The Hitflip UK Blog

Quite a few days have gone by since we begun the first three parts of this series ‘Affiliate Marketing 2.0′. To remind you, here are the links to the first three parts:

1. What has been said on the subject so far and what is Web 2.0?
2. The new work with content
3. Working with social networks

Back to the last topic - since we wrote Working with Social Networks there have been some interesting posts/news. If you want to build your own small social network you can find 9 tips with Techcrunch here. Also a reminder of why not to spam on MySpace like this guy.

New Affiliate Marketing-related Web 2.0 Business model:

In the small world of Web 2.0, new business models are created which do not use the words Affiliate Marketing but on closer inspection are actually very similar. The following are a couple of representative examples.

Zlio

Zlio is a collection of many different smaller online-shops and traders. They are then taken apart into product layers and then new shops can be put together with the single products of the various traders. For example there would be a shop with blue products and in there you would find blue jam from trader A, a blue football from trader B and a blue computer keyboard from trader C. These shops run under the nickname MeShops (a little like the Amazon aStores but with different traders.) So if you put together a MeShop with blue products and get traffic there, the traders will be paid via Zlio - similar to a normal PPS (pay per sale) payment.

Squidoo

With Squidoo you can manually put together an ad for a specific product. For example if you want to write an article for your blog about a mobile phone, you can put together an advertisement for it into a widget on your blog. If someone buys the product through the widget then you earn with it - like an ‘Affiliate Widget’.

Chitika

Chitika is a bit like AdSense, purely with products.: context-sensitive product recommendations. The so-called MiniMalls have even got an integrated price comparison and search function. The beauty of it for the affiliate is that the customer stays on the site. Affilimatch from Affilinet is similar.

Impact on Affiliate Marketing

How meaningful these business models will become and whether they will have an impact on Affiliate Marketing - as we know it - will show with time. In any case it is interesting. Perhaps it will not substitute the current market of affiliate marketing but extend it, as they win completely new person’s groups as quasi-affiliates.

Summary:

According to our assessment, a subset of characterisitics apply to an “Affiliate 2.o” in the practice of Web 2.0.

1.You become better with more active users

2.You integrate data from many different sources

3.You bring people together

Once again to summarise more concretely we have arranged the main points of Affiliate Marketing 2.0 below:

• The new work with content: Still more varied reuse of content than was previously known.

• Social media and networks have a lot of noticeability and traffic and therefore lots of opportunities for affiliate earnings.

• There can be significant Affiliates who are publishers (see our article about the different kinds of Affiliates) but who don’t have their own website. For example they may have a profile on a social network with lots of traffic. The most recognisable example is lonelygirl15.

• Creative and innovative work with new methods pays off.

• If you have separate projects you can profit in matters of search engine optimisation from engagements in social networks. See for example our posts on Videocommunities and Photocommunities.

• In contrast to Affiliate Marketing via PPC, you can earn more money from visitors with the above ideas.

Please take a look at our Hitflip powerpoint presentation.

We hope you liked our short series on Affiliate Marketing 2.0 and would love to hear your comments/feedback.

Tags:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Affiliate Networks, Online, Affiliate, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.