Web
2.0
/ Web 3.0 Shifts That Affect Affiliate
Marketers
by Sherry Gordon
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Affiliate
marketing
is now over a decade old, and
the Web is well into its
turbulent teens... Things
don't stay the same, do they?
Somewhere
around
2004, Web trackers started to
speak of major changes to the
structure and usage of the Web
(calling this shift toward more
social interactions "Web
2.0"). Affiliate marketing
is mostly done online, so you
won't be surprised to learn (or
maybe you already know) that
many of these Web 2.0 changes
are affecting affiliate
marketers.
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In another
article,
I'll note some of the new directions
that affiliates are taking in response
to these changes. For now, let's
run down in a list of evolutionary
shifts and divergences that are coming
more fully into play circa 2010.
(If you don't know anything about
some of them and are interested, try
looking them up in a search engine for
more information.) While you're
reading through them, be thinking in the
back of your mind about how such things
might affect affiliate marketing...
- Interactivity
&
social networking - from blog
commenting to an emphasis on
real-time interaction such as instant
messaging (IM) and online conference
rooms, person-to-person and
person-to-group interaction is a big
draw; out of this has come the
development of communities
of people all interested in the same
thing (either on separate topical
sites, or in multi-topic sites such as
Facebook)
- Social
sharing
- a specialized form of social
networking, there's far more sharing
of information going on, from sales
sites such as Amazon
("Listmania" lists, "So You'd Like To"
guides) to sites dedicated to such (eHow,
social bookmarking sites like Delicious,
photo-sharing sites like Flickr,
and of course YouTube
for videos)
- Customer
rating/voting
- there are rated product reviews
enabled on sales sites (Amazon
and HomeDepot
are examples); there are sites such as
Digg
and Reddit
where members vote their approval (or
disapproval) of web content (and
numbers of votes = rating)... all of
which utilize the collective
intelligence of the crowd of
participants/users [A note:
Anyone on the web might assume
that they and their site will be
talked about!]
- Greater
inclusiveness
of social sectors - there's been a
vacuum that's slowly filling up, of
websites and online services for
bricks-and-mortar small businesses,
local agencies, nonprofits, chambers
of commerce, all
the bits and pieces that makes up a
community in the real world
- Collaboration
&
"crowdsourcing" - not just the social
networking communal stuff, but also
more group collaboration on shared
projects (e.g., open source software,
IdeaMamaClub.com
invention incubator), and the whole
idea of farming projects out to the
masses (à la Wikipedia)...
which
allows the crowd to participate in
changing the direction
of the project
- Customer
definition
vs. business dictation - as just
mentioned, there's a whole lot more asking
of customers what they
want rather than the traditional
emphasis of telling
customers what they should
want... which again leads to an
unpredictable, "organic" development
of sites and products/services, and a
more cooperative mindset in general
And these
are some of the "costs" of asking the
crowd what it wants and allowing users to
morph the direction of a service
(initiating overall change that leads to
greater opportunity
for more naturally giving-focused
entrepreneurs to "lead with their
hearts"):
- Focus
on
"free stuff" - at this late date in
the history of the Web, someone will
offer something for free that someone
else is offering for a price... so why
would you not learn from that
and give
so as to establish trust and a good
feeling about you?
- Less
intrusive advertising - with the
burgeoning of competing websites as
well as these other changes, people
respond less and less to in-your-face
banner ads and more and more to
what helps
them: more contextual ads (like
Google AdSense) and truly helpful,
freely given enticements (ebooks,
trial memberships, etc.), as opposed
to spammy onslaughts of emails and
mere pieces
of things (like only the first part of
an article, and then you have to pay
for the rest)
- A
rise in altruism - from what we might
call "wishful altruistic thinking" of
entrepreneurs who set up a framework
that encourages altruism (e.g., IdeaMamaAdNetwork.com,
with a stated emphasis on promoting
"green" companies, and which enables
participants to channel funds to
charities), to communities inclusive
of and supportive of charities (as
with many Facebook
"Pages"), to more purposeful support
for non-profits (NetSquared.org)
...And
because of all this, perhaps:
- A
greater
difficulty in monetizing major
offerings - note that YouTube, after
an ad-free "honeymoon period", now
places ads in front of you when you
view any video (obnoxious, isn't it? -
they have to make money somehow;
and
the flip side is that those are
golden advertising opportunities for
some businesses)... and we can expect
more of that "honeymoon is over" stuff
all along the line [Shall we
call this "Web 2.1"?]
And then
there are some other factors that play
into these evolutions in different ways:
- Mobile
reach
- with so many using mobile internet
devices, mobile reach becomes more
important; location-based search
and location-based marketing are also
more popular and more important all
the time
- Search
engine
optimization (SEO) is a little less
critical - with blogs, forums, wikis,
article repositories such as EzineArticles.com
and eHow, and
plenty
of online communities to join, you
don't have to undergo the rigors of
website SEO to participate as an
author on the Web
- Syndication
of
content - while RSS and Atom web feeds
come first to mind, similar Google
Alerts, the technology that
enables streaming audio and video,
website news and stock quote
feeds, and YouTube videos to be
embedded on other sites, and even Twitter
"tweets" are all examples of content
syndication (much of which is automated
- like Amazon's category-related
affiliate banner links - rather than
the one-off decision to embed a
specific video on your site)
[Syndication keeps a website
"freshened up" - and provides content
authors with the great benefit of
viral reach]
- New
ways of using old material - "data
mining" or "scraping" (extraction of
specifics from huge, unwieldy
databases - such as Satellite-Sightseer,
scientific aids such as Volcano
Monitoring Using Google Earth,
and all the "funniest videos" sites)
and "mashups" (combinations of
elements from two or more databases -
check out these cool examples of Google
Maps
mashups) continually provide
greater depth and incisiveness to
users' accessing of information
Some of these
factors you'll certainly have been aware
of already. Even if you're aware
of all of them, it's pretty interesting
to put them all together, isn't it?
It's certainly a different picture
than when I started looking into
webmarketing a decade ago. It's
even a darned different picture from a
few years ago. ...Which underlines a
major truth about the Web:
Things
change! We're wise to expect it -
and to be willing to shift when shift
happens.
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