some type of process, we are going to focus and become more effective and maybe even more efficient.
I believe today’s thinking about affiliates has changed. Now we look at cross-partnerships and reciprocal arrangements. This means that without joint participation the value of just an affiliate link is minimized. Today’s successful affiliate structure is not a hierarchy or multi-level approach. You find successful affiliates/partners playing/working in the customer’s playground. The affiliate link is often a way of keeping score and sharing revenue keeping the relationship balanced. This is more of the type of relationships that have become part of building platforms and what others may call the “sharing economy”.
How do you view affiliate structures in today’s environment? How have they changed? What challenges do you face?